I really love that the two factors conservative men over-index for the most on preferences in women is them being uneducated and "not so bright". I have had a long-running debate/conversation with my husband that I like to call the "what's up with conservative women" question? Basically we can't figure out what's in it for them or why any woman would voluntarily be conservative if she had information and options (and to be fair, not many are, certainly a lot less than men, which to me is a very predictable result).
After going round about it many times, the answer I've essentially settled on, to state it bluntly, is "they're just dumb", and the answer he's settled on is "they just like and enjoy jerks". So this study seems to support my theory a bit, at least in so far as conservative men are actively selecting for (or at least not filtering out) them being dumb.
Sorry for the blunt language but let's just get down to it. They like bimbos (ie dumb and Barbie-like) and that's kind of exactly what you'd expect.
I do look fairly Barbie-ish and have been called Barbie lots of times, which I do bc I know men like it and it just seems advantageous to optimize whatever powers of persuasion I might have over them. But I also admittedly disrespect them for this preference of theirs. It's just very dumb. A bottle of hair bleach and some lipstick are cheap and easy, signifying nothing and yet they always seem to think it signifies more than it does. The suggestion here is that it signals sexual availability and yet it really doesn't. Like at all. Plenty of women who love sex and don't have high standards who don't bother with the artifice, plenty of virgins who do their makeup every day. I'd say it's more just a signal of efforts to manipulate men, which is why I can't really respect falling for it.
What's in it for conservative women? (After all, until recently liberal men had a better chance at casual sex.) I've often wondered this myself. I've read a lot of blogs by them, and:
1. Lots of women just want kids. They'd rather be mothers than anything else. Not surprising the urge is there as our species has lived this long. You'll notice conservative women writers often bragging about their large brood, and of course being able to raise a large number of children and having them all be successful requires a lot of organizational skill and often a wealthy husband (showing your ability to snag one).
2. Bright doesn't necessarily mean ambitious. A less successful woman, or one who wants to stay home, may want to preserve the prospects of her husband, both from harassment accusations and from competition by women at the office. A feminist movement that sends her to the office to work with him isn't really in her interests.
3. Religiosity does limit men's sexual promiscuity as well, though not as much as women's (as has often been criticized by feminists). A lot of women would rather turn down the overall level of promiscuity (figuring men are more likely to stray anyway and not having much sympathy for the small fraction of sexually adventurous women) in order to maintain the stability of a monogamous relationship.
You know it's interesting, because all of this assumes that the man in question would actually abide by the restrictions on his sexuality (usually given by religion), and out faith in that to get the desired outcome, and I just never had that assumption. In fact I was absolutely certain that I'd read thorough research long ago that religious restrictions on sex (ie against promiscuity or no non-marital sex) did not actually have any impact whatsoever on male sexual behavior and could only be shown to influence/restrict female behavior. I have been sure of the evidence for this for a long time, I seemed to remember learning that in college.
However, I just searched for it and can't find that. I don't know if that's bc the research is old and no longer applicable, or what - I don't think I've just invented this. The only studies I can find on it we're done in the 90s and have to do with looking at ways to use social and religious pressure to restrict/limit sexual behavior in order to stop the spread of HIV. And back then the findings were that religious pressure and limitations were effective on everyone other than gay males and that it showed no evidence for modifying their behavior. So I don't know if maybe the thinking was that as a result, it must mean that only female behavior is actually limited, and the fact that you SEEMED to see similar limitations on male behavior was only bc their opportunities were restricted/gatekept by women, and that it didn't work at all in men, as shown by gay males?? That's the only link I can even find now, though admittedly I only just googled it for 10 mins.
So maybe I DID invent this out of whole cloth, but that would surprise me and I don't know why I would have done that lol. I suppose it's possible that I was exposed to a lot of examples of male religious sexual hypocrisy in the 90s and 2000s when lots of scandals came out, and have frequently witnessed it myself and just made an assumption based on the tendency of for example male cult leaders to eventually issue a revelation that they're supposed to have lots of wives/mistresses once they accrue sufficient followers.
Anyway, I guess I always assumed that part of the "dumbness" I referenced (admittedly a crude term) was premised on total naivete regarding the ability to actually depend on a man to follow his professed sexual values, whether religious or not. But it could also be that I am just very cynical about this and somehow invented for myself research to show it, which I can't presently find!
> religious restrictions on sex (ie against promiscuity or no non-marital sex) did not actually have any impact whatsoever on male sexual behavior and could only be shown to influence/restrict female behavior.
Yes, that's more or less true, because male sexuality is stronger, more urgent, or less flexible. The best citation I have for this is: Baumeister, R. F. (2000). Gender differences in erotic plasticity: the female sex drive as socially flexible and responsive. Psychological bulletin, 126(3), 347.
Human memory is famously unreliable, especially over time and things you haven't really thought about. You might remember the McMartin preschool cases where kids 'remembered' stuff that never happened. And there were a *lot* of feminist editorials saying that the purpose of abortion restrictions and purity culture and so on was totally to restrict women's sexuality. Which is certainly part of it! The Warren Jeffs of the world definitely do benefit from that sort of thing.
You don't necessarily have to assume the rules will be enforced fairly or completely--any decrement in male promiscuity might be advantageous. Also, it's not as if *no* women benefit from restrictions on female sexuality--a less sexually adventurous woman might be happy to see her more adventurous peers kept from gaining an advantage by putting out earlier. A rule that keeps you from doing something you don't want to do anyway isn't a problem, especially if it takes away something someone else might do to get an edge over you. Effectively, purity culture works as a cartel to decrease the amount of sex women have to offer and increase the amount of commitment men have to give. I'm not saying it's a *great* system for women, and certainly not smart, ambitious, adventurous women, but at least some women might do better under a conservative system than the current one. (What about women who aren't smart, ambitious, or adventurous?) After all, the political gender gap exists--I'm just guessing why it's 55-45 instead of 85-15. (Note that it's wider in Gen Z, where dating has begun to break down.)
Conversely, think about all the less-masculine men who supported feminism because they thought it would decrease the pressure to work out and be aggressive...
Also, I think you probably are right that conservative men, all else equal, tend to prefer dumber women. We've pretty much seen that in this study! (Probably the exception is Jewish conservatives--there were quite a few neocon power couples.)
I don't think conservatives are dumber than leftists anymore. That used to be a typical finding, which my own surveys also used to find, but not lately. I'm definitely interested in seeing whether there's a stronger intelligence sex gap in conservatives than leftists, but that's the kind of study that would require greater statistical power than my little n ~ 500 surveys can muster. I still don't even have 250 for the survey about attraction to men and I'm stumped for how to get anyone else to participate.
