Thread by @datepsych

This is a neat paper: men and women designed the most and least attractive bodies, kind of like character creation in a video game.

What men and women designed as the ideal body was pretty different. 🧵

"Males focus on prominent masculine and feminine traits, while women focus on traits that make both male and female bodies more elongated and slender."

Men made the attractive male avatars more muscular than women did:

"Attractive body parts were distributed normally with the peak shifted to moderately supernormal sizes, while unattractive body parts have mostly U-shaped or skewed distributions with extremes in super-supernormal and/or subnormal sizes."

"Moderately supernormal size" - what does that mean? A little bit bigger in these proportions:

"Interestingly, our participants generated avatars whose SHR is almost identical to the measures obtained on male and female fashion models."

"Attractive male and female avatars also have proportionally longer legs."

Meanwhile, short legs: the least attractive bodypart.

The most attractive waist to hip ratio for women was within the normal range.

Combined with a high shoulder to hip ratio, this is basically a "sporty" female physique. Fitness model or athletic look.

However, these were not "masculinized" female physiques and usually also were characterized by some other supernormal female trait, like large breasts or buttocks.

Summed up, men have a stronger preferences for masculinity in male bodies and femininity in female bodies than women do.

These results are similar to the Gigachad facial ratings. Men found him very attractive, women not so much on average.

Men tend to think extreme dimorphism in other men is more attractive than women do.