Why can't a hetero girl put her 2 cents in? I know what a pretty girl looks like even if I have no interest in the color of her panties.

I think the photo on the left is the one she looks "better" in.

Why can't a hetero girl put her 2 cents in? I know what a pretty girl looks like even if I have no interest in the color of her panties.

Well, no offense, but that's why your opinion is of lesser value in this case. Your appreciation of prettiness is aesthetic, not visceral. You're thinking 'she looks nice,' us straight guys and dykes are thinking 'mmm, gimme some o' that.' and the study is about sexual attractiveness not aesthetics.

(and yeah, she looks better in the picture on the left)

So, we're clever enough to fool you all with make-up, but not clever enough to judge if it worked?

Also, presumably lesbians would be less interested in their partner's fertility.

And for what it's worth, various studies have "proven" the same thing about men, that men judged as attractive tend to have higher testosterone levels.

men judged as attractive tend to have higher testosterone levels.

*beats chest, uproots tree, flings crap around room, grunts*

well, there goes that study.

*climbs skyscraper in fit of rage*

Guys with high testosterone also tend to be balder and hairier in other areas than the top of the head.

getoffmylawn- i have no interest in the color of her panties, either ;) what i meant was "anyone, feel free to add your 2 cents... especially if your sexual preference = teh ladies."

And for what it's worth, various studies have "proven" the same thing about men, that men judged as attractive tend to have higher testosterone levels.

sometimes?

Oh, and presumably lesbians and breeding males will have a different idea of sexual attactiveness.

So... women who are naturally full of estrogen (that is, ovulating) are more attractive to everyone, and more attracted to really handsome men.

The rest of the men have to settle for women who are good with make-up, or infertile.

And no one cares who the lesbians get, as long as they're "gettin' summa that."

Is this the conclusion we've now reached, based on studies publised by the BBC?

Hey ugly single chicks...

i'm generally attracted to & prefer to date women...


Charming. Imagine my surprise that you manage to get dates at all.

Guys with high testosterone also tend to be balder and hairier in other areas than the top of the head.

Really? Then how come Telly Savalas and Yul Brynner werent as big sex symbols as say, Steve McQueen and James Dean?

/unhairy, unbald yet still high-testosterone male

oddly enough, i'm generally attracted to & prefer to date women that don't wear makeup

That's what you think! Dig into the archives for the countless discussions we've had on this topic.

presumably lesbians and breeding males will have a different idea of sexual attactiveness.
does that hold true for both butch and femme -types? and what about chapstick lesbians, transgendered folks, etc?

Charming. Imagine my surprise that you manage to get dates at all.
you entirely missed the point, but i'm glad it got your attention. ;)

what about chapstick lesbians

Those are the eskimo lesbians with chapped lips, right? I thought they were called klondykes.

You'll have to prove your testosterone with a test, jonmc. While you indeed might be an outlier, I'll go with the actual research which I am too lazy to look up. Also please note the word "tend". I can't explain your anecdotal references to men whom you consider sexy, that would be more of a cultural influence I would imagine.

i like the photo on the right better.

Wow, my brother looks exactly like the dude on the right in Wedge's (second) link. No wonder he gets all the chicks.

*Inarticulate howl of grief and frustration*

*erases too much information and inquires about muddgirl's brother instead*

men judged as attractive tend to have higher testosterone levels

(snivel)

Women only like macho, preppy jocks.

They don't wanna go out with nice guys like me.

(/snivel)

You'll have to prove your testosterone with a test, jonmc.... I can't explain your anecdotal references to men whom you consider sexy

I piss of the porch. I like the gus and the movies where shit blows up. and bisexuality and high testosterone are not mutually exclusive propositions. and I'm drunk.

The difference could be different ways this woman was lit for each photo. If you look at her neck in the one on the left, there's some weird reflections going on. I honestly don't see any differences that can't be attributed to lighting.

P.S. maybe they used light tricks to simulate higher estrogen, who knows?

and I'm drunk.

Those three simple words would make a lot of MeFi posts more readable.

"Lebanon blah blah Zionism blah blah Chomsky blah blah. And I'm drunk."

"Terrorism blah blah Islamofacism blah blah. And I'm drunk."

"Bush blah blah Satanic blah blah fascist takeover blah blah. And I'm drunk."

I'm conflicted. I'm definitely single and may or may not be ugly but due to certain oral contracecptives and an intense cyclic visual dose of Adam Baldwin, I'm most certainly hormonal. Am I fuckable or not?

Administrator, please hope me!

LeeJay: Based on my intensely scientific analysis of your attraction factors, I vote YES!

