David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences | Lex Fridman Podcast #282

What do women want? Tell me all the things women want in a long term mate. And so I would start at one end of the blackboard. There were like five blackboards. And they say, well, I want a mate who's, who's kind, who's understanding, who's intelligent, who's healthy, who's got a good sense of humor, who shares my values. And I just go and I fill out five blackboards and then run out of space. So then I turn to the men and I say, well, what do men want? And then I, I run out of space after about a blackboard and a half because they, they can't think of anything else. So women, I think there's a lot.

Of explanations for that.

The following is a conversation with David Buss, evolutionary psychologist at UT Austin, researching human sex differences in mate selection. He's considered one of the founders of evolutionary psychology and has authored many exciting and challenging books including the the Evolution of Desire, Strategies of Human Mating, Bad Men, the Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment and Assault and the Murderer Next Door, why the Mind Is Designed to Kill. We talk a lot about sex, dating, relationships and love. I take these at times controversial topics very seriously. But I also try to inject humor and ridiculousness throughout this conversation and all conversations I do. Please do not mistake my silliness for a lack of seriousness and my seriousness for a lack of silliness. And above all, do not mistake my suit and tie or my PhD as a sign of intelligence or wisdom. I barely know what I'm talking about on most days. I'm simply curious and hoping to understand the way a child does. What the heck is going on in this weird and wonderful civilization of ours? If I say something stupid, as I often do, I promise to learn and to improve. As Mark Twain said, I do not want my schooling to interfere with my education. Open minded curiosity, I think, is the best guide for a proper and fun lifelong education. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, and here's David Buss.

What is more important in the history of the development of human civilization? Sex or violence? So, mating strategies or military strategies?

Oh, well, both are important. I mean, first of all, humans are a sexually reproducing species and so everything has to go through sex. So in our mating psychology has to be very rich and complex because to succeed for us to be here now, all of our ancestors in an unbroken chain have had to succeed in selecting a fertile mate, attracting that mate be mutually chosen by that mate. Stay together long enough, do all the sexual things you need to do to reproduce, have the kids survive, et cetera. So everything has to go through mating. And. And in that sense, I think it's. I mean, survival is really only a means to an end, if you will. So sex has gotta be important. And humans have a very rich, evolved sexual psychology or an evolved mating psychology. Okay. But I wouldn't minimize the importance of violence either. There's a ton of evidence that humans evolved in the context of small groups with a fair amount of small group warfare. So inter tribal warfare, where. And this is a harsh realization, but there, historically, this is part of our bad evolutionary history. It has been advantageous from a purely reproductive standpoint to conquer a neighboring group, kill the males, and get whatever resources they have, including females and sexual resources, as well as tools, weapons, territory, and so forth. And so I think that we have. Of course, it's typically males who do that. I mean, yes, some females have participated in warfare, but as far as I know, there's never been a single case in all of human recorded history of women forming a war tribe with other women to attack another group of women and kill them and capture the men as husbands. But this phenomenon is common in the ethnographic record and small group studies. It's part of our common thing. So just one concrete example. Unfortunately, he's dead now. He passed away. Napoleon Chagnon, who studied the Yanomamo for many, many years. When he first started interviewing them, he asked them, you know, why do you go to war? And they said, well, to capture women, of course. It's the only sensible reason. And they said, you know, why does your culture go to war? Or however they phrased it? And he said, well, we go to war to spread democracy and ideas and everything. They basically fell off their logs laughing at such a stupid reason, because why risk your life for anything other than women? Of course, it's more complex than that, because some go to war for reputational reasons. They say if we don't retaliate because we've been attacked and they've stolen three of our women, if we don't retaliate, then we will get a reputation as exploitable, and then other groups will start to attack us as well. And so they get into these cycles of, you know, like The Hatfields and McCoys of attacks, counter attacks, retribution, and part of it is reputation management. So that's between groups, and I think that's been the primary source of violence, but not the only source. So there's also within group conflict, and so many ethnographies, many traditional societies have things. Some of them are ritualized like wrestling matches or in the Onomamo, they have these. Or used to these chest pounding duels where. So if we're in this match, you challenge me and I have to.

Of course, chest pounding duel. I like this.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's not. You're not hitting each other, you're just. It's like peacocking.

You really. Oh, no, you're hitting each other. Oh, sorry. Yeah. So they, they get 20 paces away and they, they run up and you punch the other guy in the chest and he has to basically stand there and then he does the same and everything.

Oh, wow.

And then it's basically last man standing.

That's. Well, I suppose that's better than the face. That's an interesting decision with the chest. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure if you get good at that kind of thing, you could start breaking ribs and you can get loose about the rules of where exactly in the chest you can hit. And there's that guy who's always known for hitting. Not exactly in the chat, accidentally missing.

Right, right. The Mike Tyson of exactly eating your ear off.

So interesting. So there's like ritualized conflict. Sort of purify the competition that resolves some kind of issue.

Well, yeah, it's in part to establish status hierarchies, you know, but also, and here's just another one more concrete point on that, the Yanomam, we don't have this in our language. We just have one word for kill or murder. But Yana Mamo have. You're either an Uno. If you're a male, you're an Uno kai or a non. Uno kai. The non unokai are men who have not killed. If you're an Uno kai, that means you have killed someone. And the Uno kai among the Anamamo historically had higher status and more wives. So they're a polygynous society, which is. Which has been true of something like 83 to 85% of traditional societies. Or actually, I was just corrected by a anthropologist who said we no longer call them traditional societies. We call them small scale societies.

