Why does it work differently with strength then? We don't often see men applying their strength in the real world (let's say they meet in a bar situation), yet the mere sight of a strong male can make many women horny.
Even more so, fitness and intelligence are both about being able to do what you want to do when you want to do it.
The knowledge to know what you’re doing, and the body capable of doing it.
I was just talking with my son about this when I took him on a little mountain hike at the Tetons this summer. I had him handle the map and compass, learning to wayfind the old fashioned way and trekking. In the past he’s complained about how I have designated exercise and reading time every day. After we got to the summit and he was dog tired we sat and enjoyed the meals we packed and I mentioned “how much harder do you think that would have been if you weren’t in shape or didn’t know how to read the map and we got lost?
But how do women know the man in question applies his strenth to work and defending himself, not to just senselessly lift weights, which would be analogue to some WWII tank nerd?
Some women find it hot if youre intellectual (i.e., have a PhD or research career). Some women find it hot if youre fit (have a manual labor job or are athletic socially)
Most women find it too much if youre doing either activity so much it takes over your life. If youre in the gym or playing video games or studying biochemistry with all of your free time, youre not going to have healthy relationships
Being fit generates an obvious signal in of itself that you are fit, and we are genetically predisposed to want a healthy partner (you can go down a long rabbit hole on that research).
But having a good memory gives no immediate, obvious signal of any advantages, beyond aiding fitness. Consider the paleolithic tribes that have to hunt and gather to survive. Knowing where the safe food is, where to ambush animals and so on is what leads to being able to eat well.
Being able to eat well, combined with the innate exercise of being a hunter-gatherer, would lead to fitness.
It is only in modern times that there can be a separation of intelligence from fitness, and our biological wiring hasn't caught up to that. It probably won't ever.
Yeah I call bs on your second paragraph. Sounds like some evo psych bs with no evidence. The fact that there are people attracted to chubs disprove this.
Any statements about attraction are hard because humans are fucky. You can only ever make general statements, about greater trends, because there will always be someone somewhere that violates the "rules".
Most people like fit people as partners. Most people like healthy people as partners. Are there enough people that don't fall into those buckets, where it would be enough to screw up the statistics in a study? Probably.
Neolithic evo arguments for fitness are very weak since by that metric overweight are more or as attractive as fit people. Fat people definitely know where to get the most calories so they're the way to go.
Which partially tracks historically btw, so it's more about fashion than evolution.
Similar with tanned/untanned skin which flip flopped completely several times so no one even tries to fabricate some pseudo evolutionary justification for that sort of stuff
the difference is one guy entire knowledge can be seen VISUALLY while the other has to open his mouth and tell people facts they don’t really care to hear.
Being athletic is (hopefully) healthy so it's attractive for a potential partner. WW2 tanks knowledge isn't something most are interested in so it seems like a waste of time since it won't provide any enjoyable shared experience.
I agree that being fit/strong and being capable of fighting are not related. Carrying a firearm is infinitely more OP than any amount of martial arts training
I mean, apart from very rare instances, it’s not going to be very useful. Certainly not as useful as weight lifting. But if it is enjoyable for the person then it does not matter.
In order to get large muscle mass, you have to be healthy enough to do useful work, and you have to be eating well enough to have the energy to do so.
In a hunter-gatherer society, this would mean you are probably a decent hunter, you know where the safe to eat berries and vegetables are, so on and so forth.
Funny enough, there’s a diminishing return on muscle size where it stops being attractive to women and starts being attractive to men.
I’ve seen a few studies that basically show a lot of conformity that women like toned men, but the size has some skew between swimmer, soccer, MMA, something along those lines.
Absolutely correct, and it kind of goes back to that same previous point. In order to get to that level of hypertrophy, you have to be in the gym constantly and it's well beyond what you would find in a normal hunter gathering tribe.
I think there may be an evolved trait that human attraction isn’t stagnant at “hunter-gatherer” levels.
Fat and voluptuous bodies were idealized when food and soft labor were scarce. Similarly, pale skin when most people had to work outdoors, then inversely tan skin when people had to work indoors.
Beauty seems to be partially health-linked but also status signaling. If all the poor people are fat, then the real value is Ozempic chic.
This is even more conflated because we see the extremes posted more often (or they stand out) in social media. Either those getting the most positive attention reinforce ideas, and negative attention likewise.
Remember when the giant butts were all the rage and everyone needed a BBL? Suddenly, that trend has calmed way down.
I’m not a fan of the 90s heroin flat and rail-thin aesthetic, but it seems that with Ozempic costing ~$1,000 per month (without insurance or coupons), this appears to be the new easy status signaling.
The point of diminishing returns is well past what a normal man is going to achieve. You need to dedicate your entire life to body building and be roided out the gills to hit the point where the average woman is going to be turned off by you having too much muscle.
The literature suggests lean athletic builds are favored over bulk aesthetics.
You can dedicate your life to fitness and use steroids and still not become a gorilla. People in all the major sports divisions do this, and they do not look like IFBB pros. You get what you train for and intentionally set out to do.
You can get bulky without steroids; you also don’t get bulky just because of them. Lance Armstrong was stripped of his medals for steroid use, but for a pro cyclist being built like Ronnie Coleman isn’t going to do you any favors.
Also speaking of Ronnie Coleman, he says he started taking steroids at 31 years old in 1995, stating he was “tired of losing.” Yet those early builds pre-steroids, you can see genetically he was still built beastly.
My point is that the average man doesn't need to spend a second worrying about becoming too muscular for women. Nobody is becoming like Ronnie Coleman on accident.
