A lot of women went nuts over this mugshot - 

and he's an effing criminal for crying out loud.

I find these "studies" interesting - what a woman finds attractive looking at pictures has little (if anything) to do with what kind of man they would actually go out with (or more). Consistently, studies show that women who are ovulating prefer more traditionally masculine looking men (from Discover News, Aug. 18, 2010):

Starting in the 1990s, studies began to show that in the days before ovulation women start to become more attracted to men who have deeper voices and more chiseled, masculine and symmetrical faces. According to some studies, that may be because men who look like George Clooney are more likely to have dominant social roles, better genes and stronger immune systems.

Woman in relationships experience an even greater increase in their desire for highly masculine men during ovulation - and ovulating women in relationships are also more likely to cheat on their partners than non-ovulating women.

Unless this variable was controlled for in the study below (from Mother Nature Network), it is meaningless (even if it makes us less masculine looking guys feel better).

The masculinity myth: Here's what women really want

(Hint: It's not what Hollywood has been telling you.)

Mon, Nov 03, 2014
Jenn Savedge, Author of parenting books blogs about raising children and health issues.

In theory, masculinity signifies health and strength — but that's not the whole story. (Photo: Pressmaster/Shutterstock)

If old stereotypes are to believed, women like their men oozing with masculinity. But a new study flips that thinking on its head, revealing that what women really want in a man might be far from this tired depiction of masculinity.

Even though it had never been proven, the stereotype of women liking masculine men has been around for so long that it was considered true by default. Experts theorized that masculinity signified health and strength, thus it was more appealing to potential mates. But a recent study conducted by British researchers at Brunel University in London has revealed that the appeal of more masculine men only holds for women from Westernized, urban communities. Throughout the rest of the world, women prefer feminine-looking men to their more masculine counterparts.

For starters, the team attempted to define "masculinity" in terms of appearance. They compiled data using computer simulations to merge photos of men’s and women’s faces into composite, “average” faces of five different ethnic backgrounds. They edited the photos of the men to make some more "masculine," and others more "feminine." To do this, they calculated the differences between the male and female faces. To make a photo more masculine, they increased these differences. Conversely, to make an image more feminine, they minimized the differences.

Then they showed the images to both urban and rural residents of 12 countries and from different ethnic groups. Participants were shown three sets of photos from models of five different ethnic groups. They asked each of the 962 subjects which of the faces they found most attractive. In urban areas, they got the response they expected. Women consistently found the men with the most masculine traits to be most attractive. But the responses of the remaining women shocked the researchers, as they seemed to prefer men with more neutral or even feminine-looking faces.

Researchers theorized that maybe city-dwellers have developed the masculinity preference as a means to make a snap judgment about a man's health without any other background information.

Either way, the study flies in the face of the age-old notion that women prefer manly men, or that the roots of this so-called preference could be found throughout history.

More likely, the masculinity myth is just another urban legend.


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Was President Obama's "Best-Looking Attorney General" Comment Sexist?

I pay very little attention to most political news, so I missed President Obama's "best-looking attorney general" comment (on Thursday, April 4) in reference to California Attorney General Kamala Harris. However, one of my female clients brought it up in her session, so I looked into it a little bit.

Interestingly, some conservatives (women) are defending Obama while others are suggesting he “crossed the line” (woman) and needs “gender-sensitivity training” (man).

“She’s brilliant and she’s dedicated, she’s tough, and she is exactly what you’d want in anybody who is administering the law, and making sure that everybody is getting a fair shake,” Obama said at a Democratic National Committee event in California Thursday, adding “She also happens to be, by far, the best looking attorney general.”

Obama had the chattering class buzzing not long after he made the remarks, with some arguing he “crossed the line” and needed “gender-sensitivity training.”

And he found defenders in an unlikely place: Fox News. On Friday’s Fox & Friends Gretchen Carlson said “She’s pretty! So what?” Later conservative radio host Monica Crowley defended the president as well. “What he said was sincere, it was honest, it was very sweet,” she said.

I can see why some people might be bothered by this comment, although I have no sense that Obama is sexist in any way. He praised her skills as a lawyer and public servant first and foremost, and then offered, as an aside, the comment on her attractiveness.

It seems clear that is was the wrong place and time to make such a comment, but it does not appear particularly harmful or in any way belittling of her skills and talents. It feels like political correctness to demand he attend gender-sensitivity training.

Writing at The Atlantic, Garance Franke-Ruta offers a different perspective - the gaffe in this comment is in mixing the worlds of power and the worlds of beauty, which tend to be mutually exclusive.

Why Obama's 'Best-Looking Attorney General' Comment Was a Gaffe

The system of beauty, the system of power, and Kamala Harris

GARANCE FRANKE-RUTA

APR 5 2013,

Eric Risberg/AP Images

President Obama's biggest gaffe yesterday when speaking of California Attorney General Kamala Harris was not in flirtatiously complimenting her as "the best-looking attorney general," but in introducing an observation from the system of beauty into a forum that was about the system of power.

What's that, you say? Irin Carmon does a great job in Salon in laying out the bounds of propriety for when it's appropriate to talk about a woman's looks as a general matter. But I've long felt we lack a solid theoretical underpinning for easily discussing these issues, and why precisely it is that admiring and complimenting women for the beauty they work so hard to maintain--and let's be clear, nobody looks like Harris at her age (48) without effort and without herself valuing beauty and fitness, which are achievements as much or more than naturally occurring properties--can sometimes be inappropriate.

