CNN: Men want hot women, study confirms

Men want hot women, study confirms
Story Highlights
Dating study: Men base their decisions mostly on physical attractiveness
Men are much less choosy than women
Women are aware of the importance of their own attractiveness to men
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Science is confirming what most women know: When given the choice for a mate, men go for good looks.

And guys won't be surprised to learn that women are much choosier about partners than they are.

"Just because people say they're looking for a particular set of characteristics in a mate, someone like themselves, doesn't mean that is what they'll end up choosing," Peter M. Todd, of the cognitive science program at Indiana University, Bloomington, said in a telephone interview. "I mean, I was 'looking' for someone like myself, only hot and a woman, but I got my wife."

Researchers led by Todd report that in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that their study found humans were similar to most other mammals, "following Darwin's principle of choosy females and competitive males, even if humans say something different."

Their study involved 26 men and 20 women in Munich, Germany. That's right! Germany. Where there is absolutely no historical basis for people judging other people on unquantfiables such as body shape, eye color, hair color, and breast size.

Participants ranged in age from 26 to their early 40s and took part in "speed dating," short meetings of three to seven minutes in which people chat, have oral sex, then quickly move onto another partner. Afterward, participants check off the people they'd like to meet again, and dates can be arranged between pairs who select one another. Those who don't get chosen? Well, they're ugly.

Speed dating let researchers look at a lot of mate choices in a short time, Todd said, and was, in their opinion, a lot faster than looking at actual couples who like, know each other.

In the study, participants were asked before the session to fill out a questionnaire about what they were looking for in a mate, listing such categories as wealth and status, family commitment, physical appearance, cock size, healthiness and attractiveness.

After the session, the researchers compared what the participants said they were looking for with the people they actually chose to ask for another "date."

Men's choices did not reflect their stated preferences, the researchers concluded. Instead, men appeared to base their decisions mostly on the women's physical attractiveness.

The men also appeared to be much less choosy. Men tended to select nearly every woman above a certain minimum attractiveness threshold, Todd said.

Women's actual choices, like men's, did not reflect their stated preferences, but they made more discriminating choices, the researchers found.

The scientists plan to move on to trying to figure out what exactly men look for in porno, by conducting a "study" of them at their computer terminals while their wives are in the next room, their mothers are calling their cell phones, and the family cat is hurling at their feet. They hope this study to be just as fruitful in figuring out "what men what" as the speed dating one was.

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