Female Mate Value

A fundamental assumption of adaptive explanations of female attractiveness is that bodily features that males judge as attractive reliably signal youthfulness, healthiness, and fertility or female mate value. One of the bodily features, waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), is a reliable indicator of a female’s reproductive age, sex hormone profi le, parity and risk for various diseases. Systematic variation in the size of WHR also systematically affects the judgment of female attractiveness, healthiness, and youthfulness. This article summarizes recent fi ndings about the relationship between female’s WHR and various factors affecting reproductive capability and risk for diseases. Research on the relationship between attractiveness and WHR is discussed in light of some methodological objections to previous research. Finally, cross-cultural and historical data are presented that suggest that the relationship between WHR and female attractiveness is not culture-specifi c and not inculcated by modern Western fashion dictates or media. According to evolution based theories of mate selection, one of the adaptive problems faced by human ancestral males was to assess a woman’s mate value, or the degree to which she would enhance his reproductive success. Women’s mate value is determined by numerous variables such as hormone profi le, reproductive age, fecundity, parity and resistance to diseases, none of which can be directly observed. It has been proposed that information about some of these variables was reliably conveyed by specifi c characteristics of female bodies and that selection therefore produced psychological mechanisms in men to attend to bodily features in assessing a woman’s mate value [1,2]. It is the fundamental assumption of evolutionary mate selection theories that physical attractiveness is largely refl ective of reliable cues to a woman’s mate value [3–5]. Two different research approaches have been used to demonstrate the link between physical attractiveness and mate value. First are the studies in which people identify those features they fi nd attractive; it is then ascertained whether such features are correlated with variables comprising mate value. Early research of categorizing various facial features that people fi nd attractive [6], recent research by Johnston and his associates on computer generated beautiful faces [7,8] and research by Perrett