A group of researchers studying male body attractiveness found that women were particularly drawn to one specific body type.
If you frequently use dating apps, you might sometimes swipe right solely based on physical attraction.
While appearance isn’t everything in a relationship, as personality, hobbies, likes, and dislikes also play significant roles, prior research suggests that women tend to favor a certain body shape in their potential partners.
Back in 2017, experts at Griffith University in Queensland conducted a study to determine the significance of physical strength in men’s attractiveness.
The researchers showed a range of photographs depicting headless and shirtless male torsos to 160 women, asking them to rate the attractiveness of each image.
One set of photographs featured regular male university students, while the other set featured men who frequented the gym three to five times per week.
All the men in the photos also underwent the same strength test.
The survey results indicated that none of the female participants found the less muscular bodies appealing.
“We weren’t surprised that women found physically strong men attractive … what did surprise us was just how powerful the effect was,” commented Aaron Sell, a senior lecturer at Griffith University and the study’s lead researcher.
“Our data couldn’t find even a single woman that preferred weaker or feminine male bodies.”
The research concluded that women generally found Herculean bodies to be the most attractive.
Moreover, a man’s strength emerged as the strongest indicator of his attractiveness rating.
These ‘strong’ men constituted 70 percent of the highest-rated men, while additional research showed that women favored tall, lean men over those with stocky or overweight body types.
Interestingly, other studies have suggested that excessive strength in men 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.”
Additionally, a 2017 paper published in the Royal Society Journal indicates that a 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 at Griffith University plans to further investigate the question of attractiveness, particularly why women seem to prefer feminine male faces over masculine ones.
“It looks like the face is being analysed differently by women, and we’re not sure why yet,” Sell added.