And really, *that* is the way to find out what conservative women are in for. It may be that their reproductive patterns are just part of the standard dysgenic trend, where women with economic prospects get an education, earn money, and pursue a life of pointless hedonistic sterility, while women without prospects shrug and get knocked up. But if heterosexual female attraction patterns are a mirror of male patterns, then your husband's position would also be correct: Far right men look for a cook/babysitter/maid and don't care if she's smart, while far right women look for a money machine and don't care if he's ever home. At this point, though, who knows?
Even with only half of the picture, though, I found it eerie to see how strongly conservatism was represented by these romantic preferences. If you combine all three factors together, conservatism correlates r = 0.45. That's bigger than for regular personality, and we're just talking about what people like in a woman. Keep this up for a century, and you're breeding two different populations in America that are no longer even attracted to one another.
I absolutely do not think conservative men are dumber, I was talking about women specifically. Conservatism advances male interests in some obvious ways. I can't think of any way it advances female interests and in fact clearly aims for the opposite in many cases, which is why Ive just come to the conclusion that for a woman to choose that, she's probably a bit dumb (either that or ignorant, which is a different thing and lots of women raised in a conservative culture in fact leave it voluntarily once they are exposed to other options, which is what I'd expect to happen).
I'm not at all surprised that conservatism is such a strong through-line here. To me, the only actual continuous thread in what you could call "conservative" throughout different cultures and times in history is the stance that women should be subordinate to men and that men should exercise some (or all) control and cultural authority over women's fertility/reproduction. I really can't think of any other policy or stance that is consistent across all conservatives in time and place, other than that, so to me it forms the very core of conservatism itself. I would be shocked if there were NOT huge differences on this measure, bc male attitudes to women as a sexual/reproductive resource is IMO the very core of conservatism itself, the rest is fairly variable in the narratives that are applied to the one thing that never varies, whether one is an Amish, Islamic, or Christian conservative from basically any century.
But yes I will be interested to see if conservative women are more likely to view men as essentially provider/resource machines with much stronger preferences for that. I'm not sure you'll find such a strong preference there, though I would expect there should definitely be a distinction.
I will keep trying! Women seem to be unfortunately unlikely to fill out male surveys, not sure whats up with that.
So I had a peek at what the data are saying prematurely about what people like in men, and there's definitely a clear picture (though I don't know how much I trust it, since I have fewer than 200 heterosexual women). I don't want to give anything away (especially since I'm hoping for more responses that may change the picture) but I'll just say there is evidence relating to your argument with your husband about what's in it for conservative women.
Your idea that conservatism is basically a manifestation of gender relationships is interesting. But, how do you explain other aspects of conservatism, like elevated conservative disgust proneness, conservative ethnocentrism, conservative holistic (vs analytic) thinking, conservative opposition to hedonistic media, drugs, or euthanasia? Most of these things appear as basic to conservatism as attitudes towards women, spanning the religions you named as well as secular onservative movements. Even more difficult, how do you explain powerful conservative females like Georgia Meloni, or movements like conservative feminism?
So first I should say my thoughts are very informed by Hyrum and Verlan Lewis and their thesis that there is no coherent philosophy whatsoever dividing left and right...they do a very good job extensively cataloguing how many times "conservative" positions have either flipped entirely in one culture or are directly opposed cross-culturally. https://open.substack.com/pub/betonit/p/the-myth-of-left-and-right?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1p8xuv
However, where I disagree with them is that there IS a through-line, which is that conservativism or rightism is always associated with female subordination to men and attempts to secure maximum male authority over female "reproductive resources", and that ultimately that's mostly what it comes down to. Though if anyone can point to a counter-example, I'm happy to reconsider.
Disgust impulse: I don't really buy that this is a thing. Look at reactions to COVID. Conservatives are just fine with plenty of things liberals are squeamish about such as slaughtering animals. This really only applies wrt things that are sexual in nature like homosexuality, and if conservatism is fundamentally concerned with systems to gain control over reproduction, that makes perfect sense.
Ethnocentrism - almost entirely about fear of foreign men raping/taking "their" women. Look what they get worked up about the most, and that's what it is. They are generally perfectly fine with foreign/immigrant women, it's just the males they want to keep our (kind of notable both our President and VP are anti-immigration yet married to immigrant women, eh?).
Euthanasia - driven by fear no one truly loves or likes them, and therefore would pressure them to off themselves as soon as they're not useful, if it were legal. This ties in with needs for controlling others via dominion over them and hierarchy, for the same reason...they don't trust altruism or that people actually just keep each other around bc they enjoy and like each other.
I can't speak to the holistic/analytic thing, I'm not familiar with that.
I can't explain women like Meloni or conservative women movements in general, that's the whole reason it's a perpetual question! Because I find it confusing. However, I offer this anecdote:
The Equal Rights Amendment died in Utah. It was one of the last states and was supposed to be a small event, where they'd only planned room for a few dozen delegates and speakers, etc. But then hundreds of Mormon housewives showed up to oppose it and this is where it died. The story was, oh look these conservative women don't want equal rights, the women themselves are fighting it. However, decades after the fact when documenting what really happened here (there's a great documentary on the topic which I unfortunately can't find within 30 seconds of googling, but I've seen it and they interview all the main players who were there), what really occurred is that the Mormon Church found out about the event (women are not allowed to hold priesthood or positions of authority in LDS faith), and they put out the call to every single stake and ward president (men, obviously) in the state demanding that they find a woman to show up and attend, and gave them all talking points about why they needed to oppose it. Which they did, and the men drove them there and then actually patrolled up and down the aisles making sure they did as they were told. 50 years later most of the women in attendance (who are still alive) report that they regret their participation and how afraid and pressured they felt, by their church leaders standing there telling them how to vote. So anyway, there's one example. I could not begin to explain the motivations of someone like Phyllis Schlafly though. And I do wonder about it very much!!
Most of the attempts I've seen by dissident rightists to define left and right seem to center around the right being more tolerant of innate hierarchy. The left outside of the USA focuses more on socialism, which of course is an attempt to level economic hierarchy. The US left focuses on some intersectional combination of race, gender, and sexuality. I guess male-female would be an aspect of that. It's certainly a big thing, but it's not the only thing.
The 'foreigners after the white women' thing is definitely a part of it, but you see concerns for jobs and fear of crime and so on.
Conservatism is well known to correlate with disgust proneness. For example:
Inbar, Y., Pizarro, D., Iyer, R., & Haidt, J. (2012). Disgust sensitivity, political conservatism, and voting. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3(5), 537-544.
