Science Thinks It Knows What Kind of Women Straight Guys Want

The Way to Most Straight Men’s Groins is Through a Lower Waist-to-Hip Ratio.

Science gets a bad rap in a lot of science fiction movies. It gave us The Thing, The Human Centipede, The Fly, Re-Animator, Jurassic Park, Planet of the Apes, and the Alien series, which started out strong but lost its way during Aliens 3. Women who hope to attract straight men look to what passes as medical science for guidance in how to judge their bodies and how to expect men to respond to them. Right, wrong, or indifferent on an individual basis, science has some opinions about what straight men in general look for in a lady they want to bed.

Somewhere between 1830 and 1850, Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist began to develop what would come to be the terror of all women: the Body Mass Index (BMI). Not intended to be a tool for medical assessment, a decade later it was embraced by Francis Galton, a Victorian Brit who used its concept of the “ideal” human in the creation of his infamous theory of Eugenics.

BMI was known by other names until the July 1972 edition of the Journal of Chronic Diseases, within which physiologist Ancel Keys proposed the term. He admitted that it wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t worse than anything else available. Still used today after a few tweaks, any woman who enters a doctor’s office, gets weighed, and has her height measured is affixed a BMI and its associated stigma or distinction.

Medical judgments aside, what, if anything, does a woman’s BMI have to do with her attractiveness to men who like attractive women? As mentioned earlier, not all men crave or respond sexually to the same kind of women. There are, however, trends. And, unsurprisingly, they relate to reproduction. The association is likely subconscious and has more to do with a man’s genes than his brain. Today, there are enough of us that we have the luxury of spacing pregnancies or even opting out of the entire procreation game. For most of human history, that has not been the case.

When infant mortality was high, adult lifespans were short, and contraceptive options were few, a man needed to choose a literal mate whose body radiated fertility and the promise of continuing the family line and expanding their larger social collective. A woman who was too frail or boyish might not be able to conceive, carry a pregnancy to term, survive gestation, give birth to live young, and then repeat the process multiple times.

Instead, women with large breasts and wide hips were seen as an embodiment of fecundity, especially if they had a narrower waist. Variations of the hourglass figure continue to be considered ideal even though different silhouettes have trended for short periods of time throughout history. Straight men, especially those who want to be fathers, have an affection for women with a low-to-medium BMI.

This was supported by a 2006 study that appeared in Eye on Psi Chi. A speed-dating experiment in 2020 supported this. As reported in Social Psychological and Personality Science, researchers were told by straight male participants that they found the women with narrow waists and wide hips to be the most attractive.

Interestingly, in 2012 a study was published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior that observed the preferences of straight men who did not wish to be fathers or raise children. The science revealed that these men were more likely to prefer smaller-breasted women with thicker waists.

Science has revealed that straight men, based purely upon a woman’s appearance, find those with a low-to-medium BMI more desirable than those who are underweight or overweight. Women, interestingly, can often be their own worst critics, yet female study participants underestimated how much thinner the men who also participated in the research said they wanted women to be.