Models and Sex

Proven Women like manly men

Hormonal women are more responsive to manly men, and Kinsey Institute researchers have the brain scans to prove it.

Women participating in the Kinsey study were shown 224 photos of men’s faces, some of which had been “masculinized” or “feminized” using photo-morphing software. MRI scans revealed higher levels of brain response to the masculinized photos, particularly in women who were in the phase of their menstrual cycle immediately preceding ovulation and higher fertility.

The study, published this month in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, is the first to show differences in neural activation to masculinized and feminized faces. One of the areas of the brain most activated by the images, the anterior cingulated cortex, is involved in decision-making and assessment, which indicates that women are calculating the risks and rewards related to a man with high levels of testosterone.

“Because male traits generally thought to predict good condition and even genetic quality often coincide with less desirable characteristics, women must balance potentially disparate mating priorities,” writes Heather Rupp, who headed up the study. “For example, although men characterized by more masculine testosterone-linked traits may be socially dominant and physically healthy, they are also less likely to invest in offspring and to enter into a partnered relationship.”

In the battle of nurture vs. nature, however, ovulating women ultimately will choose in favor of genetically strong children. At other points in the menstrual cycle, the feminized faces are preferred, indicating a dip in certain hormones and a preference for men who are willing to stick around and play catch with Junior.

“As is true for most social behaviors, both biology and social influences impact the output of behavior, and likely interact,” Rupp told LiveScience.

In addition, Rupp and her colleagues asked the women — none of whom were on hormonal contraceptives — to subjectively rate the images, and discovered that scan results didn’t always match up with stated preference.

The finding is a nod to the complexity of sex, and the phenomenon of making up your mind without using your brain.

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Megan Fox Gallery

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25 places to meet new people

In this fast paced world we live in, sometimes we don’t make time to socialize. Before you know it, your friends have all gone their own ways and often you are left alone. You sit night after night watching TV or spending time on the computer.

The computer you say, can help you meet people. Sometimes it can, but more often than not, it’s just faceless, meaningless chatroom conversation. It’s better to get outside of your home, see people face-to-face, socialize and have fun!

There are many reasons you may not get out to meet people. You’re too busy, too tired, too shy, too frustrated by the social scene, and just overwhelmed by it all. But the alternative is to be alone.

Listed next are 25 places to meet people. Some ideas to help get you motivated to go out and make some new friends. All you have to do is leave your house! You have nothing to lose and so much to gain: FRIENDS! Change your attitude, be open to possibilities, relax, and have fun. Bars and nightclubs are not mentioned as there are many better and preferred ways to meet people.

1)Join a health club: solves two problems; you’ll become less of a couch potato and more fit. Think of all the people you will meet. The friends you meet here will most likely be healthy, athletic and attractive. You’ll look better and feel better at the same time.

2)Take a class, any class: again a two in one tactic; you’ll learn something new and make new friends with similar interests. Conversation is easier if you have something in common.

3)Go to Museums: Many museums have special events and members only events. Become a member and meet lots of cultured people.

4)Got to sporting events: Go to sporting events of any kind; soccer, football, basketball, etc. Go to professional games or college games, guaranteed to have fun.

5)Go to Flea Markets and Antique Shows: While you’re browsing the finds, you can people watch.

6)Play a Sport: Have you ever wanted to play soccer after watching a game on TV? Lots of towns have adult sport programs. Volleyball and tennis are common town recreational sports you could join.

7)Join a Book Club: Check this out at your local library. Reading books and sharing them is another great way to get to know people.

8)Join a Singles Group: Self-explanatory, there are many singles organizations out there that plan singles dances, get-aways, etc.

9)Volunteer: Help build houses for Habitat for Humanity; give out beverages at marathons, or join one of the many volunteer organizations.

10)Have a Party: Invite your friends and have them invite two friends and so on and so on.

11)Learn a craft: take craft classes at your local community center.

12)Join a Business Association: If you are a professional, join your local association. Network for your business and your personal life.

13)Go to High School/College Reunions: A great way to reconnect with your old best friend!

