• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 547 0

to eyes that are not too close together nor too far apart, to a chin that is neither prominent nor receding, to lips that are full but not too full, to cheekbones that are prominent but not absurdly so, to a face that is the average, oval shape, neither too long nor too broad – crops up throughout literature as a theme of female beauty. It suggests to me that a Fisherian sexy-son – or, rather, in this case, sexy-daughter – effect is at work. Given the importance of facial beauty, a man who chooses an ugly-faced mate will probably have daughters that marry late or marry second-rate husbands. Throughout human history men have fulfilled their ambitions through their daughters’ looks. In societies with few other opportunities for social mobility, a great beauty could always marry above her station.27 Of course, women inherit their looks from their fathers as well as their mothers, so a woman should also prefer regular features in a man – and mostly women do.

All that the Fisher effect requires is for men to show a tendency to prefer the average face and runaway selection will take over: any man who deviates from the average preference has fewer or poorer grandchildren because his daughters are considered less beautiful than the average. It is a cruel, despotic fashion, one that enforces its pitiless logic at the expense of many a brilliant, kind and accomplished woman who happens to be plain, and one that has ironically been made worse by the demographic transition to prescribed monogamy. In medieval Europe, or ancient Rome, powerful men took all the beauties into their harems, leaving a general shortage of women for the other men, so an ugly woman stood a better chance of eventually finding some man desperate enough to marry her. That may not sound very just, but justice is rarely the consequence of sexual selection.

Personalities

So much for what attracts men in women. What draws women to certain men? Male handsomeness is affected by the same trinity as female beauty – face, youth and figure. But, in study after study, women consistently agree that these factors matter less than personality and status. Men consistently place physical features above personality and status when considering women; women do not when considering men.28

The single exception is height. Tall men are universally considered more attractive by women than short men. In the world of dating agencies, the principle that a man must be taller than his date is so universal that it has been called ‘the cardinal principle of date selection’. Out of seven hundred and twenty applications by couples for bank accounts, only one was from a couple in which the woman was taller than the man: yet couples chosen at random from the population would show scores of such cases. People mate ‘assortatively’ for height. Men seek shorter wives and women seek taller husbands. This cannot only be due to the men. When shown drawings of men and women together and asked to write stories to go with them, even women who stated adamantly that the size of a man made no difference to them wrote stories about anxious or weak men more often when the man depicted was shorter than the woman. The laudatory metaphor ‘He’s a big man’ is found in many cultures. It has been calculated that every inch is worth $600 a year in salary in modern America.29

Bruce Ellis has summarized the evidence that personality is critical in men. In a monogamous society a woman is often choosing a mate long before he has had a chance to become a ‘chief’ and she must look for clues to his future potential rather than rely only on his past achievements. Poise, self-assurance, optimism, efficiency, perseverence, courage, decisiveness, intelligence, ambition – these are the things that cause men to rise to the tops of their professions and, not coincidentally, these are things women find attractive. They are clues to future status. In one test of this truism, three scientists told their subjects stories about two different people of undefined gender taking part in a tennis match and doing equally well. One was