And that's actually an interesting point. Does BC make women more attractive? Are we fooling men not only with make-up but with hormonally-controlled fertility? Are modern women really just big ol' liars trying to trap men into marriage using fake signs of fertility? I think we should sic the BBC on these important questions.

/me adores LeeJay, even never having seen her

My deceptive uterus is a trap!

Ah, so that's it....

I'm the administrator, and I'm here to hope you.

Firstly, LeeJay: Fuckable. She gets the fuckable heart beside her name.

Secondly: Danger, danger! Those two images are not the same girl with less or more hormone! The face structure is different on the second image. I cut it out in photoshop and lined it up over the first face, matching exactly where the eyes, nose and mouth were, and the second face is longer. You can see this if you look at the photos: The eyes are in the same position, but girl two's hairline is higher and chin is lower. It's just a different face structure. (Plus muddier shot, less tan, slightly thicker brows.)

So unless not watching enough Adam Baldwin will actually change your face structure, these photos are not really a good way to visualize what they are talking about.

2. MATERIAL AND METHODS
(a) Participants
Participants were 59 white women from the student
undergraduate population at the University of St Andrews
(age,MZ20.4, s.d.Z1.5, range 18–24). No participants were
currently using the contraceptive pill or had been in last
90 days. All received monetary payment for participation.
(b) Photographs
Participants were photographed each time they came to the
laboratory, weekly for four to six weeks. Participants were
photographed in a neutral expression, under standard
conditions with diffuse flash lighting from two lateral flashguns.
Images were captured on a digital camera at a resolution
of 1200!1000 pixels in uncompressed TIFF format using
24 bit RGB encoding. No restrictions were made for make-up
use during photography, however the use of make-up was
recorded in self-reports. Consequently, 32 participants were
not wearing any make-up when photographed and 27 were
wearing make-up. The first photograph taken (week 1) was
used for ratings if the participant had either always worn
make-up (nZ27) or always not worn make-up (nZ14) in all
the photographs. If there was a combination of no make-up
and make-up photographs (nZ18), the first photograph with
no make-up was used. For presentation to raters, the faces
were aligned on interpupillary distance and masked around
the face line, so cues to hair and clothing were reduced.

via

So unless not watching enough Adam Baldwin will actually change your face structure, these photos are not really a good way to visualize what they are talking about.

I know for a fact that watching too little Adam Baldwin is more dangerous than not getting your daily recommended allowance of both riboflavin AND folic acid. I also know that these photos are not a realistic demonstration of fuckability.

The heart tells you so.

Mmmmmmm, hope me.

Maybe, wedge... still, it's hard to believe that hormone-deprivation makes your chin grow 3/4 of an inch during a month. I hate to accuse the BBC of doctoring, but whatever the reason the photos are different, I just don't think they are accurately showing what happens.

≡ Click to see image ≡

*Inarticulate howl of grief and frustration*"

I find inarticulate growls of grief and frustration unnattractive.

Seriously, as highly as I think of you, Miko, it seems clear to me that you're dominated by reactionary (in the most literal use of the term) impulses when this type of thing comes up.

I just don't know what you expect. If you don't believe that a bunch of stuff is built into biology and you are dogmatically clinging to blank-slate hypothesis, well, reality is slowly destroying the viability of those ideas. It's clear that lots of human behavior is the product of biology.

(And I'll add that I have a hard time being patient with those who strongly think otherwise. From where I'm standing, this variety of cultural anthropocentricism which sees humans as apart from nature in a way all other living creatures are not is just a post-enlightenment version of theist human exceptionalism. It's incredibly hubristic. And unlikely to be true.)

If you are suspicious of sociobiological research because the researchers (or those who interpet the results for their own purposes) may use them to reify social inequity, then I'm right there with you.

But opposing such research and opposing discourse about it is not the answer. To me, and certainly to other people, doing so seems a lot like the behavior of people that oughtn't be allowed a seat at the table because, frankly, they're irrational. They want to wish the world to be different than it is.

I don't think that either as a society or as individuals we're prisoners of our biology. I do think that if we want to achieve social justice with regard to a great many things, we have to take into consideration all factors which act against it—and that certainly includes biases built into human cognition and behavior.

To overcome the inujustice and evil associated with the human inclination to tribalism and the demonization that accompanies xeonophobia, deniying or ignoring that inclination seems to me to be the surest way to insure that such efforts fail. Until we are willing to re-engineer our brains, then we have to understand that inclination and find ways that are effective in working against it. And, by the way, history has already demonstrated that simply denying it, even convincing a majority of it, doesn't work. An alternative would be to convince a majority that it exists and must be consciously fought.

