A commonly touted theory about how women’s attraction to men works might be all wrong, suggests a new paper published this week in Psychological Science. Prior, small experiments have found that birth control pills and ovulation could change a woman’s sexual preferences. Now, a large new study has found that women’s preferences for men’s faces are reliably stable, regardless of whether they’re taking birth control pills or whether they’re ovulating.
Some previous experiments have found that women taking hormonal contraceptives or experiencing their period were more likely to favor male facial features that are less associated with testosterone, like a rounder jaw or thinner eyebrows. But these studies may have been flawed from the get-go, according to Ben Jones.
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Jones and his team recruited over 500 heterosexual-identifying women in the UK for their study. The women were shown 10 pairs of randomly selected male faces at the same time and told to pick which one they were more attracted to, as well as to rate how attractive the face was. The faces were slightly digitally altered to be more masculine- or feminine-looking.
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“We found no evidence that women’s face preferences tracked changes in hormone levels or changes in women’s use of oral contraceptives,” Jones said. “Instead, we found that women generally preferred masculine men regardless of their own hormonal status.”
Read full, original post: Birth Control Probably Doesn’t Change Who You’re Attracted to, Study Finds