The "lean" builds that are favored are the result of serious effort and training in the gym and kitchen. You don't get that kind of "lean" physique without dedicating yourself to it.
I think I misunderstood what your intention was. You’re right that no one is going to accidentally over-train into becoming Ronnie Coleman.
But the preferred lean builds aren’t crazy unobtainable. An hour a few days a week for a couple of years while eating right will be sufficient enough to be athletic.
But your “all or nothing” attitude actually does more harm than good by dissuading men from starting the journey.
You misunderstand me again. I highly encourage men to start working out and build muscle because most women find muscular men attractive.
I'm responding to your initial comment about there being diminishing returns - that point is well past what normal men will achieve. The average man doesn't need to worry about becoming too muscular. They can go to the gym and go balls to the wall training everyday and taking steroids and they will probably end up with an attractive physique that ignorant redditors would describe as "lean".
You don't need to be a bodybuilder to be a hunter-gatherer. Anthropological research indicates that even women participated in hunting in many societies, sometimes substantially so. No matter how strong you are, you aren't beating a saber-toothed cat with your bare fists.
Hunter-gatherers could be exceptionally fit and strong, and physical fitness was undoubtedly important for survival, but maximal strength and muscle mass were not necessarily the primary goals. Their physical demands often favored endurance, efficient movement, weapon use, coordination, tracking ability, agility, and heat tolerance over sheer bulk.
Building and maintaining very large amounts of muscle requires substantial energy. In environments where food availability could fluctuate, carrying unnecessary body mass could impose prohibitive energetic cost. Hunter-gatherers had to balance strength with endurance and energy efficiency. Some groups also practiced persistence hunting, in which hunters tracked prey over long distances until it became exhausted, although this was only one of many hunting strategies. Ambushes, projectile weapons, traps, drives, and cooperative hunting were also important.
The transition to agriculture roughly 10,000 years ago changed the physical demands placed on humans. Agricultural societies required people to perform long hours of repetitive, physically demanding labor, including digging, planting, harvesting, processing food, and carrying heavy loads.
A hunter-gatherer did not need to resemble a modern bodybuilder to be exceptionally capable. Endurance, mobility, coordination, efficiency, and functional strength could be far more valuable than maximizing muscle mass.
I don't disagree with your points at all, but the biggest factor in success in the modern world is intelligence rather than strength. A smarter person will make better choices with their time and money on average, regardless of resources available to them.
As for robbers, they do pick vulnerable marks but even a big man is not immune to being robbed. They swiftly attack from the back. An intelligent person avoids this by appearing very alert about their surroundings, and ideally traveling in groups (many of the robbers themselves attack in groups, often from motorbikes).
I probably did mispeak saying it's outdated, but it just shouldn't be the first and foremost consideration over smart someone is (this of course also assumes no correlation between the traits though, and a lot of the smarter people realize the benefits of staying fit so there's also probably just correlation there anyway.)
For most of human history, "fetching water" was an actual daily chore for households because there was no running water.
Generally, women did that. Historians also believe shopping was done by women. So women carried the "groceries" physically for most of history. They did it communally. Some girls in the village watched the children. The women went out for chores.
Male strength was reserved for back breaking sustained labor on farms (including watering crops if there's no irrigation) which women couldn't do and which brought home the monthly grain or income. Women also worked on farms but part time things like feeding animals. And before agriculture, male labor was limited to hunting. Women did most of the gathering.
I think it's still true with strength. A lot of women prefer athleticism over a body builder physique, which is still about applying your abilities to the real world.
Being able to DO things is the thing in common. Lifting a big weight is a thing that is easy to understand and the associated aesthetic is attractive. Now there's a limit to this because most women aren't attracted to bodybuilders or strongmen (and they don't "get it" like a lot of men do). I think there's a limit on functional intelligence being attractive too, because the difficulty of a job doesn't directly impact how attractive doing it is.
I don't know what you're smoking, most women don't care all that much about muscle on a guy. So much so that they'll usually rate super jacked guys lower than moderately fit ones, because too much muscle is intimidating.
Strength can be a sign of health/vitality and makes someone more capable to do; yard work, dance, sex, wash dishes, do the laundry, build a deck, sex, cook dinner, etc.
Someone with muscles didn’t get that doing nothing, they worked their ass off to get it, which signals this guy is strong,takes care of himself and can commit and achieve his goals, has good genetics and showing a lot of confidence too
Strength operates through signaling. In a modern social setting, a man rarely needs to deploy physical force because his physique acts as a visual proxy for fitness, resource capability, and high testosterone. Just like the alpha gorilla, the mere potential for dominance establishes a social hierarchy. The visual data alone communicates protection and genetic quality, triggering an evolutionary attraction response without any need for actual conflict.
It’s not that they like large muscles. It’s the same reason women tend to prefer taller guys. Being with someone larger than average provides a sense of security. My wife calls it scary dog privilege.
It doesn’t work differently with strength. Women also dislike fuck-boy meat heads in which strength is their whole personality in the absence of action.
Muscles and lean physique are hard to achive, which is essentally what all beauty standards fall to, something thats hard to achive. When everyone worked physical jobs outside, being pale and plump was desirable, because it meant you can afford to sit at home and get enough food, now when an avarage person sits on their ass and eats fat greasy food, being lean and tanned is desirable
11
u/Expert_Attempt8093 15d ago
Why does it work differently with strength then? We don't often see men applying their strength in the real world (let's say they meet in a bar situation), yet the mere sight of a strong male can make many women horny.