What Men Are Looking For

Number 1:  Looks

Numbers 2 through infinity: other stuff.  intelligence, kindness, good job, good cook, sense of humor......


This is a basic fact of evolutionary psychology (if you haven't read that post, go to Ev Psych Post).
Anything that leads a man to have sex with a FERTILE woman, is going to have a very strong payoff in leaving more descendants, and is therefore going to be a strong inborn behavioral tendency. All of the attributes that contribute to what we collectively, and men individually, identify as Beauty, are in fact indicators of fertility:

• thick, long, glossy hair and dewy skin are strong indicators of health.
• plump but not too plump is an indicator of fertility: a woman who is very thin is probably not menstruating, and a woman with a large waist is likely to be already pregnant...or too old for fertility.
• left-right symmetry of features: asymmetrical features, and other physical oddities, happen more frequently in inbred populations, which was a much bigger problem in hunter-gatherer times than it is today. And the inbreeding that tends toward asymmetry also tends to produce children who have hereditary weaknesses. Studies show that facial symmetry affects judgments of beauty.

Nowadays, many of those indicators are of questionable value (the beautiful girl may be on the pill), and pregnancy is not the desired outcome of sex for most people most of the time. But our instincts don't work by causing us to consciously want to make babies with a good genetic co-parent: they work by causing us to have an almost irresistible desire to have sex with an (instinctively) attractive and available partner; and by causing us to love the babies and care for them after they are born.

This doesn't mean that every man values only looks: it just means that if you assume that any random man is going to choose the most beautiful girl available to him, you will be right ninety-five percent of the time. (95% being a number that I just picked out of thin air, but the tendency is there).