Saw that someone in the house recorded a discovery channel two-hour documentary entitled "Science of Sexual Appeal" and immediately went "time for notes!"
Here's part one of them.... more as I continue watching....
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Science of Sexual Appeal
Sex Appeal is not a matter of taste, it's a biological imperative. Evolution is driving how we pick partners.
We're hard-wired to read genetic clues in a potential mate's face, bod shape, sway, scent and voice. Women have a more complex sexual agenda than men.
"So we use to think that mate preferences were something completely arbitrary, that beauty was in the eye of the beholder. In recent years, the evidence is suggesting that that's probably not the case. There are lots of things that are going on on-consiously that we have no control over. Beauty is not arbitrary, what's handsome is not arbitrary. All around the world, women find certain things attractive and other things less attractive."
We al operate according to a genetic playbook. It tells us to couple with the hottest partner we can snag, and makes us love being in love. Monogamy, even cheating, turn out to be programmed behavior. Everything is directed at passing on the best genes to our offspring. And to giving those offspring the bet hot at survival.
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FACE
Man to Woman
Once look can stir a passion that lasts a lifetime.
"I thought I was a little out of my league... probably. And that had a lot to do with her face. I mean, she's a beautiful girl. She's got amazing lips and a perfect nose. The eyes, the shape and the color of them is pretty much ideal for me."
"You have the highest cheek bones I have ever seen on a female and I was like "Is that real?""
"The first thing I noticed were her eyes and I thought she had really cute ears. And then I kinda progressed from there downward."
Woman to Man
"He had on really thick coke bottle glasses, but I could see through that that he had the most beautiful face and smile and big huge brown eyes and I just fell in love with his whole little face."
THE GOLDEN RATIO
Across the centuries, certain faces have achieved immortality for their lure and sexiness. For just as long, scientists and philosophers have tried to figure out just what makes a face drop-dead gorgeous. The greeks believe the secret lay in a mathematical formula. Plato called it "The Golden Ratio: An Equation For Perfect"...
Take a space and divide it into two parts. "The Golden Ratio" is the when the relative size of the small part to the big part is the same ratio as the big part to the whole. It's about two thirds of the way across.
It turns out, you can find The Golden Ratio in the structure of many living things including human beings. Many anatomical proportions in the hands (Tip of fingers to the top of the palm to the wrist), feet (Tip of the toes to the bump on top of the foot to the back of the foot), arms (Wrist to elbow to shoulder), torso (Neck to waist to groin, Neck to knees to bottom of feet), and face (Bridge of nose to side of eye to side of face, Side of eye to front of ear to back of ear, Bridge of nose to eye to side of ear, Chin to nostrils to eyes, Bottom of chin to top of chin to nostrils, Nostril to eyes to top of head) come close to matching this mathematical balance.
(As seen in "Eyes to mouth to base of chin", "Eye to front of ear to back of ear", "Middle of the nose to the bridge between eyes to the top of the forehead", "Mouth to the eyes to the top of the highest hair", etc.)
Kendra Schmid, a statistician at the University of Nebraska, uses The Golden Ratio to rate a faces sex appeal.
Most of us seem to drawn to members of the opposite sex who got a strong dose of sex hormones during puberty. These faces indicate god health and fertility.
"We say someone looks attractive, but what we're actually saying is that that person probably as good genes, that that person is probably reproductively healthy. If I pair up with that individual and we have children, those children will do quite well."
(As soon as we spot a potential mate, we immediately subconsciously run through a list of reasons why we find that person attractive based on specific details in looks.)
SYMMETRY
Imagine you could split your face in two. Superimpose one side to the other. Your eyes would line up evenly, your smile would be straight, and your nose, cheeks, and forehead would be perfectly balanced. The symmetry of our faces is determined by events that took place before we were even born. The human fetus is designed to grow in two equal parts, but it doesn't always happen that way. Tiny genetic abnormalities, poor nutrition, even mild infections can slightly alter our facial design leaving a permanent, if subtle, record.
8/10 men and women prefer a symmetrical face. They're subconsciously responding to fundamental clues about physical and genetic health. Clues planted in the womb.
Faces can undergo subtle changes from one day to the next. Women get more attractive as they're ovulating (Face clears up of pores and imperfections to become clean and angelic).
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BODY
An ideal woman has a thin waist, curvaceous hips, long and slender legs. For a man, it's broad shoulders, strong pectoral muscles, and washboard abs. But are these the features we al find attractive?
Man to woman:
"Sometimes she'll give me a little flash and that's.... yeah I like that."
Woman to man:
"He's proportional. He has nice thighs too. He doesn't have that chicken leg syndrome where they're really big up top and these skinny, tiny legs. He has a great body."
