When it comes to finding a mate, men may not be looking for charm and intelligence, but rather a woman who looks dumb - or drunk - enough for a one-night-stand, according to a new study.
In an article in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, University of Texas at Austin graduate student Cari Goetz and her team focused on the so-called sexual exploitability hypothesis - the idea that men are genetically programmed to look for 'easy' sex.
Tests on 76 male students found that they rated vulnerable-looking women as attractive - lending weight to the idea.
'Male participants rated photographs of women who displayed varying levels of cues to exploitability,' say the researchers. The 'cues' included being sleepy, stupid or inert - and thus easily exploitable.
'We identified 22 cues indicative of sexual exploitability. Nineteen of these cues were correlated significantly with sexual attractiveness,' say the researchers.
Men, the researchers think are 'born' to have little concern for the consequences of casual trysts, given that their bodies produce somewhere around 85 million sperm cells every day -- per testicle.
Goetz began with the assumption that the brain of modern women is still sensitive to the pregnancy-related consequences of casual sex, making them more reluctant to engage in it than men.
The goal of the study was to test out the hypothesis that a woman who appears silly or inert, or in other words more ‘sexually exploitable,’ is a turn-on for the average straight man.
In the evolutionary psychology sense, the word ‘exploitable’ simply indicates that a woman is willing or can be more easily pressured into having sex, even if she is a prostitute or a nymphomaniac.
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