Overall conservatism correlated variously with disgust proneness around r = 0.20 in a sample of n = 25,588. They also verified this on an international sample of n = 5,457 people from 121 different countries. Their questions included things like:
* "I never let any part of my body touch the toilet seat in a public washroom."
* It's disgusting to: "take a sip of soda, and then realize that you drank from the glass that an acquaintance of yours had been drinking from’’
* It's disgusting to: "inflate a new unlubricated condom, using your mouth"
There are many other results like this, but it's well established that conservatives are disgust-prone - much more than any of the attraction patterns I write about in this post.
I agree that ethnocentrism in men can be motivated by a desire to keep women (and other resources) away from competitors. On the other hand, conservative women are often ethnocentric, and women have even become more concerned about immigration than men in America: https://www.newsweek.com/immigration-migrants-poll-gallup-women-1896166
Holism vs Analytic thinking is an interesting divide, contrasting people who prioritize relationships vs those who break things down to understand them. For example, if you had to group bees with one other thing, would it be A) honey or B) butterflies? Answering A is holistic and B is analytic. Interestingly, a collection of 5 studies with total n > 5000...
Talhelm, T., Haidt, J., Oishi, S., Zhang, X., Miao, F. F., & Chen, S. (2015). Liberals think more analytically (more “WEIRD”) than conservatives. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(2), 250-267.
...found Westerners are more analytic than others, and liberal Westerners are more analytic than conservative Westerners. Even briefly training people to think analytically caused them to form more liberal opinions.
Opposite findings are found with fear of death, or alcohol: Priming people to think about death, or giving them a few beers, makes them more conservative. Then, too, we also have longstanding personality traits that relate to conservatism/leftism, like Openness to Experience and Typical Intellectual Engagement, on which leftists (and Westerners) are higher, and Conscientiousness, Honesty, and Need For Closure, on which conservatives are higher.
So while I don't have an interesting story about dysfunctional gender relationships in Utah, I can also offer what I think is a coherent explanation for the difference between the left and right: Leftists wonder about and question things, and conservatives take what's obvious. Given the sorry failure of philosophy as a discipline, and the even sorrier state of wokeness in the modern world, it isn't clear that the left is really better than the right. Still, for better or for worse, while I do fit your schema as being relatively unconcerned about controlling women, I am also a Western, analytic, hard-to-gross-out, not-afraid-to-die, sober-at-the-present-moment, extremely-high-in-Openness, moderate leftist.
Viewed in this way, your wondering about this very much is a trait that underlies your general left-of-center attitudes. Meanwhile Phyllis Schlafly, Georgia Meloni, and my female conservative relatives aren't concerned with women being controlled by men, and even take dominant postures vis-a-vis men. They just don't think too hard, and aren't fooled by the kinds of fancy words I like to throw their way.
While I overall agree, I don't know about your relatives, but I would bet Schlafly, Meloni, Kristi Noam, and Pam Bondi, for instance, think *very* hard about how to advance their careers.
Ok! I slept a bit, read it again, repeated, and yea... this all seems about right. The point on homosexuality being sort of one end of the spectrum seems insightful and makes sense.
One thing I might add about cultural symbols of attractiveness, such as lipstick and high heels, is that they are intentional signals. That is very valuable in a species that does not have the equivalent signals of "going into heat" for females. Choosing to adorn yourself with cultural symbols suggesting a sign saying "Help wanted: Mating partner" is going to get a lot of attention and be attractive to the extend people are interested in the job. It can be overdone, of course, as humans are picky about their partner choices, so simply wearing a tank top with "DTF" across the chest isn't your best option perhaps, but whatever signals interest in receiving sexual advances is going to be appealing to those who are interested in making sexual advances.
Put another way, when you are hungry there are many things that can make a good restaurant, but the most important aspect is usually having an "Open" sign hanging in the window.
The cryptic ovulation of females is an interesting feature of our biology. What especially interests me about the Barbie Dimension is something I didn't really get into in the post, which is that the signals are not exactly culturally dependent. Granted, a few are. But many of them are part of an effort to appear fertile - not merely receptive, but fertile. Lipstick colors the lips, corsets lower WHR, shaving the legs reduces the appearance of age. And several of the desired traits there, such as large breasts or protruding hips, are fertility signals that a person can't fake without surgery (or at least, not in a swimsuit).
In other words, carrying around a green traffic light only works if people are turned on by the color green to begin with. We're not stupid, and despite claims to the contrary, beauty isn't merely in the eye of the beholder. For long and long has Venus been consciously enhancing her attractiveness; this is why even after thousands of years, her symbol remains the hand mirror: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/venus-and-mars
Yes, there is definitely an interplay between the cultural aspects of "I am ready to go" and the more natural "I am a fertile woman" aspects. How much any particular aspect is a mix of culture and nature is pretty specific. Corsets are more popular in places where not having a fat belly is desirable, for example. Grey powdered wigs are fashionable in certain times and places, but (presumably) women compensate by looking younger in other ways.
We see the traffic light is only attractive if people already like the color aspect when we look at people over doing it. Street walkers are often not really that attractive, for example, unless that is specifically what you are looking for. Yet at the same time there is definite cultural contingency in what is considered over doing it, and often what "doing it" even counts as.
You say: ". (And there’s barely anything in the lower area, because that my survey would have had to be filled with items like Malodorous, Cross Eyed, Pyromaniac, and Bag Lady.) "
Doesn't that direction lead in the more masculine direction? The male sexual dimorphisms? It would be interesting to see how bi or even homosexual men would or did factor into the study. I could imagine that there are going to be results that fall into the extremes for liking feminine and neotenised features too...
That graph combining factors 2 and 5 doesn't have anything I recognize as particularly gendered on it; factors 1, 4, and 3 have much more of that kind of thing.
Unfortunately, the study was poorly designed to pick up variation between straight, bisexual, and homosexual men, since it separated attraction to men and women into two separate surveys. It *was* able pick up differences between heterosexual men and bisexual or lesbian women; women interested in women were somewhat more interested in the high side of factor 4 towards athleticism and maturity, while men interested in women were more interested in the low side towards youthfulness and childbearing.
Although those findings are strong, it's inaccurate to say BvB is "just" racial. They found that at the large scale, preferences are overwhelmingly predicted by the ancestral compostion of the region. This approach treats individial variation within each region as noise.
We could, similarly, say that temperature is "just" a function of latitude; checking by average temperature, tropics are hot and poles are cold. This approach treats seasonal variation as noise, but there's obviously a lot going on with seasons!
Leftism vs Conservatism is probably not the thing that makes some people prefer one thing over another, but control for ancestry and there may still be something interesting going on.
