>The results showed that it was possible to almost perfectly predict how attractive a man’s body is from three things: how physically strong he looks, how tall he is, and how lean he is. The effect of strength was so large that none of the 150 women in the study preferred weak men. Furthermore, looking strong was much more important for man’s attractiveness than being tall or lean.
>“The rated strength of a male body accounts for a full 70% of the variance in attractiveness,’’ Dr Sell said.
Yes but A) I wanted to be sure we were looking at the same research and B) everything I found looked at bad as this one.
Firstly the relationship between the strength of the men and the women's abilities to determine their strength is weakly correlated (r=0.33).
Secondly, the sample of women here are all around 21 years old and all study at the same university. I don't think we can extrapolate what "most women" find attractive from this.
Thirdly, the women are presented only with photographs of male upper bodies without faces. The study itself mentions that other research suggests many women prefer men with "weaker or more effeminate faces." I think it's also clear that styling, manner, expression, personality etc all play a party in attraction and move of that is accounted for in this study.
I also believe you or the reporter have misinterpreted something here. You said that none of the women preferred stronger men, but the study actually shows a correlation of 0.8. None of the women preferred more weak men more often than strong men but some of them did prefer some weak men over some strong men.
The study also points out that asking a woman how strong a man looked was a better indicator of how strong he was than asking her how attractive he was.
Note also the quality of the questions here. First the woman is asked to rate the strength of the man and then asked to rate his attractiveness. I'm not a psychologist but it feels like the study itself primes the person being tested to consider the correlation ahead of giving their answers, which strikes me as poor research design.
As a man surely you're aware that your tastes differ to other men's tastes. Consider how much the cultural standard for an ideal woman has changed within our lifetimes. A woman praised for being thicc in 2015 would be ridiculed during the years of heroin chic in 2005 and vice versa. It's clear that these things are very much affected by cultural norms, by age, etc. A test which doesn't attempt to account for this can't be used to extrapolate in the way you're doing.
Finally, you made the claim that women prefer a certain type of man because they want to feel protected. You said tonnes of studies supported this but the one you gave me has absolutely nothing in it that makes any reference to this supposition. What am I missing?
First study had "mixed results," second is about a healthy level of musculature (ie the preference was for men without dangerous levels of atrophy), third says that too much muscle was as unattractive as too little and again all three focus only on upper body attractiveness which is clearly distinct from overall attractiveness, and again suffer from similar sampling/methodology issues as your first study. The fourth is based on references to the others and self reported sense of attractiveness in men.
By the way, after I went from skinny to muscular, I pulled way more women and higher-quality ones as well. Women were more receptive to my approach. Strangers smiled at me more. Some women gazed at me.
https://news.griffith.edu.au/2017/12/13/upper-body-strength-...
>The results showed that it was possible to almost perfectly predict how attractive a man’s body is from three things: how physically strong he looks, how tall he is, and how lean he is. The effect of strength was so large that none of the 150 women in the study preferred weak men. Furthermore, looking strong was much more important for man’s attractiveness than being tall or lean.
>“The rated strength of a male body accounts for a full 70% of the variance in attractiveness,’’ Dr Sell said.