What actually makes you attractive? | Oestrogen Expert Dr Sarah Hill

attraction for me is such a delicate thing it's almost it's almost un it's well it is unconscious and I I we often think of attractiveness as maybe you know this body part on the person is a certain shape or their face looks like this but the older I've gotten and the more I look back on my life The more I've come to believe that there's almost like a thousand tiny little micro expressions or something in the air which makes us attracted to someone else and so when we're giving people advice on how to be attractive

I wonder if most most of the advice is pretty futile because it's deeper than that right it's so much deeper than that yeah so I and and you're totally right about that I mean the fact is attraction is idiosyncratic and finicky right so all of us when we think about the things that we find sexy and attractive um there's going to be a lot of ways that you're going to disagree with other people right like you're going to think that somebody like is so sexy to you and other people might say yeah you know she's

all right but it doesn't really do it for them um and there's a there is an element to our attraction that is very person specific and I syncratic right and may might there be some evolutionary Roots behind all of that maybe right so it could be for example that the kinds of qualities that you find you know just really attractive in another person that that make you feel so attracted to them might be cued that they are a really compatible mate for you and maybe that's why you have a very sort of you specific response

to that person but there are also Dimensions that are shared right so we know for example that men tend to place a greater emphasis relative to women on qes related to physical attractiveness and that physical attractiveness tends to be related to things that have historically been related to fertility right so for example having an hourglass body shape we know that this is something that's related to a woman's level of sex hormones and that women with higher levels of estrogen for example are more likely to put on fat around their butt and their thighs and less

likely to put on fat around their waist um relative to women with higher or lower levels of estrogen right as estrogen levels decline when women age their bodies become more straight up and down than they do hourglass and this has to do with changes in estrogen and um and so we know that that's something that men generally desire to a greater extent than women right we also know that men tend to PR a place a greater emphasis on cues related to youthfulness right so the cues that are related to H maturity in a face that's

something that women tend have aen preference for so if somebody has sort of an older you know an older face um they they tend to be seen as more attractive like so like 50-year-old George Clooney seems more attractive most women think that that looks more attractive than you know 25-year-old um George Clooney and and we see that because our brains have inherited this tendency to find cues related to wisdom and status and resource acquisition all of which come with greater age um women have inh have inherited that preference for those kinds of qualities because that

would have given them a mating related Advantage relative to preferring a more youthful face conversely for men they would have been penalized if they had a preference for maturity in the face of a potential partner because if you like women who have signs of maturity and wisdom and resource acquisition ability you'd probably choose somebody who's approaching menopause right and that's not going to lead to any Gene transmission at all right and so we tend to see that men have a heightened preference for related to youthfulness and faces and so even though yes there are difference

or there are differences between individuals and there is some idiosyncrasy that tends to characterize human mate Choice there are a lot of things that we can actually make some pretty strong predictions about too so there are some overall themes that tend to characterize men's and women's partner preferences is it true that men are less attractive to successful women is there any sort of evolutionary basis for that I do know that research finds that men don't place as much of a priority on that that compared to women but I don't know that they penalize them exactly

right if you had somebody if you show a man a photograph of a woman who's dressed like a CEO and she's gorgeous and you show a man a picture of a woman who's dressed like a Burger King service you know person and she's drop dead gorgeous men are going to find her similarly attractive in both conditions it doesn't matter the woman can be doing it doesn't matter what the woman is doing and there's been research that shows this they'll show men and women photographs of people in different types of outfits and the men's ratings of

how attractive the women are has just everything to do with how attractive the women are um for women rating men it all depends on what they're wearing right do they show cues to Resource access do they not show cues to Resource access and women tend to modulate how physically attractive they find men based on whether or not they have these cues related to provisioning Ability so I don't know if there was a really attractive and there are a lot of really attractive uh females in positions of power um men will find them just as attractive

as they do somebody who's not in a position of power although they may be you know potentially less likely to choose them as a long-term mate um you know if there's issues related to power dynamics and that sort of thing that they don't want to mess with what about jealousy and specifically is the term intersex of women being jealous of women men being jealous of men you mentioned a second ago that if you know 60% of the college educated or college attendees or 70% of them are women and there's only a pool of 30% which

