Male attractiveness
Abs-olutely fabulous
Women's expectations of the opposite
sex are at least as unrealistic as men's
MEN have long wondered what exactly it
is that women want.
Some pore over men's magazines, with
their promises of washboard abs, for guidance.
The more scientifically minded look for
experimental data.
The latest evidence comes from a group
of researchers led by Brian Mautz, then of Australian National University.
They gathered 105 heterosexual
Australian women and showed them a series of digitally generated pictures of
men in which three bodily characteristics were varied—height, shoulder-to-waist
ratio and flaccid penis size.
The women were asked to rate the men as
sexual partners.
In an article just published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr Mautz and his team describe
their results.
Happily for the insecure, although the
women did indeed find a larger penis alluring, it was not the most important
factor.
That honour went to the combination of
broad shoulders and a narrow waist, which accounted for around three-quarters
of the variation in attractiveness all by itself.
Height was also only a weak predictor
of appeal.
That is odd, says Dr Mautz, because
other studies have linked height with all sorts of benefits, from higher
salaries to longer lives.
The bigger-is-better effect was also
subject to diminishing returns: each extra centimetre, whether of height,
shoulder width or penis size, was less significant than the previous one.
Nonetheless, even the tallest,
broadest-shouldered and best-endowed digital hunks that the researchers
generated fell short of perfection.
The optimum values appear to lie
outside the tested range, they note, adding that the maxima are more than two
standard deviations from the population mean for each trait.
That means that, for each trait, fewer
than 2.5% of the men whom women encounter in the real world will be as
generously proportioned as they might hope.
Men with perfect scores in all three
traits will be rarer than hen's teeth.
The study is not perfect.
There was no danger of the women
mistaking the digital men for the real thing.
Other factors—such as social status,
for instance—may, in the real world, override the physical preferences that the
researchers were measuring.
And it is hard, when all the subjects
come from a single country, to disentangle the effects of nurture from those of
nature.
It is commonly pointed out, for
instance, that men's apparent preference for slim women seems to be a
relatively modern construction.
Erotica from the turn of the 19th
century tend to feature much curvier women than their modern equivalent.
Women's preferences may be just as
influenced by the culture in which they grow up.
On the other hand, it is a rule of
thumb in biology that females are much pickier than males.
There are good evolutionary reasons why
that is so.
Even in humans, who share the burden of
child-rearing more equally than many animals, having children requires far more
of an investment of resources from a female than it does from a male—after all,
it is the woman who must endure nine months of pregnancy and then breast-feed
the baby.
Women therefore face stronger
incentives to spend their relatively limited reproductive resources on only the
most attractive men, whose children will be most likely to breed in turn.
Back to the sit-ups, boys.
科学技术
男性魅力
腹肌，绝对是极好的！
男女对异性抱有的期望都不切实际，但女性更甚。
女人到底看重男性身材的哪一点，男人们一直在苦苦寻求答案。
有些人研读教男人如何获得搓衣板般腹肌的男性杂志，想从中找到答案。
而更具科学精神的人则会希望从实验数据中寻找答案。
由布莱恩·莫茨带领的研究小组发现了最新证据。
他们选取了105名国内异性恋女性，给她们展示了三种能展现男性魅力的组图，
并让她们以性伴侣的角度去评价这些男性。
莫茨及其小组在《美国国家科学院院刊》刚发表了一篇文章描述了他们的研究结果。
结果让那些对自己阴茎没自信的男性感到庆幸：尽管女性的确会认为阴茎更大更有吸引力，但这并不是最重要的因素。
最重要的是要同时拥有宽肩和窄腰，单单这点就能解释所有男性魅力方差的四分之三。
结果还得出，男性魅力也与身高关系不大。
莫茨博士说，但有点很奇怪，因为其他研究经常拿身高和好的方面联系起来，比如高薪和长寿。
越大越好的效应也遵循收益递减定律：无论身多高，肩多宽，阴茎多大，每多一厘米，那这一厘米的重要性都会递减。
然而，即便在研究者所合成的数字照片中，拥有最高身高，最宽肩膀和最大阴茎的健壮男性也算不上完美。
研究者说，最优值似乎在测试范围外，每项特征的极大值都在总体均值的两个标准差之外，
这也就是说，在女性现实世界遇到的所有男性中，就该特征而言，尺寸能符合所愿的少于2.5%。
这三方面都很完美的男性算是凤毛麟角。
该研究并非精确无误。
参加测试的女性并不会把虚拟男性看作是真人。
现实世界中，其他因素可能比研究者一直在测量的身材偏好这个因素更为重要，比如社会地位。
而且如果参与测验的女性仅来自一个国家，那她们就很难将后天形成因素和先天自带特点区分开来。
比如，普遍观点指出：男性对窈窕女子有明显偏好，似乎是现代西方文化做出的解释。
相比现代的色情书籍，十九世纪初的则更着重描述拥有曲线美的女性。
女性喜欢什么样的男性，也许正会因她们成长中所经历的文化的不同而不同。相比现代情色书刊中出现的女性，19世纪初情色书刊会将女性描述得更为妖娆。她们成长所处的文化背景些许会影响女性对男性的偏好吧。
而且从生物学的角度来看，有这么一条常理，雌性都比雄性更挑剔。
进化论就很好地解释了这一点。
即便在分担子女抚养责任方面，人类在所有动物中算是做得比较公平的了，但是就生小孩而言，还是需要女性从自己身上投入更多。
毕竟，女性需要怀胎十月，小孩生下后还需母乳喂养。因此就能强烈诱发女性将自己十分有限的生殖资源献给更具吸引力的男性身上，他们的孩子才最有可能接着生养自己的孩子。
所以，小伙子，还是仰卧起坐走起吧！