Men overestimate women's preference for masculinity

back when okcupid was not part of match.com, and it was &quot;indy&quot; and had kinda nerdy harvard founders, they published a blog including reports on statistics from users of their site.<p>The most &quot;astonishing&#x2F;counterintuitive&quot; detail was that women were essentially more concerned or attracted to good looks than men were. If you rate people&#x27;s attractiveness on how much other people like their look, you can then look at how much people are interested in people &quot;out of their league&quot;, so to speak. And women showed a much greater tendency to flock toward the most good looking men, men who were &quot;numerically&quot; out of their reach (because too many women wanted too few men)<p>This is not the same thing as preferring &quot;masculinity&quot; which this study concerns itself with, but it is similar. There are masculine traits you can fake or modify, like &quot;abs&quot; and there are masculine traits that are more innate, like shape of your face&#x2F;jaw. Presumably both men and women are innately more aware of &quot;underlying&quot; looks. Part of what this article concerns itself with are &quot;mutable&quot; characteristics that people are over focusing on.<p>it&#x27;s just interesting to learn that women care about looks more than men do, at least on a &quot;dating menu&quot;; irl could be totally different.

there are studies showing women actually prefer more masculine men during ovulation, the few days when they can actually get pregnant each month. At other times of the month, they are more attracted to men who are &quot;good providers,&quot; which is an evolutionary adaptation that runs counter to monogamy. Essentially suggesting that women, who are mammals that conceal &quot;being in heat&quot; unlike other mammals, can choose to become pregnant with masculine men when they are actually able to get pregnant, but for the rest of the month, they are attracted to the men who they can rely on to provide for them. Birth control might alter this, I&#x27;m not sure. But it&#x27;s an interesting sexual selection rabbit hole to investigate.

<i>144 White, straight men and women aged between 18 and 27</i><p>It&#x27;s always annoying to see headlines trumpeting general conclusions from what turns out to be a small&#x2F;over-selected sample population.

A study of 144 people, measuring preference of how masculine as a face shape is. The headline suggests the study applies more generally than it actually does.

<p><pre><code> This all suggests that misjudging what others find attractive doesn&#x27;t just skew our view of potential partners, but also distorts our own self-image. Just as concerns about muscularity, body type, or weight can lead to insecurity and unhappiness, so too can worries about the masculinity or femininity of our facial features. </code></pre> I have come face-to-face with a facet of this recently, where my internal lenses directly affected how I act and interact with the world around me to a deleterious degree.<p>It is amazing to me to catch the occasional glimpse beyond my own preoccupations and see the outside world unmarred.<p>I&#x27;m not sure what to do with these experiences. Maybe this will be helpful to you.

The subheading is &quot;and women overestimate men&#x27;s preference for femininity&quot;. And furthermore, the study focuses specifically on <i>facial appearance</i>. Splitting these up like this and burying the context reminds me of the story of an editor magnifying gender conflict in the fantastic essay &quot;How Americans edit sex out of my writing&quot;:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20221006180631&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;europeanreviewofbooks.com&#x2F;how-americans-edit-sex-out-of-my-writing&#x2F;en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20221006180631&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;europeanr...</a><p>Anyway, the methodology for <i>quantifying</i> how masculine or feminine a face is in the study was kind of interesting, though it wasn&#x27;t brought up in the press release.<p>&gt;<i>Transformation was achieved by applying or subtracting the linear difference between the average male face shape and female face shape to target face (i.e. average faces for illustration and each individual composite or base face for stimuli. The distance from the average female face shape to the average male face shape was equivalent to a +100% increase in masculinity. Thus, each of the 118 faces contributed to the definition of the dimorphism vector along which base faces were manipulated</i><p>So some notion of deformation — the medical imaging community uses the concept of a &quot;deformation vector field&quot; — is being applied to project face shapes onto an axis of feminine to masculine.<p>One limitation of face-shape studies like this is that the faces are always shown in orthographic projection on a flat screen, which creates a predictable distortion of facial features, tending to widen and flatten faces compared to what you see in real life. This is the &quot;camera adds ten pounds&quot; effect:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;petapixel.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;28&#x2F;camera-adds-10-pounds&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;petapixel.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;28&#x2F;camera-adds-10-pounds&#x2F;</a><p>Since the preferences for female faces were both predicted by women and chosen by men to be much more feminine (&gt;100%) than the displayed faces, it seems possible that the method of display may have been slightly distorted as though projected from infinity, like the telephoto examples in the article, where the subject&#x27;s face is widened.<p>But perhaps the greater lesson is that it isn&#x27;t so simple to display a 3D object on a flat screen. In fact, the method of projection isn&#x27;t even mentioned in the study, much less the article!

Yes, extremes, e.g., Kai Greene or John Cena, are not attractive to the largest swath of people - Rich Froning is very &quot;mid&quot;

Not my field of expertise by far - but having been around women for decades showed me that many of them are attracted to anything... and I mean anything. Trying to simplify human attraction to a few core concepts is a complete waist of time.<p>Stay true to yourself and hell what others think - with basic social skills and a few smiles you&#x27;d be surprised what comes your way.<p>But yeah, one needs to leave his screen at some point - so be a bit more social and just say hi around.

It is funny that the article is only about made up facial photos and the photo is a ripped muscular torso.<p>But I expect that none of these social science things would work out in the real world so it&#x27;s a fairly reasonable representation

Why on earth was this flagged? So frustrating.

You would do best to ignore studies like these IMO.

honestly whats up with the UK psycology psuedoscience thing? Is it just me or are there way too many &quot;mindhunter&quot; types over there doing science by imagination?

hackernews?

There is a vast difference between what people what and what they admit to wanting.