are men isn't there going to be a ton of competition amongst women and what direction does that competition travel in is it low status women having competition with high status women or is it what is it I mean the competition when you have cases where there's an asymmetrical sex ratio and like we do on college campuses I mean women are very competitive amongst one another for access to the men that are available and oftentimes the way that this like the form that this tends to take is that women become increasingly likely to be willing to

do whatever men want of them in order to be chosen as a mate and what we've tended to see on college campuses is because men are more oriented toward casual sex and non-committed relationships than women are what we tend to see is that short-term hookups and Casual Sex tend to be very common on college campuses and in part this is the result of the fact that women are competing for access to mates and one of the ways that they can compete for access to Mates is to be willing to do whatever it is that men

want in terms of um providing you know the structure of their relationship and if men are only looking for casual sex even though women are tend to be more oriented toward long term relationships they're going to be um more inclined to just give in to whatever it is that the men desire um as a means to be able to get a partner are women more competitive with beautiful women or women that are less stereotypically and socially considered beautiful oh women are more competitive with beautiful women I mean there's just no question about that and the

reason for this is that given that this is something that men desire and their Partners um this is the primary Dimension by which women can compete for access to Partners right and so this is the big this is the big one um given men place a really pretty strong priority on physical attractiveness in their choice of Partners and in fact one of the biggest predictors of a woman's upward social mobility in the US is how physically attractive a woman is and in fact that's a bigger predictor of a woman's upward Mobility than her education level

or even her socioeconomic status of origin when you say upward social Mobility what do you mean mean the ability to transcend the social class in which you were born okay so if you're somebody who was uh you know working class or middle class or upper class your ability to transcend those ranks of um of you know socioeconomic status is um more strongly predicted by physical attractiveness than a woman's education level and that's like a tough thing to have to that's a tough nut to you know a tough nut to crack tough pill to swallow so

women are more competitive against beautiful women in the lens of society and stereotypically yes and and one of the ways that women compete against one another is by derogating their competitors right and derogating their competitors just meaning saying mean things about them or saying mean things to them and a lot of times those mean things that they have to say have to do with a woman's attractiveness right they'll try to downplay how attractive she is to other people by saying things like um you know oh she's had a lot of work done right that's the

thing that you'll hear women say um about each other or to men about other women and and this is something that's done to try to manipulate other people's perceptions of that woman's value but because attractiveness plays such an important role in terms of a woman's ability to successfully attract a romantic partner um this is a dimension in which women are fiercely competitive even when they don't want to say that they are and want to pretend that they're not right I think that the Barbie movie was you know sort of got at some of these kinds

of issues and just this idea that women want to pretend like none of this stuff matters right and that it's not that important and that we don't value this stuff but nonetheless um this is still a very important domain of competition for women always has been I think it probably always will be are women more likely to trust a beautiful woman or a woman that is less stereotypically Beautiful cuz I was thinking about this um this thing about gay male shopping sales associates uh-huh it was a test that you did right yeah so this was

I have um one of my former this is digging deep so um this one of my former students um who was really into and so he's a gay man um and just to set the stage for all of this he became really interested in the friendship that tends to form between gay men and straight women which is actually you know it there's a this is something that happens everywhere so having like the the gay man and the straight woman friendship is something that's not just you know something that we see in Europe and the US

it is sort of cross-culturally ubiquitous and he was trying to understand this relationship and one of the things that he noted in his research is that um the people who tend to form friendships most frequently with gay men are beautiful women um it's like attractive women who who are more competitive and potentially May perceive more competition on the part of other women and they form these friendships because gay men can provide them with really important information um that's relevant on the mating Market that is not colored by one intersexual competition right so if you say

to these pants make me look fat right your um your gay man friend isn't going to tell you no they look great even though they make you look terrible because they're trying to send you out and look terrible right so there's no like there's no thread of competition in that relationship and there's also not the fear that this person's just trying to get you in bed right and so there's this there's this really nice trust um that women can have with um with gay men if you love The D CEO brand and you watch this

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