14)Get a Dog and Walk Everywhere: go to parks and the beach with your dog. Dogs are great people meeters!

15)Go to every Party you are invited to: even if you don’t want to go…go. You never know who you’ll meet.

16)Join an Investment Club: make money and friends!

17)Travel: go to the islands; Europe; talk to everyone. Learn about their culture.

18)Go to seminars: lots of people go to seminars alone; great place to start a conversation.

19)Go to Wine Tastings: sometimes local restaurants have a wine-tasting night.

20)Go skiing, snowmobiling, snowboarding

21)Take a yoga, Tai Chi class: relieve tensions and meet other enlightened people.

22)Get a new job: Is your job boring, going nowhere, maybe you need a change. A new job is a great place to make some new relationships.

23)Join a women’s or men’s group

24)Take up acting; go to acting workshops, help create scenery.

25)Talk to everyone, everywhere

As you can see, these are not difficults methods.

They are tried and true. Remember, you can never have too many friends!

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Laws of attraction

Anthropologist and best-selling author Helen Fisher sums up the eternal question in the title of her new book, Why Him? Why Her? (Henry Holt). It goes like this: You strike up a conversation with someone you’ve never met before, and whether you admit it to yourself or not, after two minutes or so, you know: You’re attracted to him or you’re not. If you’re single, you’re intrigued; if you’re happily involved with someone, you’re… careful.

Fisher says she knows exactly what’s going on here. While long-term compatibility depends a lot on factors like status and life history, what causes the sparks to fly, or not, during that first conversation is how well your personality types match up. Maybe that doesn’t sound terribly scientific—but Fisher begs to differ. After sifting through an enormous pile of research literature, she concludes that four chemicals play leading roles in determining who we are and who we’re drawn to: two sex hormones, testosterone and estrogen; and two neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin.

In Fisher’s last book, Why We Love (2004), she broadly sketched out the influence of these molecules on our romantic lives. In Why Him? Why Her? she uses them as building blocks to construct four distinct personality types. The Explorer, defined by high dopamine activity, is adventurous, novelty-seeking, creative. The Builder, with high serotonin activity, is cautious, conventional, managerial. The Director, pumped up with testosterone, is aggressive, single-minded, analytical. The Negotiator, more estrogen-influenced, is empathetic, idealistic, a big-picture thinker.

The love laboratory where Fisher has conducted her research is Chemistry.com, an affiliate of Match.com, the largest dating service online. She formulated an elaborate questionnaire (which is included in her book) to help clients figure out their personality type. Then they began choosing whom they’d most like to date from a list of candidates sent to them, and as the service evolved, subsequent clients received lists of dating prospects weighted in favor of their theoretically preferred personality type. And so Fisher had a mass experiment for her theories about personality and romantic attraction.

Not exactly research science as usual. But mainstream academics have been studying the effects of personality on romantic choice for decades, and all we have to show for it are two pieces of conventional—and diametrically opposed—-wisdom: “Opposites attract” and “Like attracts like.” Fisher, however, has crunched the numbers and, as she tells me over lunch, she’s got it all figured out.

ELLE: Isn’t there something discomforting about reducing everyone to four personality types based on the chemicals running through them, and then predicting who we’ll be attracted to?

HELEN FISHER: Honey, everything is chemical. Everything is physical, and if you want, everything is spiritual. My answer is this: You can know every single ingredient in a piece of chocolate cake and still sit down and eat it and feel the joy. You can know every note in Beethoven’s Ninth and listen to it and reel with the pleasure. To me, understanding the system expands my wonder. In the wild, all animals are attracted to some other animals and really uninterested in or repelled by others—too old, too young, too scruffy. With the evolution of humanity, it became more refined and more profound and led to a phenomenon we call romantic love.

ELLE: You’re trying to make the dating process more efficient?

HF: Right. The finest selective device is your brain. But we’re trying to do some preselecting so you don’t have to kiss a lot of frogs.

ELLE: Isn’t there something to be said for letting people make their own mistakes?

