There’s no man like a strong man for women
Heterosexual male gym rats, rejoice! Women, when asked in a study to judge photos of men’s bodies, rated the strongest men as the most attractive.
Height and leanness were appealing attributes, too, but strength played an outsize role in the ratings of a man’s torso, per a report published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
“No one will be surprised by the idea that strong men are more attractive,” said study author Aaron Lukaszewski, an evolutionary psychologist at California State University at Fullerton. “It’s no secret that women like strong, muscular guys.”
There was no nuance to these results, he said. Zero of the 160 women surveyed showed a statistical preference for weaker men.
“That is so obvious, people are go- ing to wonder why scientists needed to study it,” said Holly Dunsworth, an anthropologist at the University of Rhode Island who was not involved in the research. “And the answer would be because they want to know how these preferences evolved.”
Lukaszewski and his co-authors created a photo database of shirtless or tanktop-wearing male college stu- dents, all from the University of California at Santa Barbara. The men’s heads were digitally obscured.
Dunsworth described the overall effect as “faceless, soulless blockheads” above naked torsos. “It’s nice to see evolutionary psychology treating everybody like pieces of meat,” she said, “not just women.”
Sixty of the shirtless men were re- cruited from the university gym; 130 were students enrolled in psychology courses. The researchers quantified the students’ physical abilities via weightlifting machines, grip-strength tests and other measures.
The raters were students in their teens or early 20s enrolled at Oklahoma State University and Australia’s Griffith University. Men and women were asked to judge how attractive or strong they thought the men were, on a scale of 1to 7. Perceptions of strength closely aligned with the men’s actual strength.
The researchers also discovered a linear relationship between a man’s rated strength and his attractiveness. “What really explains the lion’s share in attractiveness is how strong a man looks,” Lukaszewski said.
Dunsworth said that despite the study’s straightforward methods, she did not find the authors’ evolutionary explanations convincing.