In humans, this might mean women are more choosy when it came to finding a potential co-parent.Īnother theory, called the gender similarities hypothesis, proposes that men and women are more alike than they are different. The theory suggests that whichever sex - male or female - invests more work in raising their offspring will be pickier when looking for a mate. The other issue is that a lot of the science is old: A study from the 1970s, for example, lays out a theory called the “parental investment theory,” which Whyte and his team cite in their own study. Here’s the background - Theories about sexual attraction between males and females are as variable as sexual preferences, and there’s no unifying theory to draw on. “It’s just that at different times in our life, men or women place different levels of emphasis on that preference.”
“There’s much more symmetry in our preferences than we ever give credit to,” Whyte says. He tells Inverse that heterosexual online daters of either gender may be more alike than we realized.īut there is a key nuance to these findings: The age of each dater influenced their preferences, the study shows. Stephen Whyte is the lead author of the study and a research fellow at the Queensland University of Technology. The results are both surprising and very predictable. Ultimately, the answer may not be what you think. Their findings are detailed in a study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE. But with so many myths, stereotypes, and plain old untruths about sex and love obscuring the science like a cloud of pheromones at a high school dance, it can be hard to know what’s real and what’s fantasy.Ī group of researchers from Australia decided to find out: What are straight men and women actually attracted to? To answer, they looked at the data of thousands of Australian men and women on internet dating sites and asked daters about what they found sexy in a potential mate. If the internet is anything to go by, straight men and women want very, very different things when it comes to finding a romantic partner.