The mapping of women’s physical attractiveness onto mate value: a proposed method of derivation

Abstract

Though female attractiveness is one of the most widely studied variables in the human mating literature, there has been no attempt to quantify its relation with female mate value. I propose that the possibility of mapping female attractiveness onto mate value in the form of a curve should be explored. The curve will differ for short and long-term mating contexts and across individual males. The area under each curve could be used as a concise and global measure of male choosiness. I suggest a possible method of empirically deriving this curve, whereby male participants make forced choices between sets of female stimuli.