I fell in love exactly once, instantly and permanently, fifty years ago. She’s asleep upstairs right now, but we have spent most of our lives apart. I could not return her passion as a teenager, because I was afraid of losing her. My first two sexual experiences had both ended friendships I valued much more than the sex, and I was terrified of this one turning out the same way. Our eventual reunion in our fifties marked the first time I had slept with someone I liked since tenth grade. Yes, you read that right. I avoided liaisons with women I genuinely liked for 35 years. All the traits mentioned in your survey results seem superficial to me; personality as much as breast size. If they weren’t her, it was a fish or fowl choice to me.
It seems bizarre that men are expected to like the same things in every woman.
I never wanted the same things from every woman, did not admire and desire the same traits in every woman, nor was I looking for the same relationship with every woman.
I have had deeply affectionate relations with women with whom sex was never in the realm of possibility; lesbians, married women, much younger or older women—wonderful women who meant the world to me, and made my world a larger place. I desired them all, understand. “Have penis, will slaver,” right? As long as She was not in the picture.
On the other hand, by headcount, which just seems wrong, most of the women with whom I have had sexual relations have been one-off, or short term, or intermittent relationships. Each had some lead characteristic I desired, like “expensive,” “sophisticated,” or “hot.” I took hot to the beach, sophisticated to the boss’s party, expensive to the play. Is this not the usual? I think it might be. All the temps, if you’ll pardon the term, had two things in common; they were conventionally pretty and they weren’t people I wanted around. I filled their bill in some particular, they filled one of mine, and that was that. Of course they all had one other thing in common: Not My One.
In my pose as an eligible young man, I selected for conventional traits. My darling met several of those criteria, but that was incidental. Since the day we met in high school, there have been two classes of women in my life; Her and Not Her. I find her fantastically attractive at 67, think about her body all the time. With her in my life, the idea of being with other women is on the same level with bestiality in my mind. Not my species: ick.
Biology had its way with me in my late 20s, and the marriage to my final girlfriend lasted 23 hilariously disastrous years. Then my darling found me on Facebook, and my real life began.
She is slim-figured and 5’4”, whereas I typically chose to date more showy figures and a better match for my 6’ height. She is high-intensity, glamorously vivacious, and a somewhat dominant personality, whereas my girlfriends tended to be of mid-range intellect and affect, and somewhat submissive.
Hope this tmi tl;dr gives some perspective and an interesting sidelight to your findings, thanks again.
First of all, great work! Just the sort of stuff we need now that academia's been ideologically captured. It is fun to see that most of the stereotypes about blue and red tastes in women are, in fact, justified. Of course, given stereotypes about liberal and conservative women (and men) it's going to be hard to tease out nurture and nature on this one.
A less charitable view of blue men's tastes in women is they're looking for availability rather than competence, i.e., engaging in short-term mating.
"Still, it’s hard to avoid concluding that a world ruled by the Barbie dimension would definitely be one with a lot less womanly tears, heartache, and stress about whether their bosoms or bottoms approximate the womanly ideal."
Problem is lots of women would put out the green light and then you'd just have competition by looks, etc. again.
As an aside you really ought to consider a Holm-Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons. You do 20 tests at p=0.05 one of them is going to be false-positive just by chance. Bosoms/butts and right/left seem an obvious situation (and it's not PC, but you might be catching a racial thing as there is a well-known preference for butts among black men, who tend to lean left--see Mix-A-Lot et al. (1992)).
Does sapiosexuality peak at different IQs for men and women? You constantly hear smart women complaining men don't want a woman who's smarter than *them*.
How hard would it be to make graphs for the other combinations of factors?
I'm familiar with Bonferroni corrections, but I left that kind of statistical detail out largely because I try to write for a wider audience. (No mention of eigenvalues, percent of variance, rotations, why five factors were extracted, etc.) You can actually apply Bonferroni to the results as a reader, knowing that there were seven personality traits and three political values - multiply p by ten and find that most of the results remain significant, except for those which I explicitly said might be a fluke. Of course, you do actually risk type II errors with Bonferroni, but whatever; in the end my attitude is that either a finding will replicate someday or it won't.
Now regarding graphs - It wouldn't be too hard to make graphs for the other combinations now that I've had some practice with matplotlib, but the two others I checked (3 with 5 and 4 with 5) weren't as interesting as 1 with 4, and 2 with 5. Were you hoping to find something by studying them?
As for sapiosexuality, Gignac (2018) reported no sex difference, but LOL at Mix-A-Lot et al. (1992))
Makes sense. Yeah, precision versus communication is always a big tradeoff.
I just wondered what would come out of it. Are there other aspects of attraction we're missing? (Theoretically there are 5 choose 2=10 possible combinations.) You're not obligated to make graphs for random commenters, of course.
I need to read through this again when I am more awake and can give it the attention it deserves. At the first worn out brain pass before bed, however, this is really interesting. I am looking forward to rereading this with a cup of coffee.
I think that your finding that conservatives disproportionately like artifice is a very interesting one. I would love to see the same questions answered by non-Western conservatives and progressives. Do conservatives in Iran feel as turned on by red lipstick? Too bad that only Western conservatives are progressive enough to share their sexual preferences for the sake of science (it would be great to be proven wrong on that point).
You speak some Arabic, don't you? If you could advertize, I'm pretty confident Middle Eastern men would answer. But actually, there's already plenty of data on their romantic preferences already. In fact my survey here can be seen as an extension or partial replication of...
...where they used ratings from several thousand participants in three dozen cultures taken from David Buss' 1989 survey. They identified four dimensions:
* Love vs. Status/Resources (Men at the left, women at the right)
* Dependable/Stable vs. Good Looks/Health (Women preferred the left, men the right)
* Education/Intelligence vs. Desire for Home/Children (This was a clear match for my factor 2 vs 5, and Women preferred partners at the left, men preferred partners at the right)
* Sociability vs. Similar Religion. (Women preferred left, men preferred right)
Unlike my data, their data was all in terms of tradeoffs, so the results also highlighted tradeoffs. But the middle East was well represented, with Iranians, Palestinians, and Israelis all participating, and their study findings appear to be universal.
My experience with Middle Eastern men in America is that they're actually pretty normal and well adjusted among and towards other men. They get weird when they have to interact with women. I suspect medieval Europeans were similar, placing women in a lower category and thinking that women were more amorous than men.
I really love that the two factors conservative men over-index for the most on preferences in women is them being uneducated and "not so bright". I have had a long-running debate/conversation with my husband that I like to call the "what's up with conservative women" question? Basically we can't figure out what's in it for them or why any woman would voluntarily be conservative if she had information and options (and to be fair, not many are, certainly a lot less than men, which to me is a very predictable result).
