FWIW, there was a recent big Danish study (SEXUS) that asked about sex drive, and one thing clear from the numbers there is that sex drive in women falls much more quickly as they age than in men, e.g. a 45 year old woman may be comparable to say a 75 year old man.
Something lucky about this, since attractiveness *to* men also seems to drop dramatically in women past menopause. Possibly there's something related to overall health or energy level - attractiveness seems to relate to health and sexual attraction within age groups, with extraversion as a marker for all three variables:
Lukaszewski, A. W., & Roney, J. R. (2011). The origins of extraversion: Joint effects of facultative calibration and genetic polymorphism. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(3), 409-421.
Bártová, K., Novák, O., Weiss, P., & Klapilová, K. (2021). Personality traits and sociosexual orientation are related to sexual inhibition and sexual excitation scales: Evidence from the Czech Republic. Personality and Individual Differences, 171, 110468.
My only quibble here is that your graphs make it look as if there are NO women who are taller or have a higher sex drive or are less neurotic than man, which is clearly not the case. The peaks and tails of the curves should diverge, but there should be some overlap, and some women who are more masculine on those measures and vice versa, though not at the tails.
I say this as a woman who is 5'9" and therefore taller than 50% of men...and also has a sex drive I'd estimate at higher than 40% of men and is less sentimental/neurotic than about 85% of men. But according to your graphs I don't exist. ;)
As an aside, us hetero overlappers tend to get along *fabulously* with the opposite sex. My dearest friends from age 4 to workplace friends in my 40s have always been guys. And I know plenty of males who fit the same profile but in reverse, with lots of female friends. Though we can't really help all those who align strongly on the poles but are heterosexual...They're SOL I guess!
Great article otherwise, but I beg you to please fix your graphs to portray the overlap.
I wonder if I'm not understanding your comment, here--the graphs do show that overlap. I didn't post a graph for the height disparity, but, if your sex drive is higher than 40% of men (congratulations BTW, hope life is fun) then you're literally at the center, somewhere below where the red and gold lines intersect.
If your Emotionality is lower than 85% of men, that's much more extreme, but you're still easy to find on the second graph: Start on the left where the curves appear to start from, and move to the right a bit more than a quarter the entire width of the image, until you just pass the first bold vertical black line. That's where the red curve is high and starting to slow down in its rise, and the gold curve is balooning upward (because you showed up).
But is the problem really that my graphs didn't include percentiles? I wanted them clean, just to give a sense of the size of the disparities, but I could add numbers to clear things like this up. Here's a Gaussian curve with percentile rarities included: https://assessingpsyche.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/percentiles.png
Of course you are right! Lol - this is why I should not be making comments at 1 in the morning when my brain clearly isn't working.
I think something about the design of your charts made them look somewhat like an EKG monitor or stock chart, so I was looking at them as individual points, rather than what they obviously are as a distribution curve. I think if the curves were actually filled in with a color down to the line under each curve, that would make the overlap more obvious. I know it SHOULD be obvious just looking at it, since everything under the more triangle-ish part of the curve is overlap, but it takes an extra mental step for those of us who are less visual thinkers. If your gold curve was filled in with light gold and your red curve with pink, then the overlapping part would show orange and would stand out much more as the overlap. Not that you should change your charts just for overly linear/textual thinkers like me, they're fine. :) I swear I am not always a moron, but apparently right before bed I am! :)
FWIW, there was a recent big Danish study (SEXUS) that asked about sex drive, and one thing clear from the numbers there is that sex drive in women falls much more quickly as they age than in men, e.g. a 45 year old woman may be comparable to say a 75 year old man.
Something lucky about this, since attractiveness *to* men also seems to drop dramatically in women past menopause. Possibly there's something related to overall health or energy level - attractiveness seems to relate to health and sexual attraction within age groups, with extraversion as a marker for all three variables:
Lukaszewski, A. W., & Roney, J. R. (2011). The origins of extraversion: Joint effects of facultative calibration and genetic polymorphism. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(3), 409-421.
Bártová, K., Novák, O., Weiss, P., & Klapilová, K. (2021). Personality traits and sociosexual orientation are related to sexual inhibition and sexual excitation scales: Evidence from the Czech Republic. Personality and Individual Differences, 171, 110468.
My only quibble here is that your graphs make it look as if there are NO women who are taller or have a higher sex drive or are less neurotic than man, which is clearly not the case. The peaks and tails of the curves should diverge, but there should be some overlap, and some women who are more masculine on those measures and vice versa, though not at the tails.
I say this as a woman who is 5'9" and therefore taller than 50% of men...and also has a sex drive I'd estimate at higher than 40% of men and is less sentimental/neurotic than about 85% of men. But according to your graphs I don't exist. ;)
As an aside, us hetero overlappers tend to get along *fabulously* with the opposite sex. My dearest friends from age 4 to workplace friends in my 40s have always been guys. And I know plenty of males who fit the same profile but in reverse, with lots of female friends. Though we can't really help all those who align strongly on the poles but are heterosexual...They're SOL I guess!
Great article otherwise, but I beg you to please fix your graphs to portray the overlap.
I wonder if I'm not understanding your comment, here--the graphs do show that overlap. I didn't post a graph for the height disparity, but, if your sex drive is higher than 40% of men (congratulations BTW, hope life is fun) then you're literally at the center, somewhere below where the red and gold lines intersect.
If your Emotionality is lower than 85% of men, that's much more extreme, but you're still easy to find on the second graph: Start on the left where the curves appear to start from, and move to the right a bit more than a quarter the entire width of the image, until you just pass the first bold vertical black line. That's where the red curve is high and starting to slow down in its rise, and the gold curve is balooning upward (because you showed up).
But is the problem really that my graphs didn't include percentiles? I wanted them clean, just to give a sense of the size of the disparities, but I could add numbers to clear things like this up. Here's a Gaussian curve with percentile rarities included: https://assessingpsyche.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/percentiles.png
Of course you are right! Lol - this is why I should not be making comments at 1 in the morning when my brain clearly isn't working.
I think something about the design of your charts made them look somewhat like an EKG monitor or stock chart, so I was looking at them as individual points, rather than what they obviously are as a distribution curve. I think if the curves were actually filled in with a color down to the line under each curve, that would make the overlap more obvious. I know it SHOULD be obvious just looking at it, since everything under the more triangle-ish part of the curve is overlap, but it takes an extra mental step for those of us who are less visual thinkers. If your gold curve was filled in with light gold and your red curve with pink, then the overlapping part would show orange and would stand out much more as the overlap. Not that you should change your charts just for overly linear/textual thinkers like me, they're fine. :) I swear I am not always a moron, but apparently right before bed I am! :)
Can I borrow one of your graphs? I'm writing about female outliers and I'm too stupid to make a graph with overlapping curves.
Of course; or I could make you some new ones, if you'd like the curves different colors, greater or less separation, different heights, etc.
Thank you! No, the one about Emotionality from the Hexaco test works fine for my purposes. Coming soon in another place!