From wealth to facial features, exactly what is it about the male species that piques a woman’s interest?
We’ve all been there. Someone on the other side of the bar catches your attention, rousing butterflies somewhere in the pit of your stomach. Maybe you’ve just met. Maybe you’ve known them for years. One thing’s for sure – the man in front of you is ticking all the right boxes.
But what is it that ignites this coveted, sometimes elusive spark? Unfortunately, the answer isn’t entirely straightforward. When it comes to choosing male partners female preferences are so diverse and idiosyncratic as to defy systemic explanation, says evolutionary psychologist Bruce J Ellis in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology And The Generation Of Culture.
Ellis goes on to argue female preferences can be partially discerned using the evolution-based concept of ‘mate value’, where the principles of attraction are grounded in evolution. He speculates females are most ensnared by male traits that were appealing in our natural environment – those of the Pleistocene hunter-gatherer. These encompass the willingness and ability of a man to protect, provide for and engage with a woman and her children.
Qualities such as an alpha status and positional/economic stability are especially important because, traditionally, they would enhance a woman’s own status, survival chances and reproductive prospects. Ellis explains such considerations may be hard-wired into female evaluative mechanisms in women designed to detect and prefer high-status men.
Wealth or good looks?
Evolutionary quirks aside, subconscious gold digging and social climbing are widely held as attraction determinants. According to Laura Watson’s excerpt in Evolutionary Explanations Of Hypothetical Human Behaviour, females are the more choosy of the two sexes, because of their high level of investment during pregnancy and child rearing. Their limited egg production (around 400 in a lifetime) has women seeking ‘quality’ partners and, Watson speculates, has resulted in females being disproportionately drawn to men of status and wealth.
Indeed, The Human Face by Brian Bates and John Cleese cited anthropologist John Marshall Townsend’s study which blandly states, ‘women always preferred the best-looking man with the most money’ and will ‘tend to choose an average-looking, or even unattractive professional over a good looking manual worker.’
For those men with a sinking bank balance but a killer jawline, romance is not dead. Watson concedes physical attractiveness is still important and argues women prefer testosterone-enhanced features in men. Traits such as high cheekbones, muscles, strong jaws and deeper voices infer masculinity and high testosterone, aligning with women’s evolutionary tendency to prefer men of social dominance. Traditionally, masculinity would benefit a man standing among peers and competitors, while high testosterone would benefit the production of healthy offspring.
Interestingly, however, masculinity and attractiveness are not synonymous with each other, as the throngs of Leonardo DiCaprio female fanatics can attest. A study by Sonja Windhager, Katrin Schaefer and Bernhard Fink at the Department of Anthropology, University of Vienna, Austria, found men considered ‘attractive’ featured long, narrow jaws with wide and full lips. The same study found masculinity was more commonly associated with rounder faces, wider eyebrows and prominent jaws, showing masculinity and attractiveness as ‘separate aspects of male mate quality’.
Similarly, in a study at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, researchers used a computer program to manipulate men’s faces, making them more feminine or masculine in appearance. Feminised men were consistently deemed more attractive by the female participants in the study, a trend that only varied with women in the most fertile days of their cycle, once again complying with mate selection based on evolution’s alpha-male agenda.
The seduction of symmetry
Whether your jawline falls in the ‘attractive’ or ‘alphamale’ category, the secret of symmetry is regarded a definite swoon factor. Several studies have associated male attractiveness with facial symmetry. Research by evolutionary psychologist Ian Pentn-Voak et al. used real and computer graphic male faces to discern symmetrical faces as more attractive (though not necessarily more masculine) than nonsymmetrical faces. Again, this lure has not escaped the clutches of evolution, as symmetry has been proposed as a marker of developmental stability that may be important in human mate choice.
Everything else, it seems, rests on the shoulders. An inverted triangle shape, with a low waist-to-chest ratio (WCR) is widely reported to attract the female gaze. Broad shoulders, descending to a smaller waist and even slimmer hips is considered highly evocative. Particularly in urban settings where WCR is the primary component of attractiveness ratings compared to body-mass-index and waist-hip-ratio, as revealed by Viren Swami and Martin Tovee in their study Male Physical Attractiveness In Britain And Malaysia: A Cross Cultural Study.
Attractive on the inside
Finally, for those closet male romantics, surrendering to the cliché and letting shine the qualities within is a guaranteed heart-stopper. A nomad tribe called the Wodaabe, who roam through central Niger, Africa, stop their travels each year for a celebration named the Geerewol. For seven days the men dance for a crowd of women who, in turn, single out their most desirable suitor.
Lovers and husbands alike are not chosen for their beauty, as all men are dressed uniformly and use colourful makeup to enhance their features. Instead, as described in The Human Face, the women search for reflections of inner kindness, intelligence, warmth and charm in each man’s dance style and facial expressions.
Evolution, jawline and dance moves aside, the true crux of female attraction still has many single males in particular stumped. As Candace Bushnell, author of the women’s bible Sex and the City put it, after all, it’s women who decide if a man is desirable or undesirable. And, as women’s tastes vary so drastically as to defy systemic explanation, it seems the mysteries of female attraction will remain just that complete mysteries.