After going round about it many times, the answer I've essentially settled on, to state it bluntly, is "they're just dumb", and the answer he's settled on is "they just like and enjoy jerks". So this study seems to support my theory a bit, at least in so far as conservative men are actively selecting for (or at least not filtering out) them being dumb.
Sorry for the blunt language but let's just get down to it. They like bimbos (ie dumb and Barbie-like) and that's kind of exactly what you'd expect.
I do look fairly Barbie-ish and have been called Barbie lots of times, which I do bc I know men like it and it just seems advantageous to optimize whatever powers of persuasion I might have over them. But I also admittedly disrespect them for this preference of theirs. It's just very dumb. A bottle of hair bleach and some lipstick are cheap and easy, signifying nothing and yet they always seem to think it signifies more than it does. The suggestion here is that it signals sexual availability and yet it really doesn't. Like at all. Plenty of women who love sex and don't have high standards who don't bother with the artifice, plenty of virgins who do their makeup every day. I'd say it's more just a signal of efforts to manipulate men, which is why I can't really respect falling for it.
What's in it for conservative women? (After all, until recently liberal men had a better chance at casual sex.) I've often wondered this myself. I've read a lot of blogs by them, and:
1. Lots of women just want kids. They'd rather be mothers than anything else. Not surprising the urge is there as our species has lived this long. You'll notice conservative women writers often bragging about their large brood, and of course being able to raise a large number of children and having them all be successful requires a lot of organizational skill and often a wealthy husband (showing your ability to snag one).
2. Bright doesn't necessarily mean ambitious. A less successful woman, or one who wants to stay home, may want to preserve the prospects of her husband, both from harassment accusations and from competition by women at the office. A feminist movement that sends her to the office to work with him isn't really in her interests.
3. Religiosity does limit men's sexual promiscuity as well, though not as much as women's (as has often been criticized by feminists). A lot of women would rather turn down the overall level of promiscuity (figuring men are more likely to stray anyway and not having much sympathy for the small fraction of sexually adventurous women) in order to maintain the stability of a monogamous relationship.
You know it's interesting, because all of this assumes that the man in question would actually abide by the restrictions on his sexuality (usually given by religion), and out faith in that to get the desired outcome, and I just never had that assumption. In fact I was absolutely certain that I'd read thorough research long ago that religious restrictions on sex (ie against promiscuity or no non-marital sex) did not actually have any impact whatsoever on male sexual behavior and could only be shown to influence/restrict female behavior. I have been sure of the evidence for this for a long time, I seemed to remember learning that in college.
However, I just searched for it and can't find that. I don't know if that's bc the research is old and no longer applicable, or what - I don't think I've just invented this. The only studies I can find on it we're done in the 90s and have to do with looking at ways to use social and religious pressure to restrict/limit sexual behavior in order to stop the spread of HIV. And back then the findings were that religious pressure and limitations were effective on everyone other than gay males and that it showed no evidence for modifying their behavior. So I don't know if maybe the thinking was that as a result, it must mean that only female behavior is actually limited, and the fact that you SEEMED to see similar limitations on male behavior was only bc their opportunities were restricted/gatekept by women, and that it didn't work at all in men, as shown by gay males?? That's the only link I can even find now, though admittedly I only just googled it for 10 mins.
So maybe I DID invent this out of whole cloth, but that would surprise me and I don't know why I would have done that lol. I suppose it's possible that I was exposed to a lot of examples of male religious sexual hypocrisy in the 90s and 2000s when lots of scandals came out, and have frequently witnessed it myself and just made an assumption based on the tendency of for example male cult leaders to eventually issue a revelation that they're supposed to have lots of wives/mistresses once they accrue sufficient followers.
Anyway, I guess I always assumed that part of the "dumbness" I referenced (admittedly a crude term) was premised on total naivete regarding the ability to actually depend on a man to follow his professed sexual values, whether religious or not. But it could also be that I am just very cynical about this and somehow invented for myself research to show it, which I can't presently find!
> religious restrictions on sex (ie against promiscuity or no non-marital sex) did not actually have any impact whatsoever on male sexual behavior and could only be shown to influence/restrict female behavior.
Yes, that's more or less true, because male sexuality is stronger, more urgent, or less flexible. The best citation I have for this is: Baumeister, R. F. (2000). Gender differences in erotic plasticity: the female sex drive as socially flexible and responsive. Psychological bulletin, 126(3), 347.
Human memory is famously unreliable, especially over time and things you haven't really thought about. You might remember the McMartin preschool cases where kids 'remembered' stuff that never happened. And there were a *lot* of feminist editorials saying that the purpose of abortion restrictions and purity culture and so on was totally to restrict women's sexuality. Which is certainly part of it! The Warren Jeffs of the world definitely do benefit from that sort of thing.
You don't necessarily have to assume the rules will be enforced fairly or completely--any decrement in male promiscuity might be advantageous. Also, it's not as if *no* women benefit from restrictions on female sexuality--a less sexually adventurous woman might be happy to see her more adventurous peers kept from gaining an advantage by putting out earlier. A rule that keeps you from doing something you don't want to do anyway isn't a problem, especially if it takes away something someone else might do to get an edge over you. Effectively, purity culture works as a cartel to decrease the amount of sex women have to offer and increase the amount of commitment men have to give. I'm not saying it's a *great* system for women, and certainly not smart, ambitious, adventurous women, but at least some women might do better under a conservative system than the current one. (What about women who aren't smart, ambitious, or adventurous?) After all, the political gender gap exists--I'm just guessing why it's 55-45 instead of 85-15. (Note that it's wider in Gen Z, where dating has begun to break down.)
Conversely, think about all the less-masculine men who supported feminism because they thought it would decrease the pressure to work out and be aggressive...
Also, I think you probably are right that conservative men, all else equal, tend to prefer dumber women. We've pretty much seen that in this study! (Probably the exception is Jewish conservatives--there were quite a few neocon power couples.)
I don't think conservatives are dumber than leftists anymore. That used to be a typical finding, which my own surveys also used to find, but not lately. I'm definitely interested in seeing whether there's a stronger intelligence sex gap in conservatives than leftists, but that's the kind of study that would require greater statistical power than my little n ~ 500 surveys can muster. I still don't even have 250 for the survey about attraction to men and I'm stumped for how to get anyone else to participate.
And really, *that* is the way to find out what conservative women are in for. It may be that their reproductive patterns are just part of the standard dysgenic trend, where women with economic prospects get an education, earn money, and pursue a life of pointless hedonistic sterility, while women without prospects shrug and get knocked up. But if heterosexual female attraction patterns are a mirror of male patterns, then your husband's position would also be correct: Far right men look for a cook/babysitter/maid and don't care if she's smart, while far right women look for a money machine and don't care if he's ever home. At this point, though, who knows?
