Looking for love at a speed-dating event may leave you feeling unlovable
Earlier this year, Lynda Boothroyd of the University of Durham, UK, and colleagues published a study showing that the majority of men and women were able to accurately judge whether a person would be a good bet for a committed relationship or were more interested in a fling, just by looking at a photograph of their face.
How exactly we make this assessment based on such minimal information is up for debate, though Boothroyd’s study did yield one clue. She found that men who were judged to be more “masculine” and women who were considered more “attractive”, were likely to be seen as more inclined towards casual sex - and to actually be so.
This surprising talent for accurately reading people’s attitude to sex has an obvious benefit - it allows us to hook up with a partner who is likely to want the same out of a sexual relationship as we do. It also raises the more fundamental question of why individuals have such widely varying attitudes to sex in the first place. The answer is not simply that beautiful people have more opportunity. (…)
Another factor with strong links to sociosexuality is masculinity. Boothroyd found men with more masculine-looking faces scored higher on sociosexuality, and it seems to be the same story for women. Sarah Mikach and Michael Bailey of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, examined how women’s sociosexuality related to the degree to which they looked, felt or behaved in a masculine way. They found that heterosexual women who had high numbers of sexual partners were more likely to show higher levels of masculinity.
The researchers argued that these women behave in a way that is more typically male and this could be due to early - probably prenatal - exposure to androgens, such as testosterone, that organise typically “male” brains differently from typically “female” brains. Supporting this idea, Andrew Clark of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, found a higher rate of sociosexuality in women with a smaller ratio of index to ring finger length - which some researchers believe corresponds to higher prenatal androgen exposure.
