Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love (13 page)

A man’s short-term list is the one in action in clubs, pubs, bars, the beach, gyms, and everywhere he goes. It’s mainly a physical list because as brain scans show, men are largely visual and a woman’s face and body are what they see first. This short-term list is what many women respond to most of the time. Like it or not, however, it’s what men look for in a one-night stand or short-term relationship, not in a long-term one. The woman who constantly dresses like a cheap slut or a hooker is responding to this list. Miniskirts, low-cut blouses, heavy makeup, and raunchy behavior are all responses to a man’s short-term list. This is why women who present themselves this way spend a lot of time in short-term relationships with men. To attract men for a long-term relationship, a woman needs to study his long-term list and to dress and behave according to it, while at the same time knowing when to act on his short-term list to keep his immediate attention.

The personal columns where people seek partners clearly highlight the difference in preferences between men and women. Men advertise three to four times more often than women do for a physically pleasing, attractive partner, while women seek resources as their main goal—that is, a man who at least has a job, a car, and a place to live.

Psychologist Mark Mason at Nene College, Northampton, England, researched 2,200 personal ads to find out what is asked for the most and what ads are the most effective in getting responses. The formula he found was to talk 70% about yourself and 30% about what you want.

Here is an ad that has been shown to work effectively for men who advertise themselves as available:

It works because it offers women readers what they want—resources—and asks for what he wants—youth and health, which equals reproductive value.

Contrast this ad with a woman’s typical requirements, also from the personal columns and one that works very well:

In this ad, she offers physical assets and mothering in return for resources.

Any discussion of what men and women really want inevitably draws howls of protest from some people and raises stories about someone they know who advertised differently from this but still managed to do well. Keep in mind we are talking in this book about the basic principles that are effective most of the time for most people, not about minorities or exceptions.

A cross-generational mating study over a fifty-year period starting in 1940 measured men’s and women’s criteria for a mate. In each measured ten-year interval men saw attractiveness in a woman as very important, whereas women saw it as desirable in a mate but not very important. By 1990, both men and women were attaching around 50% more importance to physical attractiveness, and this rose to 65% more for men by 2008 than the same group that was surveyed in 1940. This is because of greater globalization and because a wider availability
of possible mates was available at the end of the twentieth century, and the media worldwide became obsessed with showing perfect men and women. It also highlights that the importance we place on attractiveness is not permanently set in our genes but can change to match our circumstances. Unfortunately, however, we are more demanding of perfection than our forebears.

The study also shows that it is a specieswide phenomenon for men and not geographically limited. Latvian men want attractiveness; so do Greek men and Icelandic men, Chinese, Moroccan, Inuit, and Zulu men. Men’s preferences for physically attractive mates has been operating for hundreds of thousands of years, and these male preferences are completely responsible for the emergence of the multi-billion-dollar plastic surgery and cosmetics industries. These industries understand what signals trigger hormone activity in a male brain, and so their products and services promise to deliver these trigger signals to women for attracting men.

Men also seek attractiveness in a woman because they want a visible display of their ability to control resources. A good-looking woman on a man’s arm is seen as testament to his ability to get resources. Herein lies the motivation behind “the trophy wife.” An attractive female partner can be classified along with expensive art, fast cars, gold watches, and fancy titles and thus makes a man more attractive to other potential females. Dr. Buss’s research found that regardless of culture,
having an unattractive partner decreases a man’s social status, but the opposite situation has little to no impact on a woman’s status, even if he looks like Mike Tyson on a bad day. If he has money, power, and resources, he’s still seen as a great catch even if he is shaped like an apple and looks as if a bus backed over his face.

Attractive means that a woman has taken time and care to give her assets their best presentation and to minimize her shortcomings. An attractive woman presents herself well at all times, and remember, men are first stimulated by what they see, not by what is real. A woman’s physical attractiveness is directly related to her state of health, which is why men have always placed a premium on a woman’s appearance. When an older woman dresses up and wears full makeup, she can be described as attractive but is simply re-creating the appearance and signals of a younger, childbearing woman. Most women understand this, and the industries involved in cosmetics, weight loss, clothing, and deportment carry the promise of living up to these male criteria.

Psychologist Paul Rozin conducted an experiment in which he asked men and women for their perceptions of the ideal female figure. He showed pictures of female bodies ranging from extremely thin to extremely heavy. Without exception, the women chose the thinner bodies as the most attractive and “the ones I would personally like to look like.” To the men, however, the women with the average body shape were the most preferable in terms of attractiveness. This highlights how modern women wrongly believe that men desire women with thinner bodies. Overall, men prefer average- to above-average-size women with an hourglass shape. We’ll look at why this is so later on.

Interestingly, Professor Donald Symons from the Department of Anthropology at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, was one of the first to report how, in a society where food is abundant, such as the United States, men are attracted to thinner women, but in societies where food is scarce, men are attracted to plump women. He found that the mental state connected with food was most important, not the food itself.

