While scanning through the life & style section of the UK Times Online, I couldn’t help but be drawn to this gem of a headline: ‘Women are Getting More Beautiful’. "Oh, really?" I found myself thinking. Based on whose version of beauty? My brain then filled with an internal feminist rant encompassing everything from the invention of corsets to breast implants. Though I find it very easy to argue with myself, the one thing I find difficult to argue with is science. Being a strictly liberal arts kind of gal, the quickest way to shut me up is by citing a scientific study, of which this article has plenty. Once I finished reading, I felt that my internal rant didn’t hold quite as much water. Here’s a snippet:
"One finding was that women were generally regarded by both sexes as more aesthetically appealing than men. The other was that the most attractive parents were 26% less likely to have sons.
"’Physical attractiveness is a highly heritable trait, which disproportionately increases the reproductive success of daughters much more than that of sons.
"’If more attractive parents have more daughters and if physical attractiveness is heritable, it logically follows that women over many generations gradually become more physically attractive on average than men.’
"In men, by contrast, good looks appear to count for little, with handsome men being no more successful than others in terms of numbers of children. This means there has been little pressure for men’s appearance to evolve."
I recommend reading the whole article, which in it’s final paragraph states that women are really only interested in the size of a man’s wallet. Don’t look at me! The scientists said it.
