Young, Dumb, and In Love

Young, Dumb and In Love

Thanks to the miracle of modern science we have some breaking news: a percentage of men are more attracted to dumb-looking women. Your tax dollars at work (at least in the form of student loan dollars).

Several graduate students at the University of Texas – Austin recently released an article in a scientific journal about their experiment on what they call “sexual exploitability hypothesis” which is based on the differences between male and female reproductive strategies as humans have evolved. It’s the same old song and dance. Men are biologically urged to spread their seed far and wide to create the maximum amount of children while women are inclined to say yes to good providers and men more likely to stick around. The assumption of the experiment is that these ingrained urges are hard to shake.

The purpose of the experiment was to see if a woman who is less alert is more sexually arousing to men – or in the words of the study authors, “sexually exploitable”.

Putting all of this into an experiment proved to be quite the system of levers and pulleys. The authors first invited one group of undergraduate students (male and female) to suggest “specific actions, cues, body postures, attitudes, and personality characteristics” that would indicate a woman is more likely to be receptive to sexual advances. At the end of the day, there were 88 signals that the group believed signaled this very thing. The cues spanned from “lip lick/bite,” “intoxicated”, “sleepy”, “unintelligent”, “punk”, and “touching breast”.

The authors scoured the internet (or at least their friend’s facebook pages) for pictures of women performing or exhibiting each of the 88 cues. They then ran these pictures and descriptions past another control group of undergrads to make sure they matched up. I’m assuming the “unintelligent” women were the ones standing next to a person wearing an “I’m with stupid” t-shirt in their profile pics.

Then a third group was brought into the study. (Thank God it’s a large university.) Now 76 males (not previously included in the groups) were shown the pictures in no particular order. For each picture they were asked to rate it based on the woman’s attractiveness, how easy it would be to “exploit” her for sex, and her appeal as either a short-term or long-term partner. It’s worth noting that only straight students participated.

Results were mixed. More physical cues made no difference on the raters. Things like height or weight were not seen as indicators of lay-ability or particularly tempting as long or short term partners.

Other cues did have more of an effect however. Cues like “low self-esteem”, “recklessness”, “intoxication”, and “fatigue” were rated as easier to seduce. Shocking right? But those who exhibited these cues were also rated as more attractive than women who appeared coherent and sober.

The good news (?) is that these finding seemed to only apply to short-term flings. When asked to rate the same traits for a more long-term relationship or marriage, “dim-witted” didn’t have quite the same appeal.

This whole study leads me to believe that everything you need to know about people can be divined by watching animals. Bear with me. (Bear! Get it? I crack me up.) On the Nat Geo channel they are always showing film of lions hunting gazelle. They cut the weakest looking gazelle off from the herd and use their strength in numbers to EAT the lonely gazelle.

Lonely gazelle = doe-eyed drunk girls teetering on high heels running after their group of girlfriends.

Just so we’re all clear, the scientific term “exploitation” in this instance just means that a woman is willing or can be easily pressured into having sex. This includes women that are the aggressors.

So in sum, if I want a casual fling I should act dumb but for more long lasting relationship possibilities, I can stick to being a bossy know-it-all. Oh, was that not the point of the experiment? This is good news for me because despite frequently being wrong on accident I probably could never purposefully be stupid. I’m perfectly willing to admit when I’m wrong, but since I refuse to throw a game of Candyland with small children on principle, there’s very little chance I’ll lie to get picked up by you, lazy-guy-down-the-bar.

But it’s nice to know I can always fall back on “drunk” to test this hypothesis. You know, for science.

If you want to nitty gritty, here’s the article I’m pulling from because the actual study in publishing in The Journal of Evolution and Human Behavior and is only available if you have a subscription.