What men find most attractive about women

Masterfile

If recent research is reliable, then it seems that gender equality brings out the best in men when it comes to mate selection. As for women, well, the more parity we enjoy the more shallow our choices remain concerning the men we prefer and subsequently target.

According to an article in The Daily Mail, an international study conducted by researchers at York University in the U.K. has managed to upend the conventional notion that evolution has imprinted certain hard and inflexible rules of mate selection in the human brain.

We — meaning the kind of people who devote a lifetime to studying such things — once thought, for example, that men were destined to choose women with childbearing hips over their more graphically constructed counterparts since voluptuousness signaled fertility to the primitive brain. 

Now, it would seem that circumstance and environmental elements, and not just biology, have a significant role to play in how we think about and respond to members of the opposite sex.

Twelve thousand participants drawn from more than 30 countries were quizzed about what attracted them to a potential mate. The results of the survey were measured against the respondents’ countries of origin and their records of gender equality. In less equal societies, unsurprisingly, men still preferred the traditional markers of curves and cooking as a baseline of attraction. The more heartening news is that men from countries in which the sexes share parity appear to value brains over beauty when taking stock of potential female companions — or so they say, anyway.

Not that we women have room to point fingers.

Our selection process, though slightly adaptive, remains consistently superficial. Money is the big attractant in more traditional countries, supplanted by how he looks in more socially advanced societies where the sexes are considered equal.

So, it appears that girls who wear glasses can wear them proudly — they may even be the ultimate aphrodisiac. As for men, if you want to catch her eye, pay less attention to your stock portfolio and take stock instead of how you look shirtless.

What do you find most attractive in a partner?