Man to woman:
"The first date we went on, she had on this white mini skirt. The waist was very thin and then all of the sudden, POW! Booty just out the window."
"She had a really nice body. She was built. Really built. That's was really got me and I didn't go much further than that."
Carey Johnson is trying to work out which body shape are guaranteed to drive us wild. With an eyes tracker, a dot shows where the eyes are focusing. The longer they linger on one spot, the bigger the dot grows.
"He spends a lot of time looking at the person's face. He's looking at her shoulders, up and down her body. He does look at the woman's breasts, that's not surprising at all."
A woman's breasts clearly signal that she's past puberty and is probably able to reproduce so it's no surprise they draw the eye. But they're not the only targets of a man's attention.
"If you're looking at a real person walking down the street, there are any number of things that can distract your attention away from the things that we are interested in as scientists. The person might be wearing a very low cut dress and draw your attention to that region of the body. The person could be wearing jewelry. And all of those things muddy our ability to interpret what might be governing your judgements of attractiveness."
To focus purely on body shape, she designed a series of grey mannequins with no faces, no breasts, no jewelry. All alike except in their body proportions. Then she asked subjects to decide whether the shapes were male or female. So soon noticed a pattern: No matter what shape the body was, viewers looked most often at the hips and the waist. All humans, she discovered, use the hips and the waist as an indicator of a person's gender. The reason is simple: The sex hormones which surge through us at puberty dramatically reshape a woman's waist from straight to more of an hourglass. Researchers have put a number on what appears to be the sexiest female body shape. her waist should be seven tenths as wide as her hips. Artwork across the ages shows that this ratio, very similar to The Golden Ratio, seems to be the ideal throughout human history.
"When we began this work, the dominant theory in why bodies were attractive focused on one cue and that is how curvaceous the body is. And it was theorized that it was because that particular body shape signified health or fertility. The most attractive women were those women that were healthy and that were able to bare children."
But Carey Johnson's research also uncovered what at first seemed like a serious contradiction to this theory. Although me found the fertile ratio of seven tenths attractive, they found six tenths and five tenths eve more attractive. At five tenths, the woman's waist would be so narrow, she'd be unable to bare children.
"If it were the case that the body's shape is an important cue to health and fertility, then you might expect that judgements of attractiveness would be less for extreme bodies that don't actually exist in nature. In fact, we find the exact opposite: The most attractive bodies in our stimuli are the most extreme. They have the narrowest waist relative to the hips. So narrow that it doesn't exist in nature and yet our observers say "That's attractive"."
This seems to fly in the face of all the links scientists have found between sex appeal and heath and fertility, but actually, it doesn't. Because the missing pieces that our brains judge how a body looks as it moves...
BODY MOVEMENT
..."In the 1970s, some of the first studies of human body motion were conducted by Joe Hanson who applied reflective material to the body's major joints. Essentially ping pong balls or reflective tape and he filmed people walking or doing jumping jacks. Performing many activities. When these videos were played back to observers, all you can see is those points of light moving and the question was: Can people even tell that this is a human. The answer was unequivocal: Yes. And this shows just ho important the body is and specifically body motion for social judgements."
So Carey programmed a series of walks in her bodies, gave them a variety of waist sizes, and asked viewers to rate which combination was the sexiest.
"What we found when we looked at our participant's judgements is the bodies with kind of straight torso walking with a masculine shoulder swagger were perceived to e attractive and the bodies with an hourglass shape when walking with a lot of hip swagger were also judged to be attractive. Other combinations were not so attractive."
She seems to have uncovered a mental shortcut for reading cue for masculinity or femininity. Or, in other words, were lazy. "Don't make me think too hard. Is this body worth mating with or not?"
"What we think is going on is not really anything about health or fertility, but rather the combination of cues. This is an easy combination to understand. This is a masculine man. It's very easy for the person to process and therefore it's very attractive. On the flip-side, when you have a very feminine woman's body shape, it's very easy to process and therefore it's more attractive to our observers."
And what's true for the observer also seems to hold true for the observed. Carey asked flesh and blood subject to walk on a treadmill while she filmed them. She gave half of her subjects one explanation of what she was testing-
"What we're gonna have you do today is find a comfortable walking speed on the treadmill and then we'll analyze your walk motion for its efficiency using computer algorithm."
-And then the other half, another.
"...then we'll video record your walking and show it to other people who will evaluate your sexual attractiveness."
Carey quickly noticed that the people who thought they were being rated for sexiness tended to exaggerate their movements trying to look especially masculine or feminine.
"When we look at a woman, we expect her hips to be moving laterally a little bit more from side to side. When we're talking about a man's walk motion and a man's walk motion, we're expecting his shoulders to swagger a little. As well, the men might puff out their arms a little bit more to increase the visible size of their body."