Even with only half of the picture, though, I found it eerie to see how strongly conservatism was represented by these romantic preferences. If you combine all three factors together, conservatism correlates r = 0.45. That's bigger than for regular personality, and we're just talking about what people like in a woman. Keep this up for a century, and you're breeding two different populations in America that are no longer even attracted to one another.
I absolutely do not think conservative men are dumber, I was talking about women specifically. Conservatism advances male interests in some obvious ways. I can't think of any way it advances female interests and in fact clearly aims for the opposite in many cases, which is why Ive just come to the conclusion that for a woman to choose that, she's probably a bit dumb (either that or ignorant, which is a different thing and lots of women raised in a conservative culture in fact leave it voluntarily once they are exposed to other options, which is what I'd expect to happen).
I'm not at all surprised that conservatism is such a strong through-line here. To me, the only actual continuous thread in what you could call "conservative" throughout different cultures and times in history is the stance that women should be subordinate to men and that men should exercise some (or all) control and cultural authority over women's fertility/reproduction. I really can't think of any other policy or stance that is consistent across all conservatives in time and place, other than that, so to me it forms the very core of conservatism itself. I would be shocked if there were NOT huge differences on this measure, bc male attitudes to women as a sexual/reproductive resource is IMO the very core of conservatism itself, the rest is fairly variable in the narratives that are applied to the one thing that never varies, whether one is an Amish, Islamic, or Christian conservative from basically any century.
But yes I will be interested to see if conservative women are more likely to view men as essentially provider/resource machines with much stronger preferences for that. I'm not sure you'll find such a strong preference there, though I would expect there should definitely be a distinction.
I will keep trying! Women seem to be unfortunately unlikely to fill out male surveys, not sure whats up with that.
So I had a peek at what the data are saying prematurely about what people like in men, and there's definitely a clear picture (though I don't know how much I trust it, since I have fewer than 200 heterosexual women). I don't want to give anything away (especially since I'm hoping for more responses that may change the picture) but I'll just say there is evidence relating to your argument with your husband about what's in it for conservative women.
Your idea that conservatism is basically a manifestation of gender relationships is interesting. But, how do you explain other aspects of conservatism, like elevated conservative disgust proneness, conservative ethnocentrism, conservative holistic (vs analytic) thinking, conservative opposition to hedonistic media, drugs, or euthanasia? Most of these things appear as basic to conservatism as attitudes towards women, spanning the religions you named as well as secular onservative movements. Even more difficult, how do you explain powerful conservative females like Georgia Meloni, or movements like conservative feminism?
So first I should say my thoughts are very informed by Hyrum and Verlan Lewis and their thesis that there is no coherent philosophy whatsoever dividing left and right...they do a very good job extensively cataloguing how many times "conservative" positions have either flipped entirely in one culture or are directly opposed cross-culturally. https://open.substack.com/pub/betonit/p/the-myth-of-left-and-right?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1p8xuv
However, where I disagree with them is that there IS a through-line, which is that conservativism or rightism is always associated with female subordination to men and attempts to secure maximum male authority over female "reproductive resources", and that ultimately that's mostly what it comes down to. Though if anyone can point to a counter-example, I'm happy to reconsider.
Disgust impulse: I don't really buy that this is a thing. Look at reactions to COVID. Conservatives are just fine with plenty of things liberals are squeamish about such as slaughtering animals. This really only applies wrt things that are sexual in nature like homosexuality, and if conservatism is fundamentally concerned with systems to gain control over reproduction, that makes perfect sense.
Ethnocentrism - almost entirely about fear of foreign men raping/taking "their" women. Look what they get worked up about the most, and that's what it is. They are generally perfectly fine with foreign/immigrant women, it's just the males they want to keep our (kind of notable both our President and VP are anti-immigration yet married to immigrant women, eh?).
Euthanasia - driven by fear no one truly loves or likes them, and therefore would pressure them to off themselves as soon as they're not useful, if it were legal. This ties in with needs for controlling others via dominion over them and hierarchy, for the same reason...they don't trust altruism or that people actually just keep each other around bc they enjoy and like each other.
I can't speak to the holistic/analytic thing, I'm not familiar with that.
I can't explain women like Meloni or conservative women movements in general, that's the whole reason it's a perpetual question! Because I find it confusing. However, I offer this anecdote:
The Equal Rights Amendment died in Utah. It was one of the last states and was supposed to be a small event, where they'd only planned room for a few dozen delegates and speakers, etc. But then hundreds of Mormon housewives showed up to oppose it and this is where it died. The story was, oh look these conservative women don't want equal rights, the women themselves are fighting it. However, decades after the fact when documenting what really happened here (there's a great documentary on the topic which I unfortunately can't find within 30 seconds of googling, but I've seen it and they interview all the main players who were there), what really occurred is that the Mormon Church found out about the event (women are not allowed to hold priesthood or positions of authority in LDS faith), and they put out the call to every single stake and ward president (men, obviously) in the state demanding that they find a woman to show up and attend, and gave them all talking points about why they needed to oppose it. Which they did, and the men drove them there and then actually patrolled up and down the aisles making sure they did as they were told. 50 years later most of the women in attendance (who are still alive) report that they regret their participation and how afraid and pressured they felt, by their church leaders standing there telling them how to vote. So anyway, there's one example. I could not begin to explain the motivations of someone like Phyllis Schlafly though. And I do wonder about it very much!!
Most of the attempts I've seen by dissident rightists to define left and right seem to center around the right being more tolerant of innate hierarchy. The left outside of the USA focuses more on socialism, which of course is an attempt to level economic hierarchy. The US left focuses on some intersectional combination of race, gender, and sexuality. I guess male-female would be an aspect of that. It's certainly a big thing, but it's not the only thing.
The 'foreigners after the white women' thing is definitely a part of it, but you see concerns for jobs and fear of crime and so on.
Conservatism is well known to correlate with disgust proneness. For example:
Inbar, Y., Pizarro, D., Iyer, R., & Haidt, J. (2012). Disgust sensitivity, political conservatism, and voting. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3(5), 537-544.
Overall conservatism correlated variously with disgust proneness around r = 0.20 in a sample of n = 25,588. They also verified this on an international sample of n = 5,457 people from 121 different countries. Their questions included things like:
* "I never let any part of my body touch the toilet seat in a public washroom."