To get men’s attention, the women of some tribes in the Amazon and Africa go bare-breasted and wear a G-string type of belt that runs between their vulva lips and buttocks. Women of the civilized world would be shocked by this approach, but in reality it is little different in its effect from what “civilized” women do to attract their men. They wear makeup to imply that their skin is flawless and healthy, mascara to make their eyes look bigger, lipstick to imitate blood flow in the lips; they dye their hair blonde to fake youth and higher estrogen levels, undergo cosmetic surgery to make their faces appear younger and babylike, and wear push-up bras, miniskirts, nylon stockings, and high heels and Botox their faces—all sales tools designed to appeal to men’s hardwired preferences for youth and health. As we said, this also explains why men fall more quickly in love than women—visual signals are instant.

We are not saying to avoid doing these things; we are simply explaining
why
we do them.

Animals do not have a concept of beauty. No dog, cat, or elephant has ever been amazed at the beauty of a sunset, a Monet, or a waterfall. There are no ugly monkeys, cats, or horses. In the animal world, what is attractive and beautiful in a female operates on a simple level—if she’s in heat, she’s a stunner.

How we humans measure the beauty in everything around us, however, has been handed down from our ancestors. We find a painting or picture attractive when it imitates the things from the world in which our ancestors evolved—water, animals, weather, conflict, and refuge.

Men also evaluate a woman’s physical beauty to ascertain clues as to her reproductive capacity. These clues include smooth skin, healthy shiny hair, good muscle tone, clear eyes, and high energy levels. These are all the things that women’s cosmetics, shampoos, conditioners, creams, and facial scrubs promise to deliver. These characteristics indicate youth and health, which equal her reproductive value. From an evolutionary standpoint, youthful, healthy women could produce more offspring, which gave a man a greater chance of his genetic line surviving. Consequently, women who display a high level of cleanliness are universally considered more attractive, whereas women who appear dirty are universally considered unattractive because filthiness is directly linked to disease and therefore a reduced chance of child survival.

Professor Randy Thornhill, an evolutionary biologist at the University of New Mexico, conducted an experiment in which he asked men and women to rate the attractiveness of pictures of women’s faces. The older women’s faces were rated less attractive by both sexes, with male critics giving significantly lower ratings than female critics. This shows how women also
have an instinctive understanding of how this principle works and explains why face-lifts are so popular.

The world has become a huge beauty contest between almost all women and across virtually every culture. More money is now being spent on women’s appearance than at any time in human history. The focus of women’s magazine covers is female beauty 94% of the time, as opposed to only 18% during the 1940s, when the main focus was on clothing, food and practical home ideas. The collective revenue in the United States generated by the cosmetic surgery, facial cosmetics, and dieting industries now exceeds $100 billion a year. The cosmetic industry did not invent images of women whom men desire; it simply exploited them as much as possible. Feminists argue that women who submit to the beauty industry are unsuspecting fools who are merely pandering to the things men want or are being brainwashed by the media. The reality is, however, that the cosmetics industry and cosmetic surgery evolved purely as a result of women’s competitive urge to attract men. Women instinctively know that doing these things will increase the odds of getting what they want. The worrying problem in all this is that the media promote a level of beauty that is unattainable for most women. The effect of this lowers the self-image of millions of women and ignores the other main factors that men are looking for in a long-term partner, such as personality, humor, and intelligence.

In 2003, Judith Langlois and her colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin proved with their research how the human response to attractive faces is inborn and not learned through culture or upbringing, as was previously thought. She showed pictures of people with varying degrees of attractiveness to
babies aged eight to twelve weeks and a second group aged six to eight months and found that both groups spent more time gazing at the attractive faces and less at the unattractive faces. In a second experiment, she had one-year-olds play with dolls with a range of attractive to ugly faces and found that the babies played longer with the more attractive dolls and smiled more often at them.

Interestingly cross-cultural studies have also found that there is a universal formula for beauty—that is, virtually everyone in the world agrees on what is a beautiful face and what is not. In
Why Men Lie & Women Cry
we reported that the more a woman’s face is symmetrical—meaning one side matches the other—the more attractive it is judged to be. As people age, their faces become less symmetrical, so younger faces are more attractive.

We have mentioned this ratio several times because of its significance to men. Men are hardwired to seek out this ratio—known as the “hourglass” figure—and women who have it have been shown to be the most fertile and have the highest chance of conception. This ratio is used in almost every advertisement featuring women selling products to men. This ratio attracts men’s attention even when a woman is overweight. It’s the 70% ratio that counts, not the actual weight. This is because a 70% hips-to-waist ratio signals higher fertility in a woman, and higher body-fat content—particularly stored on the butt and thighs—is a signal of a woman’s ability to breast-feed an infant.