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A pair of faces from the Face Research Laboratory study to evaluate
women's preferences. The image on the left has more masculine features
like thicker eyebrows and a wider jaw.
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(excerpt from Why Women Don't Want Macho Men)
[Women,]
... received instructions telling them they would be presented with
pairs of men's faces. For each set they would need to select the face
they considered more attractive and indicate how much they preferred it
to the other one.
The faces, it turned out, looked eerily alike and yet subtly different,
like identical twins. They were created by software that masculinizes
or feminizes a person's features in a few keystrokes.
The apparent answer is not so much—if you're a woman living in a country
with a decent health-care system and few harmful pathogens. While a
masculine father's "good genes" may confer health advantages to
children, so do good medical attention and a clean environment. In the
Face Lab study, women with the weakest masculinity preferences tended to
live in some of the healthiest countries: Sweden, Finland, Denmark and
Austria. Other countries in the study with low masculinity preferences
are Romania, Greece and New Zealand. Women with the weakest masculinity
preferences of all lived in Belgium, a country considered to have one of
the best publicly funded health-care systems in Europe (alongside
Denmark and the Netherlands in the health-care index).
| Meanwhile, women with the strongest masculinity preferences tended to
hail from the countries with higher disease and mortality rates and
some of the poorest scores on the health-care index: Mexico, Brazil,
Bulgaria and Argentina. (The researcher included only white subjects to
control the experiment, and Asian and African nations were not included
in the study.)
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And where does the U.S. stand in the masculinity ranking? The answer is
fifth out of the 30 countries in the study, one of the highest. This
is, after all, the home of James Dean and Clint Eastwood. And where
does America stand in the health index ranking? Twentieth of 30
countries, one of the least healthy.
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Eat meat. Drill for oil. Impeach Obama.
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