* It's disgusting to: "take a sip of soda, and then realize that you drank from the glass that an acquaintance of yours had been drinking from’’
* It's disgusting to: "inflate a new unlubricated condom, using your mouth"
There are many other results like this, but it's well established that conservatives are disgust-prone - much more than any of the attraction patterns I write about in this post.
I agree that ethnocentrism in men can be motivated by a desire to keep women (and other resources) away from competitors. On the other hand, conservative women are often ethnocentric, and women have even become more concerned about immigration than men in America: https://www.newsweek.com/immigration-migrants-poll-gallup-women-1896166
Holism vs Analytic thinking is an interesting divide, contrasting people who prioritize relationships vs those who break things down to understand them. For example, if you had to group bees with one other thing, would it be A) honey or B) butterflies? Answering A is holistic and B is analytic. Interestingly, a collection of 5 studies with total n > 5000...
Talhelm, T., Haidt, J., Oishi, S., Zhang, X., Miao, F. F., & Chen, S. (2015). Liberals think more analytically (more “WEIRD”) than conservatives. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41(2), 250-267.
...found Westerners are more analytic than others, and liberal Westerners are more analytic than conservative Westerners. Even briefly training people to think analytically caused them to form more liberal opinions.
Opposite findings are found with fear of death, or alcohol: Priming people to think about death, or giving them a few beers, makes them more conservative. Then, too, we also have longstanding personality traits that relate to conservatism/leftism, like Openness to Experience and Typical Intellectual Engagement, on which leftists (and Westerners) are higher, and Conscientiousness, Honesty, and Need For Closure, on which conservatives are higher.
So while I don't have an interesting story about dysfunctional gender relationships in Utah, I can also offer what I think is a coherent explanation for the difference between the left and right: Leftists wonder about and question things, and conservatives take what's obvious. Given the sorry failure of philosophy as a discipline, and the even sorrier state of wokeness in the modern world, it isn't clear that the left is really better than the right. Still, for better or for worse, while I do fit your schema as being relatively unconcerned about controlling women, I am also a Western, analytic, hard-to-gross-out, not-afraid-to-die, sober-at-the-present-moment, extremely-high-in-Openness, moderate leftist.
Viewed in this way, your wondering about this very much is a trait that underlies your general left-of-center attitudes. Meanwhile Phyllis Schlafly, Georgia Meloni, and my female conservative relatives aren't concerned with women being controlled by men, and even take dominant postures vis-a-vis men. They just don't think too hard, and aren't fooled by the kinds of fancy words I like to throw their way.
While I overall agree, I don't know about your relatives, but I would bet Schlafly, Meloni, Kristi Noam, and Pam Bondi, for instance, think *very* hard about how to advance their careers.
Ok! I slept a bit, read it again, repeated, and yea... this all seems about right. The point on homosexuality being sort of one end of the spectrum seems insightful and makes sense.
One thing I might add about cultural symbols of attractiveness, such as lipstick and high heels, is that they are intentional signals. That is very valuable in a species that does not have the equivalent signals of "going into heat" for females. Choosing to adorn yourself with cultural symbols suggesting a sign saying "Help wanted: Mating partner" is going to get a lot of attention and be attractive to the extend people are interested in the job. It can be overdone, of course, as humans are picky about their partner choices, so simply wearing a tank top with "DTF" across the chest isn't your best option perhaps, but whatever signals interest in receiving sexual advances is going to be appealing to those who are interested in making sexual advances.
Put another way, when you are hungry there are many things that can make a good restaurant, but the most important aspect is usually having an "Open" sign hanging in the window.
The cryptic ovulation of females is an interesting feature of our biology. What especially interests me about the Barbie Dimension is something I didn't really get into in the post, which is that the signals are not exactly culturally dependent. Granted, a few are. But many of them are part of an effort to appear fertile - not merely receptive, but fertile. Lipstick colors the lips, corsets lower WHR, shaving the legs reduces the appearance of age. And several of the desired traits there, such as large breasts or protruding hips, are fertility signals that a person can't fake without surgery (or at least, not in a swimsuit).
In other words, carrying around a green traffic light only works if people are turned on by the color green to begin with. We're not stupid, and despite claims to the contrary, beauty isn't merely in the eye of the beholder. For long and long has Venus been consciously enhancing her attractiveness; this is why even after thousands of years, her symbol remains the hand mirror: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/venus-and-mars
Yes, there is definitely an interplay between the cultural aspects of "I am ready to go" and the more natural "I am a fertile woman" aspects. How much any particular aspect is a mix of culture and nature is pretty specific. Corsets are more popular in places where not having a fat belly is desirable, for example. Grey powdered wigs are fashionable in certain times and places, but (presumably) women compensate by looking younger in other ways.
We see the traffic light is only attractive if people already like the color aspect when we look at people over doing it. Street walkers are often not really that attractive, for example, unless that is specifically what you are looking for. Yet at the same time there is definite cultural contingency in what is considered over doing it, and often what "doing it" even counts as.
You say: ". (And there’s barely anything in the lower area, because that my survey would have had to be filled with items like Malodorous, Cross Eyed, Pyromaniac, and Bag Lady.) "
Doesn't that direction lead in the more masculine direction? The male sexual dimorphisms? It would be interesting to see how bi or even homosexual men would or did factor into the study. I could imagine that there are going to be results that fall into the extremes for liking feminine and neotenised features too...
That graph combining factors 2 and 5 doesn't have anything I recognize as particularly gendered on it; factors 1, 4, and 3 have much more of that kind of thing.
Unfortunately, the study was poorly designed to pick up variation between straight, bisexual, and homosexual men, since it separated attraction to men and women into two separate surveys. It *was* able pick up differences between heterosexual men and bisexual or lesbian women; women interested in women were somewhat more interested in the high side of factor 4 towards athleticism and maturity, while men interested in women were more interested in the low side towards youthfulness and childbearing.
What do we desire in women? I think it's a bit of everything.
BvB is just racial. The correlation is very good (.91 across states)
See https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377214981_Intelligence_and_Group_Differences_in_Preference_for_Breasts_over_Buttocks
Although those findings are strong, it's inaccurate to say BvB is "just" racial. They found that at the large scale, preferences are overwhelmingly predicted by the ancestral compostion of the region. This approach treats individial variation within each region as noise.
We could, similarly, say that temperature is "just" a function of latitude; checking by average temperature, tropics are hot and poles are cold. This approach treats seasonal variation as noise, but there's obviously a lot going on with seasons!
Leftism vs Conservatism is probably not the thing that makes some people prefer one thing over another, but control for ancestry and there may still be something interesting going on.
Excellent, thanks.
