A new study on what women find attractive in sexual partner

So the April 14, 2013 issue of The Economist - a Brit publication -- had an article on male attractiveness and preference for sexual partner. "MEN have long wondered what exactly it is that women want. Some pore over men’s magazines, with their promises of “washboard abs”, for guidance. The more scientifically minded look for experimental data. The latest evidence comes from a group of researchers led by Brian Mautz, then of Australian National University. They gathered 105 heterosexual Australian women and showed them a series of digitally generated pictures of men in which three bodily characteristics were varied—height, shoulder-to-waist ratio and flaccid penis size. The women were asked to rate the men as sexual partners. In an article just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr Mautz and his team describe their results. Happily for the insecure, although the women did indeed find a larger penis alluring, it was not the most important factor. That honour went to the combination of broad shoulders and a narrow waist, which accounted for around three-quarters of the variation in attractiveness all by itself. Height was also only a weak predictor of appeal. That is odd, says Dr Mautz, because other studies have linked height with all sorts of benefits, from higher salaries to longer lives. The bigger-is-better effect was also subject to diminishing returns: each extra centimetre, whether of height, shoulder width or penis size, was less significant than the previous one. Nonetheless, even the tallest, broadest-shouldered and best-endowed digital hunks that the researchers generated fell short of perfection..."

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