Men prefer women who have a pronounced back-to-buttock curve, according to researchers at the University of Texas who recently published their study online the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin found in their study that men prefer women with a 45.5 degree curve from back to buttocks which allows women to better support, provide for, and carry out multiple pregnancies.
Researcher David Lewis was quoted by TIME as having explained that this particular spinal curvature “would have enabled pregnant women to balance their weight over the hips”.
This spinal structure would have enabled pregnant women to balance their weight over the hips […] These women would have been more effective at foraging during pregnancy and less likely to suffer spinal injuries. In turn, men who preferred these women would have had mates who were better able to provide for fetus and offspring, and who would have been able to carry out multiple pregnancies without injury.
The UT Austin report quoted the study’s co-author David Buss, professor of psychology at the university, as having explained that what was particularly “fascinating about this research is that it is yet another scientific illustration of a close fit between a sex-differentiated feature of human morphology” — which, in this case, is what Buss refers to as “lumbar curvature”.
What’s fascinating about this research is that it is yet another scientific illustration of a close fit between a sex-differentiated feature of human morphology — in this case lumbar curvature — and an evolved standard of attractiveness […] This adds to a growing body of evidence that beauty is not entirely arbitrary, or ‘in the eyes of the beholder’ as many in mainstream social science believed, but rather has a coherent adaptive logic
In a second study conducted by the researchers, the study’s findings found that men preferred women with spinal-curvature angles closer to the optimum 45.5 degree angle even in cases where the women had smaller buttocks.