I fell in love exactly once, instantly and permanently, fifty years ago. She’s asleep upstairs right now, but we have spent most of our lives apart. I could not return her passion as a teenager, because I was afraid of losing her. My first two sexual experiences had both ended friendships I valued much more than the sex, and I was terrified of this one turning out the same way. Our eventual reunion in our fifties marked the first time I had slept with someone I liked since tenth grade. Yes, you read that right. I avoided liaisons with women I genuinely liked for 35 years. All the traits mentioned in your survey results seem superficial to me; personality as much as breast size. If they weren’t her, it was a fish or fowl choice to me.
It seems bizarre that men are expected to like the same things in every woman.
I never wanted the same things from every woman, did not admire and desire the same traits in every woman, nor was I looking for the same relationship with every woman.
I have had deeply affectionate relations with women with whom sex was never in the realm of possibility; lesbians, married women, much younger or older women—wonderful women who meant the world to me, and made my world a larger place. I desired them all, understand. “Have penis, will slaver,” right? As long as She was not in the picture.
On the other hand, by headcount, which just seems wrong, most of the women with whom I have had sexual relations have been one-off, or short term, or intermittent relationships. Each had some lead characteristic I desired, like “expensive,” “sophisticated,” or “hot.” I took hot to the beach, sophisticated to the boss’s party, expensive to the play. Is this not the usual? I think it might be. All the temps, if you’ll pardon the term, had two things in common; they were conventionally pretty and they weren’t people I wanted around. I filled their bill in some particular, they filled one of mine, and that was that. Of course they all had one other thing in common: Not My One.
In my pose as an eligible young man, I selected for conventional traits. My darling met several of those criteria, but that was incidental. Since the day we met in high school, there have been two classes of women in my life; Her and Not Her. I find her fantastically attractive at 67, think about her body all the time. With her in my life, the idea of being with other women is on the same level with bestiality in my mind. Not my species: ick.
Biology had its way with me in my late 20s, and the marriage to my final girlfriend lasted 23 hilariously disastrous years. Then my darling found me on Facebook, and my real life began.
She is slim-figured and 5’4”, whereas I typically chose to date more showy figures and a better match for my 6’ height. She is high-intensity, glamorously vivacious, and a somewhat dominant personality, whereas my girlfriends tended to be of mid-range intellect and affect, and somewhat submissive.
Hope this tmi tl;dr gives some perspective and an interesting sidelight to your findings, thanks again.
First of all, great work! Just the sort of stuff we need now that academia's been ideologically captured. It is fun to see that most of the stereotypes about blue and red tastes in women are, in fact, justified. Of course, given stereotypes about liberal and conservative women (and men) it's going to be hard to tease out nurture and nature on this one.
A less charitable view of blue men's tastes in women is they're looking for availability rather than competence, i.e., engaging in short-term mating.
"Still, it’s hard to avoid concluding that a world ruled by the Barbie dimension would definitely be one with a lot less womanly tears, heartache, and stress about whether their bosoms or bottoms approximate the womanly ideal."
Problem is lots of women would put out the green light and then you'd just have competition by looks, etc. again.
As an aside you really ought to consider a Holm-Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons. You do 20 tests at p=0.05 one of them is going to be false-positive just by chance. Bosoms/butts and right/left seem an obvious situation (and it's not PC, but you might be catching a racial thing as there is a well-known preference for butts among black men, who tend to lean left--see Mix-A-Lot et al. (1992)).
Does sapiosexuality peak at different IQs for men and women? You constantly hear smart women complaining men don't want a woman who's smarter than *them*.
How hard would it be to make graphs for the other combinations of factors?
I'm glad you appreciate it!
I'm familiar with Bonferroni corrections, but I left that kind of statistical detail out largely because I try to write for a wider audience. (No mention of eigenvalues, percent of variance, rotations, why five factors were extracted, etc.) You can actually apply Bonferroni to the results as a reader, knowing that there were seven personality traits and three political values - multiply p by ten and find that most of the results remain significant, except for those which I explicitly said might be a fluke. Of course, you do actually risk type II errors with Bonferroni, but whatever; in the end my attitude is that either a finding will replicate someday or it won't.
Now regarding graphs - It wouldn't be too hard to make graphs for the other combinations now that I've had some practice with matplotlib, but the two others I checked (3 with 5 and 4 with 5) weren't as interesting as 1 with 4, and 2 with 5. Were you hoping to find something by studying them?
As for sapiosexuality, Gignac (2018) reported no sex difference, but LOL at Mix-A-Lot et al. (1992))
Makes sense. Yeah, precision versus communication is always a big tradeoff.
I just wondered what would come out of it. Are there other aspects of attraction we're missing? (Theoretically there are 5 choose 2=10 possible combinations.) You're not obligated to make graphs for random commenters, of course.
Thanks for looking that up for me!
I need to read through this again when I am more awake and can give it the attention it deserves. At the first worn out brain pass before bed, however, this is really interesting. I am looking forward to rereading this with a cup of coffee.
I think that your finding that conservatives disproportionately like artifice is a very interesting one. I would love to see the same questions answered by non-Western conservatives and progressives. Do conservatives in Iran feel as turned on by red lipstick? Too bad that only Western conservatives are progressive enough to share their sexual preferences for the sake of science (it would be great to be proven wrong on that point).
You speak some Arabic, don't you? If you could advertize, I'm pretty confident Middle Eastern men would answer. But actually, there's already plenty of data on their romantic preferences already. In fact my survey here can be seen as an extension or partial replication of...
https://labs.la.utexas.edu/buss/files/2015/09/universal-dimensions-of-mate-prefs-Shackelford-Schmitt-Buss-PAID-2005.pdf
...where they used ratings from several thousand participants in three dozen cultures taken from David Buss' 1989 survey. They identified four dimensions:
* Love vs. Status/Resources (Men at the left, women at the right)
* Dependable/Stable vs. Good Looks/Health (Women preferred the left, men the right)
* Education/Intelligence vs. Desire for Home/Children (This was a clear match for my factor 2 vs 5, and Women preferred partners at the left, men preferred partners at the right)
* Sociability vs. Similar Religion. (Women preferred left, men preferred right)
Unlike my data, their data was all in terms of tradeoffs, so the results also highlighted tradeoffs. But the middle East was well represented, with Iranians, Palestinians, and Israelis all participating, and their study findings appear to be universal.
Yes, you are right, men in the Middle East tend to be very unshy about what turns them on. Some of them should be willing to answer.
My experience with Middle Eastern men in America is that they're actually pretty normal and well adjusted among and towards other men. They get weird when they have to interact with women. I suspect medieval Europeans were similar, placing women in a lower category and thinking that women were more amorous than men.