Why Men Like Curvy Bottoms

[Steve James]

Rings true for me

MONDAY, March 23, 2015 (HealthDay News) -- Men are naturally drawn to a woman with a curvy backside, a new report suggests.

The "theoretically optimal angle" is a 45.5-degree curve from back to buttocks -- not necessarily a big butt, the University of Texas at Austin researchers determined.

These curvaceous gals would have had an evolutionary advantage, in that they appeared able to bear multiple children easily, the researchers said.

"This spinal structure would have enabled pregnant women to balance their weight over the hips," said study leader David Lewis, a UT Austin alumnus and now a psychologist at Bilkent University in Turkey.

"These women would have been more effective at foraging during pregnancy and less likely to suffer spinal injuries," he said in a UT Austin news release. "In turn, men who preferred these women would have had mates who were better able to provide for fetus and offspring, and who would have been able to carry out multiple pregnancies without injury."

This preference evolved over thousands of years and is likely to persist for a long time, the researchers noted.

Their conclusions came from a two-part study in which 100 men were asked to look at images of women and rate their attractiveness. Women with a 45.5-degree in the lower back were rated as most appealing. The researchers next determined from a group of 200 men that guys preferred this degree of lower back curvature regardless of a woman's butt size.

"What's fascinating about this research is that it is yet another scientific illustration of a close fit between a sex-differentiated feature of human morphology -- in this case lumbar curvature -- and an evolved standard of attractiveness," study co-author David Buss, a UT Austin psychology professor, said in the news release.

"This adds to a growing body of evidence that beauty is not entirely arbitrary, or 'in the eyes of the beholder' as many in mainstream social science believed, but rather has a coherent adaptive logic," he said.

The study was published online March 19 in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.

[yeniseri]

The story is a little odd but it is interesting. There are a certain category of men who like those attributes but in USA the majority of men are unable to handle it as they see it as a threat to their masculinity. They are actually afraid of The Big One! I shan't go into details but they know who they are! Secret language is like that!

[GrahamB]

Nonsense. It's because they make the rocking world go round.

[Steve James]

Nonsense. It's because they make the rocking world go round.

Conquering the world, while making the journey more comfortable.

[grzegorz]

Why Men Like Curvy Bottoms

Why not?

[Steve James]

Why not?

It's just science. However, de gustibus non est disputandum: just ask Kid Rock.

[Bhassler]

Gee, what a shock-- what the article is reporting bears only a passing resemblance to the actual study. It's also worth noting that all the bullshit about why men prefer that is pure speculation, most likely driven by the study authors' desires to get in the news and secure their next round of grant money. This sort of drivel is why Americans (I can't speak for the rest of the world) get continually stupider and more and more "knowledge" is nothing but cash driven nonsense.

Here's the abstract:

This paper reports independent studies supporting the proposal that human standards of attractiveness reflect the output of psychological adaptations to detect fitness-relevant traits. We tested novel a priori hypotheses based on an adaptive problem uniquely faced by ancestral hominin females: a forward-shifted center of mass during pregnancy. The hominin female spine possesses evolved morphology to deal with this adaptive challenge: wedging in the third-to-last lumbar vertebra. Among ancestral women, vertebral wedging would have minimized the net fitness threats posed by hypolordosis and hyperlordosis, thereby creating selective pressures on men to prefer such women as mates. On this basis, we hypothesized that men possess evolved mate preferences for women with this theoretically optimal angle of lumbar curvature. In Study 1, as hypothesized, men's attraction toward women increased as women's lumbar curvature approached this angle. However, vertebral wedging and buttock mass can both influence lumbar curvature. Study 2 thus employed a forced-choice paradigm in which men selected the most attractive woman among models exhibiting the same lumbar curvature, but for different morphological reasons. Men again tended to prefer women exhibiting cues to a degree of vertebral wedging closer to optimum. This included preferring women whose lumbar curvature specifically reflected vertebral wedging rather than buttock mass. These findings reveal novel, theoretically anchored, and previously undiscovered standards of attractiveness.

http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(15)00018-5/abstract

An equally valid hypothesis would be that women with a significant lumbar curve run slower and are therefore easier to chase down and rape. Or maybe they were smaller and ate less. Or maybe they also had big bones so were genetically stronger and able to kill their rivals. Or maybe it's a statistical anomaly. Or maybe the preference is purely cultural and there happens to be a correlation of morphology. Science, my ass...

[Steve James]

Preference studies are always subjective. It's hard to ascertain whether the curvature of the spine (with the resulting roundness of the bottom) was an evolutionary trait that developed for the sake of efficiency --or even that it makes a woman more attractive. It's clearly an evolutionary trait. On the other hand, or head, the fact remains that some (er, a few) men seem to be attracted to round bottoms --um, no matter the sex to which that bottom belongs. I dunno, maybe it is cultural. But, it can certainly be studied. Well, just as it would be interesting to hear from men who don't like round bottoms (and I don't mean ginormous spectacles, just round). There is probably some evolutionary advantage in that, too.

