Body attractiveness: Difference between revisions

According to two studies examining women's preferences regarding male body types published by the Royal Society in 2017, it appears that perceived strength is the strongest single indicator of male bodily attractiveness. This single trait has a very high positive correlation (r = 0.8) with women's attractiveness ratings of said male bodies.  

In this study, the relationship between the women's ratings of attractiveness of the men and their actual measured strength was relatively weak, from r = 0.25-.038 depending on the angle of the photo used.

This weak correlation suggests, firstly, that ratings of strength are not identical to ratings of attractiveness. Ratings of attractiveness likely capture facets that contribute to ratings of attractiveness but not strength, such as body fat percentage. Secondly, a portion of the perceptions of physical strength appears determined by factors that are only weakly related to actual strength.

These features could include traits that contribute to the desired male 'v-taper' shape, such as narrow waists and wide clavicles, traits that are unrelated to actual strength or perhaps even detrimental to it in some instances. An Australian study, for example, that utilized scale nude 3D models found that muscularity and a general mesomorphic body shape (v-taper, low body fat, thin waist) accounted for approximately 80% of the variance in the women's ratings of male bodily attractiveness, as compared to height and absolute penis size (flaccid), which both accounted for about 6% and 5% respectively.

However, one issue with this study (noted by the authors) that may have inflated the amount of variance attributable to bodily attractiveness (among the whole sample) was that the study included male 3D models that had extremely wide hips and narrow shoulders. While it is true that many males in industrialized societies are obese (as also noted by the study authors), the male model used in this study that represented the lowest attractiveness male body type had a strong gynoid (female sex-typical) pattern of fat storage and very broad hip bones and narrow clavicles, which is unusual for men (apart from men with chromosomal defects such as Kleinfelter's syndrome), and likely even more unattractive than an obese man with typical hip and shoulder dimensions would be.

 

 

 

In contrast to this belief, Brierly et al. (2016) found that Australian women manipulated male bodies to be at around 16% when they were prompted to create the most 'attractive' bodies.<ref>https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303798036_The_Body_and_the_Beautiful_Health_Attractiveness_and_Body_Composition_in_Men%27s_and_Women%27s_Bodies#pfe</ref>

Lei & Perrett replicated this in a sample of British women, finding that they preferred men with body fat percentages of 14.5% and 15% for short & long-term relationships, respectively, a difference that was non-significant. However, this study used less naturalistic 3D morphs than the first.<ref>https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/bjop.12451</ref>

A survey conducted by the fitness site Bony to Beastly also found that women generally preferred men with a low but not extremely lean body fat % as the most attractive (around 13%).<ref>https://bonytobeastly.com/most-attractive-male-body-survey-results/#2-the-most-attractive-degree-of-leanness</ref> This survey also found that women preferred 'skinny-fat' men, or men with a low level of muscle but a proportionately high percentage of body fat, to very thin men, suggesting that women tend to prefer men with some bulk over skinny men even if that bulk derives from fat.

Also concerning women's preferences in regards to leanness in men, Wang et al. conducted an analysis of whether there was evidence of assortative preference in regards to the body fat percentage of an ideal partner in raters of both sexes. This sample was cross-cultural, and revealed heterogeneity in women's preferences for male body fat percentage, broken down by their race.  This also found that most women of all races preferred leaner, but not super lean men, with 14% of women conforming to the rating pattern that evaluated very lean men (10% body fat).  The female raters' BMI played little role in these evaluations, unlike what was discovered in prior research. Very few women preferred obese men.<ref>https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/oby.22092#oby22092-bib-0034</ref>

An interesting sidenote here is that Asian women displayed the least heterogeneity with their attractiveness ratings, as the majority of them (82%) conformed to the rating pattern that evaluated men with a moderate (around 15%) but healthy level of body fat as the most attractive.

Overall, the evidence suggests that women find men with body fat percentages in the middle of the healthy range to be most attractive, on average. A small, but still fairly large, minority of women prefer leaner men (close to the ideal of defined abs). A much smaller percentage of women claim not to care much about a man's level of body fat, and an even smaller subset appears to actively prefers obese men.