Why Women Have Sex (6 page)

The most plausible interpretation of these results is that women are attracted to men who are likely to be “good dads” when choosing long-term
mates, but are attracted to the honest signals of health that masculinity provides when they are most likely to become impregnated. This interpretation, however, raises a puzzle: Why wouldn’t women be attracted to highly masculine males for all mating relationships, from dangerous liaisons through lifelong love?

The answer lies in the fact that the more masculine men are less sexually faithful. They are more likely to be the risk-taking womanizing “bad boys” among the male population. Consequently, most women face a trade-off: If they choose the less masculine-looking man, they get a better father and a more sexually loyal mate, but they lose out in the currency of genes for good health. If they choose the more masculine man, they can endow their children with good genes for health, but must suffer the costs of a man who channels some of his sexual energy toward other women. So women’s preferences reveal a dual mating strategy, an attempt to get the best of both worlds.

They can choose to have a long-term relationship with a slightly less masculine man who will be sexually loyal and invest in her children, while opportunistically having sex with the more masculine men when they are most likely to get pregnant. DNA fingerprinting studies reveal that roughly 12 percent of women get pregnant by men other than their long-term mates, suggesting that some, but certainly not all, women pursue this dual mating strategy.

Cultures differ, however, in how much women are attracted to facial masculinity. Psychologist Ian Penton-Voak and his colleagues found that Jamaican women found masculine-looking men sexier than did British women. They interpret this cultural difference as a product of the higher rates of infectious diseases in Jamaica compared to England. In cultures in which infectious disease is a more pervasive problem, women seem to shift their sexual choices to men who possess honest signals of good health—men whose faces have been shaped by testosterone.

People are drawn to those who are
collectively
considered attractive—so much so that a number of women in our study reported having sex with
attractive people even when they had no desire to pursue a long-term relationship:

I became friends with a man who was very handsome, but for whom I felt no desire to pursue a relationship. He asked me to stay the night in his bed, and despite having misgivings . . . I couldn’t resist. He was conventionally handsome but very edgy and nonconformist and he like[d] me a lot.

—predominantly heterosexual woman, age 36

What does it mean for someone to be “conventionally” handsome? Developmental psychologist Judith Langlois studies the meaning of “attractiveness” in human faces by having subjects rate composite faces—made up of sixteen or more images morphed together—against the individual faces used to create the composites. The composite faces were rated more attractive—and, according to Langlois, if “you take a female composite (averaged) face made of thirty-two faces and overlay it on the face of an extremely attractive female model, the two images line up almost perfectly, indicating that the model’s facial configuration is very similar to the composites’ facial configuration.” The same was true of men’s composite faces.

Langlois has also found that infants as young as one year old respond to this kind of “averaged” attractiveness in adult faces. Researchers varied their attractiveness levels by putting on attractive and unattractive masks that were carefully and realistically molded to their faces. The men and women then interacted with, and attempted to initiate play with, the one-year-olds. They discovered that the infants expressed more positive moods and were more involved in play when they interacted with the researchers who were wearing the attractive masks. Even when the stimulus is a doll, studies show that infants spend more time playing with attractive versus unattractive dolls.

There is also a large body of research showing that we are drawn to good-looking people because we make assumptions that they possess a whole host of other desirable traits. They are rated as also being interesting, sociable, independent, dominant, exciting, sexy, well adjusted, socially skilled, and successful. There is some support for these stereotypes.
Attractiveness is moderately linked with popularity, good interpersonal skills, and occupational success, and, to some extent, with physical health, mental health, and sexual experience, which may be partly because attractive people are treated more favorably.

Singers such as Elvis Presley in the 1950s, the Beatles in the ’60s, and Jim Morrison of the Doors in the ’70s through contemporary rappers such as Kanye West, Jay-Z, and 50 Cent are—and have always been—famously attractive to women. Part of their sex appeal has undoubtedly been a result of the popularity and social status they command. But there is also a
sound
of sexiness, something about male voices that gives women a sexual buzz.

Voice pitch is the most striking feature of human speech. Before puberty, male and female voices are quite similar. At puberty, remarkable changes occur. Boys experience a dramatic increase in the length of their vocal folds, which become 60 percent longer than those of girls. Longer vocal folds and vocal tracts produce a deeper, more resonant voice pitch. Testosterone triggers the change in boys at puberty, and high levels of testosterone predict deeper voices among adult men.

The first scientific evidence of women’s preferences for deeper male voices came from a study in which women rated the deep, resonant voices such as that of Luciano Pavarotti more attractive than the higher-pitched voices such as that of Truman Capote. This may not come as much of a surprise. But three more recent investigations show that mating context is critical in how women choose among men’s voices. Evolutionary anthropologist David Puts obtained voice recordings of thirty men attempting to persuade a woman to go out on a romantic date. Then 142 heterosexual women listened to the recordings and rated each man’s attractiveness in two mating contexts—for a short-term sexual encounter and for a long-term committed relationship. Although women said the deeper voices were more attractive in both mating contexts, they dramatically preferred the deeper voices when considering them as prospects for purely sexual, short-term encounters. Moreover, women in the fertile phase of their ovulation cycle showed the strongest sexual attraction to men with deep voices.

