Rediff reports about a recent Onepoll.com survey, the headline of which itself seems incorrect at so many levels, apart from being statistical nonsense :
What was even more surprising was a comment that followed :
This poll is wrong on so many levels. I am a guy. The actual result of the poll should be.
a. Men prefer pretty women.
b. Men prefer intelligent women.The pollster seems to have prejudices. There are pretty and intelligent women. There are also ugly and dumb women. Also, every guy i know prefer a girl who is intelligent but average looking (not ugly).
You know something is going terribly wrong with Rediff when a commenter sounds more intelligent than the article.
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April 7, 2009 at 10:15 pm
Rakshitha S Kumar
Deepak,
As far as the statistical accuracy of Onepoll’s survey is concerned, the results aren’t unfathomable on a simple X & Y graph with ugly, pretty and dumb,clever (respectively) on either extremes of both axes.
Most men would ‘ideally’ want the pretty-clever combo, but they would ‘prefer’ the dumb-bimbette version over the dumb-ugly combination. Fair enough??
And in case you’re still unconvinced about the Marie Curie vs Marilyn Monroe argument, here’s some evolutionary psychology for you to chew on.
The following is an excerpt from Psychology Today’s ’10 politically incorrect truths about human nature’. (written by Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa, both Ph.Ds)
Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)
Women’s desire to look like Barbie—young with small waist, large breasts, long blond hair, and blue eyes—is a direct, realistic, and sensible response to the desire of men to mate with women who look like her. There is evolutionary logic behind each of these features.
Men prefer young women in part because they tend to be healthier than older women. One accurate indicator of health is physical attractiveness; another is hair. Healthy women have lustrous, shiny hair, whereas the hair of sickly people loses its luster. Because hair grows slowly, shoulder-length hair reveals several years of a woman’s health status.
Men also have a universal preference for women with a low waist-to-hip ratio. They are healthier and more fertile than other women; they have an easier time conceiving a child and do so at earlier ages because they have larger amounts of essential reproductive hormones. Thus men are unconsciously seeking healthier and more fertile women when they seek women with small waists.
Until very recently, it was a mystery to evolutionary psychology why men prefer women with large breasts, since the size of a woman’s breasts has no relationship to her ability to lactate. But Harvard anthropologist Frank Marlowe contends that larger, and hence heavier, breasts sag more conspicuously with age than do smaller breasts. Thus they make it easier for men to judge a woman’s age (and her reproductive value) by sight—suggesting why men find women with large breasts more attractive.
Alternatively, men may prefer women with large breasts for the same reason they prefer women with small waists. A new study of Polish women shows that women with large breasts and tight waists have the greatest fecundity, indicated by their levels of two reproductive hormones (estradiol and progesterone).
Blond hair is unique in that it changes dramatically with age. Typically, young girls with light blond hair become women with brown hair. Thus, men who prefer to mate with blond women are unconsciously attempting to mate with younger (and hence, on average, healthier and more fecund) women. It is no coincidence that blond hair evolved in Scandinavia and northern Europe, probably as an alternative means for women to advertise their youth, as their bodies were concealed under heavy clothing.
Women with blue eyes should not be any different from those with green or brown eyes. Yet preference for blue eyes seems both universal and undeniable—in males as well as females. One explanation is that the human pupil dilates when an individual is exposed to something that she likes. For instance, the pupils of women and infants (but not men) spontaneously dilate when they see babies. Pupil dilation is an honest indicator of interest and attraction. And the size of the pupil is easiest to determine in blue eyes. Blue-eyed people are considered attractive as potential mates because it is easiest to determine whether they are interested in us or not.
The irony is that none of the above is true any longer. Through face-lifts, wigs, liposuction, surgical breast augmentation, hair dye, and color contact lenses, any woman, regardless of age, can have many of the key features that define ideal female beauty. And men fall for them. Men can cognitively understand that many blond women with firm, large breasts are not actually 15 years old, but they still find them attractive because their evolved psychological mechanisms are fooled by modern inventions that did not exist in the ancestral environment.
April 8, 2009 at 12:27 am
Deepak Iyer
@Rakshitha : That was a long comment .. I am assuming it was pasted from some source !
So my basic problem is with the ugly-intelligent classification. If you take it to that extreme, anyone would not prefer such a female to a bimbo, which is another extreme. That was the main reason why I felt the poll did not make sense.