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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday May 20 2018, @12:57PM   Printer-friendly
from the where-do-income-and-car-type-come-in? dept.

What makes a man attractive? Hint: Look at his limbs

Women prefer a man with legs that are about half his height, according to previous research; scientists believe that is an evolutionary result of women wanting to choose only healthy men. Legs that are too short, for example, have been linked to type 2 diabetes. But other proportions, such as arm length to body height or whether the elbow and knee divide a limb in half, can also relate to a person's health. Do they influence women's views as well?

To answer this, researchers collected average body proportions from roughly 9000 men in the U.S. military and used them to create computer-generated images of male models (pictured). The scientists made the model's arms and legs slightly longer or shorter, and then asked more than 800 heterosexual U.S. women to rank each model's attractiveness.

How long the model's arms were relative to his height didn't seem to matter [open, DOI: 10.1098/rsos.171790] [DX], the team reports today in Royal Society Open Science. And women cared only a little about how the elbow or knee divided a limb. But as seen in previous work, women noticed if the legs made up more or less than half his height—and they didn't like it.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 20 2018, @07:40PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 20 2018, @07:40PM (#681943)

    The science might be valid but the presentation certainly is not. If you only look at leg length then all your results will deal with legs...

    Sadly it's not only the SN headline (while even worse) but also on sciencemag. Neither of these claims ('What Do Women Want in a Man? The Right Leg-to-Body Ratio' and 'What makes a man attractive? Hint: Look at his limbs') is in any way supported by the science bit. It's a sad non sequitur.

    #fakenews

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 20 2018, @08:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 20 2018, @08:52PM (#681956)

    What, did you expect all 3 of us calling into question the sexual prowess of everybody, including each other, in this thread to pause and have a serious discussion about human sexuality?