nd body shape as a cue to a woman’s reproductive capacity. According to Buss, men prefer women who show evidence of “health and youth.” “Men who failed to prefer qualities that signal high reproductive value-men who preferred to marry gray-haired women lacking in smooth skin and firm muscle tone-would have left fewer offspring, and their line would have died out.” Buss cites as evidence a recent study that generated composites of the human face and asked men to judge which faces they believed to be the most attractive. Men repeatedly choose the faces that were the most symmetrical. Symmetry, according to biologists, is a sign of good health and youth, which would explain why men judged those faces with highest levels of symmetry as the most beautiful. Body shape also provides an important clue to the reproductive value of a woman. Men from different cultures tend to prefer different body types from thin to stout but one preference tends to remain the same: the waist to hip ratio. Buss cites a study that found that men tend to prefer, regardless of culture, a woman with a hip to waist ratio of 0.70. Buss claims that this ratio is an important clue to a woman’s reproductive value because higher ratios tend to indicate that a woman is pregnant. The search for casual sex is a trait that men have adapted due to men increasing their chances of reproductive success by mating with multiple females. Buss demonstrates this by pointing to a phenomenon called the Coolidge effect. The Coolidge effect is a “tendency of males to be sexually rearoused upon the presentation of novel females, giving them a further impulse to gain sexual access to multiple women. As evidence for this occurrence, Buss cites research done by Kinsey which found that 50 percent of males and only 26 percent of female had extramarital affairs. A similar study done by another scientist yielded even more surprising results. ...
