Men Look At Bodies For Short Flings, And Faces For Marriage, Study
Christopher Philip
Primer On Body Versus Face
A team of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have found evidence that men find different areas of woman’s overall attractiveness to be more relevant depending on their relationship intent. Specifically, men will use facial cues when assessing their preferences when seeking long term relationships, but will look to a woman’s body when seeking a short term relationship. Women, on the other hand, will use the facial attractiveness of men rather than their bodies to assess them regardless of their sexual intent.
As we’ve come to understand, women’s bodies play an important role in how men rate their overall attractiveness. It is no secrete that men prefer women with attractive symmetrical faces with few blemishes and wrinkles, with round eyes, plump lips, and other feminine features.
We also know that men prefer women with nice bodies including hourglass figures, long legs, large busts, a healthy body mass index, even a good degree of muscularity coupled with fat in appropriate areas, buttocks, hips and breast.
Turns out each cue offers some predictive indication of a woman’s health and reproductive value – her ability and desirability as a mating partner. Also, physical cues in women indicate her health, age, and even her hormonal status.
But not known is which of the two, face or bodies, wins out when men assessed women within long and short term mating contexts.
Reproductive Value Versus Fertility Value
As outlined by the researchers in their paper, there is a lack of empirical evidence on the relative importance of the face and body as whole units, and whether or not they differ in importance with mating context.
They figured that women’s faces would provide richer information with respect to her ‘reproductive value’ whereas her body would convey richer information with respect to her ‘current fertility.’
At first blush, it might appear that these factors are the same, but this is not so. For example, value and fertility tend to peak at different ages. Research has shown that a woman’s inherent reproductive value peaks at around age 17, whereas her fertility peaks at around age 24. This has lead women’s figures to advertise sexual maturity, her readiness to bear children, whereas her face advertises youth.
As outlined previous, features of the face are important. This is because facial features tend to signal the presence of higher estrogen surrounding puberty which continue throughout her reproductive lifespan. Estrogen produces characteristics such as neotenous features including large eyes as well as features considered feminine. However, when women approach menopause, the strength of those signals decline as estrogen is replaced with androgens causing more facial masculinity such as thinner lips.
The body, on the other hand, is subject to what scientists have dubbed a “wide first pass filter,” which is a quick assessment that determines if a woman is able (or not) to conceive. For example, the waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) quickly tells men a woman’s pregnancy status, fertility, and in some cases even her ovulatory status.
Keeping The Body And Face In Perspective
The difference between reproductive value and fertility value becomes clearer when we understand that a women with a waist-to-hip ratio that exceeds 1.0 (her waist is wider than her hips) is likely pregnant. This woman has a high reproductive value, but a fertility value of zero. Here body, rather than face, plays a more important role. A wide WHR has also been linked to lower fertility overall and poorer health and less ability to sustain pregnancy and lactation, not to mention the relative tightness of the skin as a strong indication of previous pregnancy. An ideal WHR of 0.7 has received much empirical support and is a highly desirable trait to men.
This might all seem rather ludicrous as we realize that men do not consciously assess women in this way – but throughout evolution, men have been subjected to strong selective pressures to find and assess women (consciously or not) for their fertility and value and those who did successfully produce more children.
The researchers thus figured that men would maximize their fitness by making tradeoffs based on their sexual strategy, be it long or short term.
They figured that men seeking short term relationships, the one-off, and look to a woman’s body for relevant cues of ‘current fertility’ whereas those seeking long term relationship would be more apt to look at woman’s faces to assess her overall ‘reproductive value.’
The Study
The study was simple enough. It included an image of a man and woman purchased from stock. A stick figure was created with two boxes superimposed. The stick figure image was meant to represent two possible selections. One covered the face – a “face box” and one the body – a “body box.”
The subjects, 381 heterosexual university students, both male and female were then asked which of the two boxes, the “face box” or “body box” they would remove given one of two mating context – a short term relationship (one-night-stand) or a long term committed relationship. Naturally, the men were shown the image of a woman and the women were shown an image of a man. Subjects were randomly assigned to the short term or long term condition and were only permitted to remove one box, not both. Before making their selection, they were told to imagine that they were currently single, even if they were not.
The Results
The results showed that women removed the face boxes under both conditions nearly equally suggesting that the face plays a much more important role regardless of the mating context.
Men who were assigned to the short-term, rather than the long-term mating context, removed the body box slightly more often than the face box. However, in the short-term mating context, men removed the face box much more often than the body box.
Additionally, when the contexts were stripped away, the researchers found that the face was much more preferred by the subjects as a source of relevant information about mate quality.
The Take Home Message
The research provides evidence that the face is a much more important cue when women assess men regardless of their desired short or long term prospects.
Women would be advised to pay particular attention to their own facial attractiveness over their bodies – that is of course, if their aim is to attract men interested in more than just a fling.
Men, it seems, are happy with a sexy body when seeking short term affairs.
Should women wish to attract men across shorter time periods, such as a one-night-stand, then using the body is an effective way to garner the required attention. In other words, the body is enough to create the conditions for short term attraction.
The face though, is the cue most salient for men when deciding to pair up for more than a simple fling.
Methods for making either the face or body more attractive – is well practiced. I needn’t go into them here!
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Resources
Confer, Jaime C.; Carin Perilloux and David M. Buss. More Than Just A Pretty Face: Men’s Priority Shifts Toward Bodily Attractiveness In Short-Term Versus Long-term Mating Contexts. Evolution and Human Behavior. 2019; 31: 348–353.
In just 2 hours you’ll have a great foundation to begin your journey as a master human decoder. This course is offered by Body Language Project and hosted by Vanessa Van Edwards.
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