It seems to me--and I touched on this a bit a 2009 Slate piece--that a simple distinction between the two worlds in which women today operate can help us think about this: They are the system of beauty, and the system of power.

The system of beauty is what preceded women's entry into the paid workforce in a bid to achieve economic equality and professional fulfillment. It operates everywhere in the world, according to regionally variable standards, but goes a little something like this: Women are a natural resource, a form of wealth that men can acquire. Beauty and, to a lesser extent, fertility, are the coinage in this system of value. In contemporary America, women can choose the extent to which they wish to engage with this system of power, but there's no question that it remains extant, and that in many ways the most economically successful women are those who use it best to their advantage--actresses, models, musicians, and the like. Beauty is a system of power, deeply rooted, preceding all others, richly rewarded. We pay homage to it, still, and young women as they face the world can make a choice to live a life--even a career--within it, just as they can choose to go to law or medical school or contend in any other way for standing and earning capacity in the world.

That is, they can enter the system of power. Power as the acquisition of status, capital, position, knowledge, property. And for a reason other than the exploitation of the resource of the physical self. The fight of feminism was the fight of women for entry into the system of power from the system of beauty. The fight in the workplace for women very often is to create a space for themselves within the system of power while continuing to operate within the system of beauty in their private lives. And the struggle of feminism has often been to acknowledge that the system of beauty is irrevocable and cannot be expunged by protest or discourse or time. To be an educated professional woman in contemporary America is to know that you operate--and often, must operate--within both systems. It's why beautiful and extremely capable women are often valued above their less glamorous or less fit peers--they are triumphs in two systems of value, double-threats.

Harris, like Michelle Obama, is a triumph in the system of beauty as well as the system of power. But President Obama's remark mistook the setting. Just as it's perfectly appropriate to tell a colleague she looks gorgeous when she's dressed to the nines for some black tie work event, it would be inappropriate to refer to her as "gorgeous over there" during a work meeting. Doing so takes her out of the system of power and puts her into the system of beauty in a setting in which power is the value that's brought her to the table. And that, dear readers, is a gaffe.

Omnivore - Gendering Everything

From Bookforum's Omnivore blog, a great collection of links on gender studies, masculinity, tough guys, and how being attractive makes men funnier (and here I thought being funny might be make me more attractive).


Gendering everything

MAR 28 2013 

9:00AM

• Katharine K. Baker (IIT): Sex and Equality. 
• Emma Poulton (Durham): “If You Had Balls, You'd Be One of Us!” Doing Gendered Research: Methodological Reflections on Being a Female Academic Researcher in the Hyper-Masculine Subculture of “Football Hooliganism”. 
• Christian Williams on the trouble with tough guys. 
• Erika Bachiochi on why U.N. feminists should want to partner with the Holy See. 
• It’s well-established being funny makes men more attractive — now a new paper reports that being attractive makes men funnier. 
• Sympathy for the stay-at-home mom: Judith Shulevitz on an argument about work, life, and the modern calendar. 
• The final feminist frontier: Why men still don't do their share of the dirty work. 
• The retro wife: Lisa Miller on feminists who say they’re having it all — by choosing to stay home. 
• Donald N.S. Unger on how men can't have it all either. 
• Yes, we’re still gendering everything.

Randy Astaiza - A Man With 12 Percent Body Fat Is The Best Mate, Evolutionarily

Strangely, this article came from Business Insider Magazine - not where one usually goes for evolutionary psychology research. Be that as it may, the researchers found that body fat was linked to attractiveness, high testosterone levels, and a stronger immune system.

A Man With 12 Percent Body Fat Is The Best Mate, Evolutionarily
Randy Astaiza | Nov. 27, 2012

When a guy catches your eye, what draws your attention?

Some people may say nice eyes get them going, while others say a manly, chiseled jaw or big strong arms. Evolutionarily, though, a man's body fat, not masculine features, is a better indicator of how attractive of a mate he would be, a new study suggests.

With any luck, these traits of an "optimal" mate would be genetically encoded and would be passed on to the man's offspring — so a female wants to choose a man with good genes and a healthy immune system. We just need to know how to figure out if a potential mate has these traits.

Masculine looking males were believed to be a good indicator of good mate choice because their looks were thought to indicate better genes and a stronger immune system, one that could take on the negative effects of high testosterone levels (which make men more prone to infection).

A new study, published today Nov 27 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, switches that on its head. The researchers found that a man's waist size is more important than how masculine his face is, when it comes to attractiveness and good immune systems.

Twenty-nine women in the fertile stage of their menstrual cycle (meaning they were more receptive to sexual cues, and more responsive to masculinity) rated pictures of 69 young white males of all body sizes by their attractiveness, masculinity, and body fat.

They then took these rating and compared them to how well the men's immune system responded to a Hepatitis B vaccine. They also tested circulating testosterone levels in the participants.

The results showed that a man's masculinity rating didn't mean he was more attractive, and also didn't mean that his immune system worked better. How masculine a man was also wasn't an indicator of how much testosterone he had either.

On the other hand, body fat was linked to attractiveness, high testosterone levels, and a stronger immune system. Too much fat was bad too, though: Body fat attractiveness had a bell-shaped curve. The most attractive men had 12 percent body fat.

When he was above normal body fat — obese or overweight — the immune system was negatively impacted.

From their data, the researchers made a composite image of the bottom eight men with the cruddiest immune systems on the left, and the eight men with the best on the right. Which do you think is more attractive?

Proceedings of the Royal Society