I was traveling this week and visited my hotel’s gym yesterday morning. There was one other guy at the gym, and he was a total beast. Big, bearded, and super muscular, he was throwing around 50-pound dumbbells (the heaviest in the gym) like they were nothing. I thought he was a total stud, but I wondered if females would find him attractive. Not being a female myself (and even if I were, I’d be a sample size of one), I have to turn to research to answer this question and fortunately, there’s a research paper right on point.
In Why Is Muscularity Sexy? Tests of the Fitness Indicator Hypothesis, UCLA evolutionary psychologists David Frederick and Martie Haselton addressed the extent to which females find muscularity attractive.
Muscularity Signals Genetic Fitness
According to Frederick and Haselton, certain traits like symmetry, attractiveness, and muscularity indicate a male’s good condition and heritable genetic fitness. They argue that females are likely to prefer males with these traits as they tend to produce more viable offspring.
However, there’s a catch for females who choose a hot, muscular mate. While attractiveness and muscularity enhance a male’s mating success, it also means he’s more likely to seek multiple partners and invest less in offspring. On the other hand, less attractive men, who have fewer mating opportunities, tend to invest more in their mates and offspring.
Thus, females weigh the benefits of an attractive, muscular mate who might not be a great partner versus a less fit or attractive one who is likely more committed.
Of course, these considerations happen largely subconsciously as the result of millions of years of evolution.
The Inverted-U of Male Muscularity
Many things in life follow an “inverted-U” pattern — meaning that there is an optimal amount of something or that you can have too much of a good thing. An example about which I’ve previously written is that while too little free time is problematic, having too much free time is also a negative. Here’s a diagram of this concept:
Frederick and Haselton found this same inverted-U pattern in female preference for male muscularity, reflecting the trade-off between an attractive yet less suited partner and a less attractive but devoted one. Their experiments involved showing volunteer women various pictures of shirtless males and quizzing them on how attractive they perceived each model to be. Here’s a chart from the study showing the inverted-U:
Note that in the above chart “Image 1” represents a nonmuscular man on the Muscle Silhouette Measure (MSM), whereas “”Image 8” represents an extremely muscular man, with the other images of models falling along the continuum.
The researchers conducted six experiments/surveys in all, including quizzing the women on the muscularity of their past sexual partners as well as collecting information on the number of sexual partners of male volunteers with various levels of muscularity. The experiments confirmed their hypothesis that females “view muscular men as more sexually desirable than both nonmuscular men and very muscular men,” or in an inverted-U.
An additional interesting finding was that women in the study reported that their short-term sexual partners (think one-night stands and the like) were more muscular than their long-term relationship partners. This reflects knowledge (at least subconsciously) of the trade-off between attractiveness and long-term commitment from male mates.
I guess the message for you guys out there, is yes, hit the weights, but maybe not too hard.
I was really hoping that the study concluded that ladies loved husky fellas with robust torsos. The extra weight a man might carry could signal that he could survive the winter.