Via Rob Henderson's newsletter: Muscularity is the strongest predictor of mating success for men. A study on males aged 18 to 59 found that muscularity is sig

Via Rob Henderson's newsletter: Muscularity is the strongest predictor of mating success for men. A study on males aged 18 to 59 found that muscularity is significantly positively associated with the number of total sexual partners and partners in the last year. Handgrip strength is correlated with self-assessed happiness, health, social confidence, overall physical attractiveness, and overall number of sexual partners. Researchers recorded short videos of 157 different men. Next, they had a group of male viewers watch videos of the men and asked, “How likely is it that this man would win a physical fight with another man?” Then the researchers had a group of female viewers watch the same videos and asked, “How sexually attractive is this man?” Eighteen months later, the men in the videos completed a questionnaire asking about their sexual history of the previous 18 months. How tough a guy looked to men was a much stronger predictor of mating success than how attractive he looked to women. In this study, researchers asked two different groups of women to look at photos of different men and rate how strong the men looked. Results showed that the rated strength of a male body accounts for 70 percent of the variance in attractiveness (this is a massive effect size). From the paper: “None of the women produced a preference for weaker men…in both samples, the strongest men were the most attractive, the weakest men were the least attractive.” See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513809000397 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905... See also https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513807000669?casa_token=Tz2riD_swQEAAAAA:qsyZQaJ9BKPBSq629QbDissA9rwW5nwup7FSrrk9oEUEJ4XP6Uv_Nz0awHMGcMr0pmb1FvoZrg https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513817304105 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905... https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2017.1819 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2017...