(Women: Butt doesn't move when NOT being judged for sexiness, DOES move from side to side when judged for sexiness.
Man: Shoulders don't move around very much at all when NOT being judged for sexiness, but they DO swagger from side to side when they are.)
We appear to have one mental mechanism that looks for people with sexy walks and another that encourages us to walk sexily when we know we're being watched. The same urges governed the mating habits of the first humans. And a regular walk to betray genetic weaknesses and a limited life expectancy. A sexy strut broadcasts that you are healthy and likely to live long enough to raise healthy children.
"What evolution is about, and we are evolved organisms, is getting new genes into the next generation. And so we are extremely attentive to cues of how heathy this person is, how good are their genes. We have mechanisms that are designed to detect the subtle characteristics in other people."
Our brains work quickly to size up faces and bodies for attractiveness, secretly ranking potential partners, always on the hunt for the healthiest possible genes. But not all of us will be able to snag a perfect ten. We do the best we can.
Woman to man:
"When my friend and I looked around and I saw Ritz, I just stopped because his physique... he was tall like how I like. He had these nice, heavy eye brows, nice head of hair and... he just stood out. I didn't have to look to the rest of the room, I didn't care what was on the other side of the room."
"He's got that sort of like puppy dog thing going for him. The big brown eyes and... I don't know, he's got a nice smile."
Man to woman:
"The way she walks, the way she talks, the way she sorta has a little devilish smile makes you feel like a very very small boy in a room full of men."
"As I was turning around, he was right there in my face looking me up and down saying "Hi, my name's Donny"."
How we decide when to pair up and with whom is a riddle that evolutionary psychologist Douglas Kenrick has tried to solve for decades.
"If we all just went for good genes, everyone would be unhappy if the guys didn't end up with Jennifer Lopez or some other fashion model, they would just stop then and the women would stop if they couldn't get Brad Pitt or some extremely handsome guy. In real life, people have to match up with one another."
Each person found a partner within a point or so of themselves.
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VOICE
"The men who had the most number of children also had the lowest pitch voices."
"We think the significance of a person's voice in terms of its sound may be related to the fact that during most of human evolutionary history, when the sun went down, it was light out and therefore, at night, sound was one of the principle domains in which critical kinds of interpersonal interactions occurred."
At the forefront of these nocturnal interactions were seduction and sex. When a woman and a man out on a first date make small talk, a crucial antennae for sex appeal is hard at work. That antennae isn't focused on what they're saying, but on how they're saying it.
"Oh my god, his voice is awesomely sexy. now, his voice can totally take your pants off. That's for sure."
"Her voice is... uhh... it's that perfectly rich mixture of femininity and clarity."
"I like a sweet voice. You know, she has a sweet voice."
"You definitely wanna feel like you're the girl and if a guy talks maybe softer or sweeter than you, you may sort of wonder about that."
Dr. David Feinburg had ben trying to discover what makes a voice attractive.
"There's a lot that we can tell from someone voice just from the first time we listen to them. We can sorta tell how old somebody is from the sound of their voice, we can tell what sort of emotional state they're in, but one of the more interesting things that we've been looking at in our research is whether you can tell how attractive somebody is from their voice."
Nearly across the board, men chose women with higher pitched voices.
"I found the high pitched voices better, they sounded more feminine."
"It really sounded like someone who was younger, someone close to my age and probably more fit."
"I thought it was healthier and younger and sexier."
"When we think about women's voices, the first thing we might think is "Men are really liking these soft and low voices. But what our research shows is the opposite. One of the main reasons why is that younger women have higher pitched voices and women with higher estrogen levels also have these higher pitched voices."
And it will probably come as no surprise that women chose men with deeper, more masculine voices.
"It just sounds better when they're deeper."
"I definitely find a deep voice more attractive for a man."
"The deeper voice just seems more like they might be stronger or bigger... maybe than the higher pitched voice."
"The pitch of a man's voice is really related to how much testosterone the man had at puberty. So men with a lot of testosterone at puberty grow these really low voices and men with not so much testosterone at puberty have these higher pitched voices. So when women listen to these voices, they may not know that they're picking up on these testosterone cues, but their behavior is acting as if they sort of unconsciously know what's going on here."
What's going on is that women is that women are reacting to clues that reveal much more than the shape of a man's vocal cords.Because testosterone levels in a pubescent boy don't just create a sexy voice, they build a sexy face and usually a sexy body too. Just as in women, high estrogen leads to a more attractive face, waist, more attractive breasts, as well as a higher voice. And there's a fascinating twist to this tale: As women's faces become more appealing during ovulation, so, it turns out, do their voices.
