Male Facial Attractiveness and Female Receptivity | Hacker News Reader

Male Facial Attractiveness and Female Receptivity

jsecjournal.com

11 pointsbumbledraven16 comments

> Furthermore, Voracek, Hofhansl and Fisher (2005) found 6% of women were receptive to offers of casual sex with a strange man

Anyone know which strange man they're talking about and what his MO is?

I'd assume Kramer

"It has also been established that women’s preference for attractiveness increases when they seek brief, sexual relationships compared to longer forms of relationship."

It's kinda obvious, but women lie about it all the time.

I wish they would stop lying about it. I have yet to meet a lady who had been honest of her true desires.

If there any girls reading this or any of you who understand girls really well, let me ask straight out, why do girls lie about their true intentions/desires always?

"Women mating strategies" by Elizabeth Cashdan:

http://www.anthro.utah.edu/PDFs/ec_evolanth.pdf

I'm no master of women psychology; however, I have spoken to many about what they desire. From what I gather, when they tell you this "lie", they actually believe those words. As far as why the lie exists to begin with, well it all boils down to saving face. Women have to keep up their social status, lest they fall victim to the double standard of being labeled a "slut", while a men who is true about his desires (and acts on them successfully) is called a "playboy" -- with obvious differences in the connotation. I won't say too much here, but message me, and I can go more in depth.

If a woman desires sex with a good looking guy but marriage with a rich guy, it's in her best interest not to talk about the former, lest it be difficult to manage the latter.

"If there any girls reading this or any of you who understand girls really well, let me ask straight out, why do girls lie about their true intentions/desires always?"

If you actually think women always lie, then why even bother asking us, since you think whatever reason we give will be a lie?

I mean... yes, as a woman, everything I say is a lie.

But if everything I say is a lie, then I am actually a man pretending to be a woman. But if I am a man, then what I say may be true, which means that I might actually be a woman.

Seriously, though, your comment is misogynistic.

It's not so much that girls lie; rather, it's well documented people in general don't understand themselves all that well. Self-reports of internal motivations are notoriously misleading. That's why research like this (or just common-sense observation of what people DO, rather than what they SAY) is useful.

The basic hypothesis: Women are attracted to good-looking men.

Well, duh.

There's always someone who leaves a comment like this.

And for good reason. This type of research routinely sets out to prove something that is already obvious. When was the last time you saw an evolutionary psychology paper that provided a surprising new insight?

How is it "already obvious"? We're told that men are visually oriented, but women are not. There are websites like "hot chicks with douchebags", and there are drop-dead gorgeous women married to complete toads who happen to be wealthy or powerful. Both of your comments are nihilistic dismissals of useful and interesting science on the specious grounds that "we already knew that". No we didn't, and even if we did, it's useful to prove it. Just because we had a hunch something was true doesn't mean it's so, and looking into the seemingly obvious can surprise us when it turns out that what we thought we knew was wrong.

When it comes to human sexual behaviour, pretty much everything is possible, and it seems like anything that you can imagine actually exists.

That's why you see dismissive comments like the original one: many people who has been 'working in the field', so to speak, have already observed this, and see no value in his paper.

The paper itself (even in the abstract) acknowledges that we already know that women are visually oriented, though, in the sense that attractiveness is related to receptivity to sexual propositions. The paper is a somewhat more modest investigation of whether facial attractiveness in particular is also predictive (it is), and does a decent survey of some of the issues and related literature.

It's "already obvious" because women do, in fact, go for attractive men (witness the swooning your wife or girlfriend does whenever there's a picture of George Clooney, Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp around). They find them sexually attractive, just like men find pretty women sexually attractive.

What confuses your argument is that women also tend to go for long term relationships with men that are high status and in such cases seem to place less importance on looks.

This leads to situations where the wife of a scrawny and unnatractive alpha male (the emperor of Rome, say) will bear children who bear a suspicious resemblance to a particularly hunky albeit lower status male from her surroundings (a beefy member of the Praetorian guard, say).

Which is exactly what this paper is saying: women differentiate between sexual attractiveness and desirability for marriage, but when it comes to judging sexual attractiveness, looks win out.

It's a matter of debunking and dismissing, publicly, the misinformation that obscures this fact.

I'd be interested in analyses of the sources and purposes of this misinformation.

(As a man,) the first time I met a women who was very direct and frank about her experience of attraction and motivation, it was eye opening. Not entirely easy to take, but very elucidating.

So much of the "common", "public" information in (U.S.) society about attraction and mating is just plain bunk. Yet it persists.

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