HF: People will always make their own mistakes. What I hope to do is enable us to make fewer of them and to understand that sometimes human nature is working against us. Sometimes we fall in love with somebody who will probably never love us, for reasons having nothing to do with us but with their own mind-set, their chemistry. There’s no way anybody is going to get this perfect, and anybody who tells you they can is a fool. But we can understand something about temperament—that’s what I’m responsible for.

ELLE: How did a nice academic like you get involved with an online dating company?

HF: Chemistry.com invited me to their offices and asked me, “Why do you fall in love with one person rather than another?” And I said, “I don’t know. Nobody knows.” We’ve known for a long time that you tend to fall in love with someone from your own socio-economic background, the same general level of intelligence, of good looks. But you can walk into a room where everybody meets those requirements, and you don’t fall in love with all of them! There’s a huge world of personality out there. One meta study of 470 personality studies ended up concluding that we simply don’t know the role of personality. So I went home and pulled out a blank sheet of paper. I wrote dopamine on the top of the page, and I took out another sheet of paper and wrote serotonin. And so on.

ELLE: You must have had a pretty clear idea about these four personality types before you created the questionnaire.

HF: The data was out there. It just wasn’t pulled together. So in the questionnaire, I had questions that would tell me whether I was measuring what I thought I was—dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, estrogen. For instance, I asked which is longer, your index finger or your ring finger. It’s established that when a lot of testosterone washes over a fetus’ brain, it makes for a longer fourth finger than second finger. We found the people who scored as Directors had that longer fourth finger. And when we ask, “Do you find the right word rapidly?” Directors say no and Negotiators say yes. There’s so much data connecting linguistic skills with estrogen. In the middle of the menstrual cycle, women find the right word even faster. When I did a word study of 178,000 people on Chemistry.com, I found out the top words the four types use. For the Explorer, it’s adventure. For the Builder, it’s family. For the Director, it’s intelligence. The top word for the Negotiator is passion. I’ve been able to validate these personality types over and over.

ELLE: Really—this has changed the way you see the world?

HF: Dramatically. I understand red states and blue states. The Builders live in the suburbs and in the countryside. They want grass and neighborhoods and to be part of the PTA. That’s the serotonin. The Explorers want the stimulation and the novelty of the big city. That’s the dopamine. I think Obama is an Explorer. He’s got charm, and the Explorer has charm to kill. The high-dopamine type is comfortable in his own skin. Look at the way Obama moves. It’s beautiful. And McCain is an aggressive, high-testosterone Director. I saw a photograph of McCain and noticed that his fourth finger is much longer than his second. Directors are who they are.

ELLE: But what type you are is only half the story. We also want to know who we’re going to be attracted to. I love that you couldn’t guess the results beforehand. You discovered the two clichés, “Like attracts like” and “Opposites attract,” are each true about half the time. Explorers are drawn to Explorers, and Builders to Builders, but that Directors are attracted to Negotiators, and vice versa.

HF: Of course, it enchants me—why does nature select these patterns? It’s easy to explain why Builders go for each other. They’re not going to tolerate the other types. They’re both traditional, managerial. These are the 50-year marriages. They’re going to have five children. That’s easy to explain from a Darwinian perspective. I can also see why the Negotiator and the Director go for each other. They need each other’s skills. The indecisive need the decisive. The tough-minded need the tenderhearted.

ELLE: That’s the cliché. The gruff, self-absorbed husband and the nurturing, charming wife guiding him—sort of like Oprah and Dr. Phil before he got his own show.

HF: But don’t forget about Director women and Negotiator men. What I find curious from an evolutionary standpoint is the attraction between Explorers. Who’s going to take care of the baby if they’re both on their way up Mount Everest, or in the bar taking drugs, or in the library reading Spinoza? But people who express a lot of dopamine, the sensation seekers, tend to marry more often. I began to see a different Darwinian strategy—different babies with different partners. That’s very adaptive, because they’re creating more genetic variety in their young.

ELLE: How about the matches that are statistically less likely: Builder-Explorer or Director-Builder? Are they doomed?

HF: No. All 10 combinations can work. They can all be superb, as long as the partners continue to respect each other.

ELLE: You are that rare academic who feels comfortable giving romantic advice in print. Have you been drummed out of the corps?

