Featured Image Credit: Getty stock images
Topics: Sex and Relationships, Science
Ella Scott
Researchers investigating male bodily attractiveness discovered that women were drawn to one body type more than any other.
If you’re a frequent dating app user then at some point you may find yourself swiping right purely because you’re physically attracted to someone.
Of course, looks aren’t everything when it comes to relationships; there are personality, hobbies, likes, dislikes and more to take into account.
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However, according to previous research, women are apparently more likely to prefer a particular body shape in their future flames.
In 2017, experts at Griffith University in Queensland embarked on a study that aimed to test how important physical strength is to men's bodily attractiveness.
To do so, the team showed various photographs of headless and shirtless male torsos to 160 women before asking them to rate their attractiveness.
One set of images showed the bodies of regular male university students while the second lot showed men who went to the gym between three and five times each week.
Alongside having their pictures taken, all the men in the images were given the same strength test to complete.
According to survey results, none of the study participants found the unmuscled bodies attractive.
“We weren’t surprised that women found physically strong men attractive ... what did surprise us was just how powerful the effect was,” said Aaron Sell, a senior lecturer at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia and study lead.
“Our data couldn’t find even a single woman that preferred weaker or feminine male bodies.”
The study revealed that the surveyed women believed Herculean bodies were universally the most appealing.
Meanwhile, the strength of a man was the strongest predictor of whether he was rated as attractive.
These perceived ‘strong’ men made up 70 percent of the highest-rated men while further research found that women preferred tall, lean men over those with stocky and overweight body types.
Interestingly, there has been previous studies that claim ‘too much’ strength in a man can become unappealing to women.
“The theory is that, yes, there would have been benefits ancestrally, in terms of the ability to acquire resources, protecting offspring, hunting and so on,” Aaron Lukaszewski, an evolutionary psychologist at California State University told The Guardian.
“But at a certain point, mating with highly dominant men, they can exert all this aggressive coercive control and there might be costs.”
Moreover, a 2017 paper published in the Royal Society Journal says that a further potential downside to dating strong men is that they might be ‘better able to invest resources in a family [but] less willing to do so than weaker men of poorer quality’.
The team from Griffith University intent to look further into the question of attractiveness and study why women have shown a preference for feminine male faces over masculine ones.
“It looks like the face is being analysed differently by women, and we’re not sure why yet,” added Sell.