Women are attracted to the male characteristics that correlate with reproductive fitness. That includes height and muscle, and a deep voice gets in there because it (accurately or not) projects a signal of strength and confidence.
Also, they're not really coupled to reproductive fitness. More fat tissue in breasts has no consequence for mamalian function. Male baldness is correlated with high testosterone, so theoretically positively correlated with fitness. And so on.
As with so many human preferences, they're far more personal or cultural than we think.
It is my understanding that it was generally believed that large breasts meant more milk until the 1950s or so. So there may still be an element of truth in assuming that stereotypical male preference for large breast could be selecting for reproduction – just with a cultural bias.
That being said, I generally agree with you. I know that I'm not attracted to the stereotype "everyone knows"/fashion model as a potential partner, far from it.
Different attributes are attractive to different people. I don't imagine man women would 'actively' say they are attracted to these things due to society pressure but that doesn't mean its fundamentally untrue.
That's a nice non-explanation. Article states:
> “There is so much attention in evolutionary literature on height, and selective pressures on height, and that’s only an 8 percent difference [between men and women]. In voice pitch, we are looking at more like 60 percent. That just doesn’t come about by accident,” Hodges-Simeon says. Instead, she believes, such differences are the result of sexual selection.
Suggesting that deep voices must've been under positive sexual selection pressure for men back when they weren't perceived representative for their gender.
Ah... scientists, just looking at the numbers in a University setting. Look up for a minute, gaze out the window, and try to find a couple where the woman is taller than her boyfriend.
So a totally expected difference in difference.
I'm sorry, I'm having a hard time parsing this sentence.
are you saying that the deep voices in males has developed due to other sexual selection, and only now shows up as a difference?
Now, the question becomes: why did the very first deep-voice males have any kind of positive selection pressure? At the time, this wasn't a male-specific trait, it was just some mutation that one individual who happened to be male had, so the initial explanation can't be sexual dimorphism. There must have been either some survival advantage, or some coincidence where this mutation happened to match a trait that was already sexually attractive for some deeper reason.
Like, imagine if 10,000,000 years from now, human-descended males have a characteristic tale, while females do not. Today, no humans have a tail, so you have to wonder, why did women start looking for a tail in their men?
I don't think it works like that.
I've heard it put like this: evolution is a conservative force, it keeps the genes that work, and remove what doesn't.
I would probably think of it like this: (it's all speculation, we'll never know).
Bigger mammals have bigger lungs and stomachs and deeper voice (because bigger) - thus females are the one who selects that, regardless of if they themselves are big or small (males don't care) - size trend downwards, but still selecting "upwards", so now humans are a bit smaller, male and female, size doesn't change outcome. But voice is still tied to aggression, intimidation, fighting, etc, which males are needed for to protect the females. So we keep the vocal traits while the species trends downwards in size.
The "choose the voice" and "make the voice" strategy has worked for us, so keep doing that.
IE: the mutation happens to both sexes, that we get smaller. It doesn't happen to one sex, "grow a deeper voice". Males would procreate with female deep voice or not.
For us to develop a tail, we'd need to lose our ears (balance) and it would happen to both sexes, unfair for males to have balance and females not.
It is true though that this may have started out as a coincidence, and then selective pressures could have made it more prominent.
> I've heard it put like this: evolution is a conservative force, it keeps the genes that work, and remove what doesn't.
My understanding is that a new gene is unlikely to become common (or even survive at all) unless it provides some measurable benefit to reproduction (which includes survival, since that is a prerequisite for reproduction, even in old age for social species), either directly or by being associated with another gene that does.