HF: [Laughs] Not yet. I expect to be, but my peers have been extremely pleasant to me. They say, “Oh, you’re working with a dating site.” And I say, “Yeah, I’m studying 7 million people.” And they stop. Cold. Because in academic research, 500 people is a big sample. And I’m also in the middle of a research project that has nothing to do with Chemistry.com. We get the study subjects to take my personality-type test, and then we measure their testosterone, estrogen, dopamine, and serotonin levels. Still, maybe some people will jump on me about the romantic advice. But I’ve always felt that science should be used.

ELLE: Some good, all-purpose advice?

HF: In the book, I say, “You want to get along with a Director? Ask him what he thinks. You want to get along with an Explorer? Ask him what he does. You want to get along with a Builder? Ask him who he knows. And you want to get along with a Negotiator? Ask him how he feels.” It sounds pigeonholing, but we have personalities that evolved for good reasons. We’re subtle and flexible—but not that subtle and flexible. At the end, I have a chapter on mind mates, soul mates. For example, Negotiators really need intimacy, and they have a certain definition of what it is—face-to-face talk about how you feel. I can’t get that from my Director friends. Or even my Explorer friends. I asked a man I was going out with, “What is intimacy to you?” He said, “Reading in bed at night to you.” So I have to train myself to realize that he’s giving me intimacy even though I don’t feel it. I like it when he reads to me in bed at night, but that’s not my intimacy. You ask me what we’re supposed to get out of this. Are we just giving the biology of these types? No—we’re trying to give tools so you can reach people.

ELLE: So in the singles bar of the future, will someone be saying, “What’s your type? I bet you’re an Explorer.”
HF: I think so. I do.

Side note: “For the Explorer, the word is adventure. For the Builder, it’s family. For the Director, it’s intelligence. And for the Negotiator, it’s passion.”

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Wealthy men give women more orgasms

wealthy man

Scientists have found that the pleasure women get from making love is directly linked to the size of their partner’s bank balance.

They found that the wealthier a man is, the more frequently his partner has orgasms.

“Women’s orgasm frequency increases with the income of their partner,” said Dr Thomas Pollet, the Newcastle University psychologist behind the research.

He believes the phenomenon is an “evolutionary adaptation” that is hard-wired into women, driving them to select men on the basis of their perceived quality.

The study is certain to prove controversial, suggesting that women are inherently programmed to be gold-diggers.

However, it fits into a wider body of research known as evolutionary psychology which suggests that both men and women are genetically predisposed to ruthlessly exploit each other to achieve the best chances of survival for their genes.

The female orgasm is the focus of much research because it appears to have no reproductive purpose. Women can become pregnant whatever their pleasure levels.

Pollet, and Professor Daniel Nettle, his co-author, believed, however, that the female orgasm is an evolutionary adaptation that drives women to choose and retain high-quality partners.

He and Nettle tested that idea using data gathered in one of the world’s biggest lifestyle studies. The Chinese Health and Family Life Survey targeted 5,000 people across China for in-depth interviews about their personal lives, including questions about their sex lives, income and other factors. Among these were 1,534 women with male partners whose data was the basis for the study.

They found that 121 of these women always had orgasms during sex, while 408 more had them “often”. Another 762 “sometimes” orgasmed while 243 had them rarely or never. Such figures are similar to those for western countries.

There were of course, several factors involved in such differences but, said Pollet, money was one of the main ones.

He said: “Increasing partner income had a highly positive effect on women’s self-reported frequency of orgasm. More desirable mates cause women to experience more orgasms.”

This is not an effect limited to Chinese women. Previous research in Germany and America has looked at attributes such as body symmetry and attractiveness, finding that these are also linked with orgasm frequency. Money, however, seems even more important.

David Buss, professor of psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, who raised this question in his book The Evolution of Desire believes female orgasms have several possible purposes.

“They could promote emotional bonding with a high-quality male or they could serve as a signal that women are highly sexually satisfied, and hence unlikely to seek sex with other men,” he said. “What those orgasms are saying is ‘I’m extremely loyal, so you should invest in me and my children’.”

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