Another example that puts things into more stark relief is the bias against poor health. Is it fair that my poor health makes me less attractive? On the individual level, how should I work against that bias: by pretending it doesn't exist, or directly overcoming it?

So men are more sexually attractive to women who show the signs of being most fertile. What an entirely expected finding. Given what we know of evolution, biology, the biology of other animals and specifically mammals, then it's obviously far more likely than not that this would be the case in humans.

What does that mean? What does it mean that cross-cultural studies show that facial symmetry correlates with sexual attractiveness? I don't know, it implies lots of stuff. Some things which are morally neutral, others that are not. The world is the way the world is. We learn about the world, understand how it works, and then apply that truly unusual human trait of modifying it or hacking it. We'll do these things both using cultural and technological means. The sooner we deeply understand how this stuff works, the sooner we can change it.

Or we can get really mad about it.

I'll take miko's falsely "inarticulate" howl of grief and frustration over kmellis's many words (which, honeslty, I couldn't read all of) any day of the week.

I'm sorry, but I understand where she's coming from, and she said it very succinctly and perfectly.

I guess there's a big divide here. Which, given the original post, shouldn't be all that surprising.

taz-

Average faces were created in order to visualize the
differences in facial appearance between women with high
and low reproductive hormones. Composites were constructed
from the faces of the females with the highest 10
and lowest 10 oestrogen using the methods outlined in
Benson & Perrett (1993) and Tiddeman et al. (2001). See
figure 1 for composite faces. Separate composites were not
constructed for progesterone levels, because they were highly
intercorrelated with oestrogen levels (see §3b); therefore, the
composites would have contained the majority of the same
faces. Composites were created from oestrogen rather than
progesterone as the latter was not as strongly related to the
face ratings (see §3b).

Some are fancy on the outside.
Some are fancy on the inside.
Everybody's fancy.
Everybody's fine.
Your body's fancy and so is mine.

Heh. So are they saying this isn't a real face, but a composite face? Anyway... obviously, I'm obssessed, because I've gone and done another photoshop:

≡ Click to see image ≡

(click to see larger)

The third frame is girl two's features, from the top of the brows to the bottom of the lips, pasted on girl one's face.

Then I adjusted for color, etc. (to be as fair as possible, to match the "uglier" version) which means to I had to bring down the saturation in the original (hormonal) face, and add more blue and cyan. So the second face has a longer chin, less saturated color, more blue and cyan tones, thicker brows, shadows under the eyes. How much of that was caused by less hormones?

I don't disagree with the findings, but the photos are making me nuts.

Know what? There's not a single one of those photos that I find unattractive. Whatever that says about me (and I think that person actually looks a bit like me), I'll take it.

*snorts hormone, passes the mirror around"

of course... she's definitely attractive. but when is she the "hottest"? during ovulation! flushed cheeks, slightly disheveled but relaxed demeanor, moist/engorged lips, sweaty thighs and tits, feverish temperature, etc... on a purely physical level, that shit is fucking sexy am i rite fellow philogynists

taz, the composite photo on the right is definitely the more interesting and attractive to me.

ooh, wedge! For sweaty and feverish, you oughtta try a lady on the cusp of menopause. *licks lips, bats lashes*

>:D
/me blushes

heheh.

I find women most attractive when they are fricasseed.

My first thought on seeing the photos was that she had put on weight betwen the photos, mainly because the shape of her chin has changed (not lust the length), these seems to be more fullness in the lower part of her cheeks and her nose seems slightly wider. I think, though, there are real issues with causality in this study. From the article, the process seems at least a little flawed.

I find women most attractive when they are breathing.

Funny, I find women most attractive when they aren't breathing.

taz, I think part of your frustration with those photos is due to the lengthening/shortening effect that happens when you tilt the subject's head.

After having written a bunch of stuff (and notably a lot about the similarities and differences when this argument is brought to bear on sexual orientation), I realize that the bottom line regarding how difficult it is for me to engage those who feel strongly about this stuff is that I don't. My notion of self, or of other people, or human nature is not dependent upon whether determinism is or isn't true. I don't really have any emotional investment either way. My engagement on the issue is not at all as a culture warrior of either side. Most importantly, the culture warriors care deeply about it because they believe that the answer to this question is the fulcrum upon which every sort of social organization, ever idea of social justiced, moves. I don't. I think we are perfectly capable of achieving the liberal/progressive social justice many of us desire either way. I don't think it's crucial in determining what's possible. I do support such research because I believe it is crucial in determining the best ways to get from here to there. But the only thing I have any significant investment in is the result, not the exact nature of the materials we have to work with. I do think, however, that the ideologues are obstructionists, often working against their own interests.