One hint as to why is found in studies of female frogs, which gravitate toward deep, resonant croaks of male bullfrogs, a reliable signal—for frogs—of a mate’s size and health. Now, research on people has revealed two similar reasons that help to explain why women find some men’s voices more attractive than others.

The first involves bilateral body symmetry—the health-and-good-genes signal that a person can better withstand the stresses of diseases, injuries, and genetic mutations during development. Body symmetry is more likely to produce deep voices. So when a woman finds the resonance of a man’s voice even sexier during her fertile, ovulatory phase, she is attracted to the sound of symmetry for her possible offspring. Attractive-sounding voices also indicate a man’s body morphology. Psychologist Susan Hughes found that men with sexy voices, in contrast to their strident-sounding peers, have a higher shoulder-to-hip ratio, the attractive V-shaped body. Women judge men with lower-pitched voices to be healthier, more masculine, more physically dominant, somewhat older, more socially dominant, and more well-respected by their peers.

Do women’s attractions to sexy voices translate into higher sexual success for lower-pitched men? One study found that American men with lower-pitched voices had experienced a larger number of sex partners than men with higher-pitched voices. A second study, of the Hadza, a population of hunter-gatherers living in Tanzania, found that men with lower-pitched voices had a greater number of children, possibly as a consequence of having greater sexual access to fertile women.

So it’s not that carrying a tune makes much difference—a baritone voice like the actor James Earl Jones’s might be mesmerizing because of all it signals about good health, good genes, the capacity to protect, and success in social hierarchies. Many of those sexually alluring musicians had another attractive quality to their credit—a body in motion.

Physical movement depends on the strength of a person’s bones, muscle tone, and motor control. The ability to move in a coordinated manner, especially through repetitive motions such as walking or dancing, reveals information about a person’s phenotype: It broadcasts information
about age—notice the difference between the dancing prowess of younger versus older dancers. It also conveys information about energy level, health, and biomechanical efficiency, whether we know it or not.

We found that some women had sex with men simply because they were good dancers:

I was told that if a man could dance he could perform in bed. I did not believe this and wanted to see if it was true. I met someone who danced on the same order of a stripper. He danced for me a couple of times.
We
ended up having sex and yes he was as good in bed as he was on the dance floor. . . . He literally danced while having sex. It was wonderful.

—heterosexual woman, age 29

He was hot. The fact that he was a good dancer made him that much more appealing. I really enjoy dancing myself, so when I see that a person has rhythm, it turns me on.

—heterosexual woman, age 26

Research reveals that women find certain body movements to be more attractive than others. One study had women view digitally masked or pixelated images of men dancing. Women were more attracted to men who displayed larger and more sweeping movements. They also rated these men more erotic. Just as men’s faces differ from one another in their degree of masculinity, men differ in the masculinity of the way they walk. Men and women have very distinctive walks: Men’s upper bodies sway laterally more than women’s. Women, in contrast to men, have a hip rotation in opposite phase to their vertical leg movement, creating that classic hip swivel.

In a fascinating experiment, psychologist Meghan Provost and her colleagues videotaped a series of men and women walking. The subjects donned suits with reflecting light markers attached; additional markers were placed on their exposed skin. Then the researchers created a computer program that took the videotaped data and converted it into points of light that “walked” on a continuum from very feminine to very masculine
. Fifty-five women not using oral contraceptives viewed these walking lights on a computer screen and chose the precise walking motion they found most attractive. Women preferred male walkers who were above average on the masculinity of their walk. Women in the fertile phase of their ovulation cycle expressed a stronger preference for masculine walkers than did women in the nonfertile phase of their cycle. These findings provide further support for the attraction value of masculinity—features created by higher levels of testosterone during adolescence that provide women with an honest signal of a man’s health.

Other patterns of men’s movements provide women with valuable mating information. Nonreciprocal same-sex touching—when a man touches another man’s back, for example—is a well-documented signal of dominance. Women see “touchers” as having more status, a key component of a man’s mate value. Space maximization movements, as when a man stretches his arms or extends his legs, are another dominance signal. Those who display open body positioning—for example, by not having their arms folded across the chest—are judged to be more potent and persuasive.

Evolutionary psychologist Karl Grammer and his colleagues conducted a study in three singles bars in Pennsylvania. They coded men’s nonverbal behaviors and then examined which ones were linked with making “successful contact” with a woman in the bar—defined as achieving at least one minute of continuous conversation with her. They found five classes of men’s movements linked with successful contact: more frequent short, direct glances at women; more space maximization movements; more location changes; more nonreciprocated touches; and a smaller number of closed-body movements.

Women are drawn to men who signal interest through eye contact and open body posture and social status through space maximization, nonreciprocal intrasexual touch, and a masculine manner of walking.

Sexual attraction isn’t simply a matter of physical bodies drawn magnetically together in search of compatibility. For some women, personality is equally, if not more, important in generating a sustained sexual spark:

It is certainly possible to have sex with someone [whom] you find purely physically attractive, or only feel emotionally connected to, but without a combination of both, the sex feels incomplete somehow. . . . In one case, my partner who I had initially been attracted to . . . showed signs of an unstable personality and many insensitive qualities. Though I remained greatly attracted to his physique, the further I became aware of his actions . . . the less I wanted to continue having sex with him. Conversely, I have been in [a] relationship where I was initially drawn to the person on the basis of their incredible personality and not their looks.