Another interesting issue is that, regardless of evolution, when a person (of either sex) finds that there is a particular feature that makes him or her more attractive to the opposite sex, there is often a strong urge to acquire that feature.

[klonk]

I don't know anything about science, but I know what I like.

[Steve James]

I don't know anything about science, but I know what I like.

Exactly. Ya doesn't even have to knows how to read.

[edededed]

I am always wary of these kinds of studies that conclude evolutionary reasons - and yet were performed within the confines of a single culture. I think that sexual preferences are mainly cultural and specific to a certain time period. Just off the top of my head, female beauty seems to be defined rather differently in the US vs. Japan:

Curvy bottoms vs. smallish bottoms
Tanned and toned vs. pale (美白) and girly
Handsome features vs. "small face" (小顔)
...and so on. Of course there are commonalities as well, such as symmetry and apparent healthiness.

On the other hand, you can also see that the Japanese perception of female beauty during the Edo and other eras was quite different from the typical Japanese beauty today - take a look at "ukiyoe" drawings where the women have quite chubby and flat faces, with long but thin eyes (they like more 3-dimensional faces with large eyes today).

A better way to get evolutionary reasoning for beauty would be to research a much larger data set, taken from multiple cultures around the world, and to use data science to see patterns within.

[Steve James]

Well, I think a better cultural comparison would be between preferences for breasts over bottoms. Afa Japanese conceptions of beauty, I think that has to be considered in a different light than sexual attractiveness. Even if geisha didn't/don't emphasize their breasts or bottoms, there's still plenty of hentai and anime that seem to fetishize the bakunyu girl. Beauty, per se, if often the product of the idealization of the rare. That, imo, has nothing to do with male sexuality, which might be the main flaw with the author's hypothesis. I.e., men will sleep with women they find unattractive --which includes all physical attributes. Male sperm donors are not hard for women to find. Men who will stick around to help care for the offspring is the question women have pondered.

In general, it's only natural for males to be attracted to female attributes. Females with more exceptional attributes get more attention. It doesn't have be an evolutionary strategy. Petite, slim women have also been able to reproduce. There's always someone to please someone.

Oh, and I think that 20-30 thousand years ago, the "males will reproduce with any female" thing was even more in effect than it is now. And having a round behind wasn't necessary for a female to get attention

[Andy_S]

BHassler:

Article seems a pretty accurate rendering of the abstract from - er, Greek? - into reasonably comprehensible language:

SNIP
The hominin female spine possesses evolved morphology to deal with this adaptive challenge: wedging in the third-to-last lumbar vertebra. Among ancestral women, vertebral wedging would have minimized the net fitness threats posed by hypolordosis and hyperlordosis, thereby creating selective pressures on men to prefer such women as mates.

Translation. A big, round, wobbly arse is attractive to chaps - er, "male hominims"

SNIP
On this basis, we hypothesized that men possess evolved mate preferences for women with this theoretically optimal angle of lumbar curvature. In Study 1, as hypothesized, men's attraction toward women increased as women's lumbar curvature approached this angle. However, vertebral wedging and buttock mass can both influence lumbar curvature. Study 2 thus employed a forced-choice paradigm in which men selected the most attractive woman among models exhibiting the same lumbar curvature, but for different morphological reasons. Men again tended to prefer women exhibiting cues to a degree of vertebral wedging closer to optimum. This included preferring women whose lumbar curvature specifically reflected vertebral wedging rather than buttock mass.
SNIP

Translation: Blah blah blah. Pretension. Yadda yadda yadda. Gobbledegook. Blah blah blah. Bullshite.

FFS. The average academic needs a harder slap around the head than does the average lawyer.

SNIP
These findings reveal novel, theoretically anchored, and previously undiscovered standards of attractiveness.
SNIP

"Previously undiscovered?"

WHAT?

I am going to sue these bastards - or perhaps demand my honorary PhD right now from whichever sad excuse of a university issued theirs.

Reason being: I, Andy_S, had "discovered the attractiveness" of women with big bums (and with big bellies and big boobs into the bargain) well prior to their spurious findings - and without conducting any academic research beyond base instinct.

Though I AM glad to hear that the science research proves that I have normal, Neanderthal-like urges, ergo that it not abnormal for a red-blooded mensch to turned off by the skeletal waifs the fashion industry thrusts our way.

And what Klonk said.

[yeniseri]

Minaj or Ariana Grande

[Bhassler]

For those who have trouble with all the big words and sciency language, the study had to do with lumbar curvature and not bottoms-- in fact, it expressly states that the lumbar curvature was the key factor and not bottoms at all. As ed^4 pointed out, all the evolutionary talk is pure shite.

Oh, and this:

https://thevoicesinherhead.files.wordpr ... t_ass1.jpg