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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 21 2018, @03:49AM
Google sucks nowadays. Good thing keywords like MHC still work (I've been having problems with Google ignoring my keywords or using what it stupidly thinks are synonyms and then when I switch to verbatim mode they seem to pick a very different ranking scheme).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_histocompatibility_complex_and_sexual_selection#The_relationship_between_olfaction_and_MHC [wikipedia.org]
See also: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/birth-control-pills-affect-womens-taste/ [scientificamerican.com]
So women go on the pill and find a guy they like, go off the pill and don't like the guy as much :).