So nothing can be called traditional.

I don't know.

Bacteria is the traditional society.

Yeah, I think it's just one of these things. The language, the words that are deemed appropriate to use to describe things change over time. So.

Yeah, so words can hurt people, they can inspire people. Words are funny, powerful things. You authored the textbook titled Evolutionary Psychology the New Science of Mind in its sixth edition. What is the Magic ingredient that gave birth to Homo sapiens. Do you think? Is it fire? Cooking? Ability to collaborate, share ideas, ability to contemplate our own mortality, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah, well, I think it's hard to isolate one factor. I know you've had Richard Wrangham on this podcast. It was a wonderful, wonderful interview. And he used to be a colleague of mine when I was a professor at Michigan. And I've stayed in touch with him on and off. He's a brilliant, brilliant guy and he thinks fire and cooking have been one of the key things. Things. But I think it's hard to isolate. I would trace at least part of our uniqueness to the uniqueness of our mating system. So we have in mating, unlike chimpanzees, who are our closest primate relative and of which Richard Wrangham is a world's expert, but they have basically no long term pair bonded mating. Okay. The female comes into estrus. All the mating, all the sex happens. Most of the sex happens during that window. But humans have evolved long term pair bonded mating. And it's only one mating strategy, but it's a really important one. And then you have with that male parental care. So basically again, you go back to chimps and chimps with whom we share more than 98% of our DNA. Males don't do anything, so they inseminate the females. But then when the kids are born, they basically don't do much of anything in terms of provisioning and so forth. But human males do. We invest in the modern environment could be decades, you know, especially with the boomerang kids and everything. But we're not all males do. But compared to the vast majority of mammals, we are a very heavy male parental investment species.

Could you, if it's okay, and I'll ask you a bunch of dumb basic questions because those are fun. Could you define mating here? Is mating referred to the, the, the series of sexual acts that lead to reproduction? Does it include like dating and love and camaraderie, loyalty, all those things?

Yes, I, you know.

Yes.

Yeah. When I first started studying. Yeah, I don't. It's. When I first started studying it, I looked for the right term and obviously it's much broader than sex. So by mating I include things like mate selection, mate preferences, mate attraction, mate retention, mate poaching, mate expulsions, mate poaching.

That sounds fun. So the early the game theoretics strategy of mate selection is primary, what mating, what mating is about, or do you include the long term? Once you agree that you're gonna Stick this out for a while and have multiple children. Is that also mating?

Yes, I include that as well. So it's a broad category, broad definition, and absolutely includes the emotion of love. And of course there are many different types of love, brotherly love, love, parents for children, but love, I think, and this is one of the shifts in the social sciences. So when I was an undergraduate, for example, I was taught that love is this invention by some Caucasian European poets a couple hundred years ago. And it turns out that's not the case. So there's been extensive cross cultural evidence now that people, not every person in all cultures, of course, but some people in all cultures experience this emotion that we call love.

And for the word love, are we going to, in this conversation, try to stick to sort of romantic love for the meaning of the word love?

Well, that's a great question, but I mean, it's pretty well established that there are these different phases of love. So there's this infatuation phase where our psychology, we get obsessional thoughts. It's hard to focus on work when we're not with the person. We're thinking about the other person constantly. So there's kind of like ideational intrusion into our psychology, but you can't sustain that. I mean, it'd be. And then of course there's a, pardon the phrase, but what I describe as the fucking like bunnies phase of this, you know, intense sexuality. But people have other adaptive problems they have to solve. And so you can't stay in that state for too long. And so that subsides over time and develops into, at least in many cases, this warm attachment, cuddling bunnies, long term.

Cuddling bunnies phase of the relationship. But still romantic. Not like brotherly love or, you know, because I talk about love a lot and for me, you know, love is a broader experience of just experiencing the joy and the beauty of life. So like just looking out in nature. Yeah, that's a kind of love, like whatever the chemicals that lead to a feeling that at least echoes the same kind of feeling that you get with romantic love. You can experience that with even inanimate objects. That sounds weird to say, but just gratitude and appreciation. Not in some kind of weird zen way, but just in a very human way. Just it feels good to be alive kind of.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess I would. I mean, that's an interesting thought. I hadn't thought about that. I guess I would use other terms to describe that. So, like the term awe, for example, when you see a beautiful sunset, you know, that's why I kind of started out by saying, I think there are different types of love, and I'm focusing on the mating type.

And we'll talk about that. But so, yeah, there is a sense of beauty and there's a sense of sexual appeal. Maybe that's a good. And those intersect in fascinating ways. We'll talk about that. Okay, we'll talk about all of that. But you're saying mating strategies, now that we've kind of placed ourselves, what we mean by mating. Mating strategies is one of the cool features that made humans what they are. One of the initial inventions is a weird. Weird and wonderful ways that we mate.

Yeah. And I mean, if you go to even things like how we compete for mates, and this is another kind of strange, for some people, angle on it. But mating is inherently a competitive process in that desirable mates are in scarce supply relative to the numbers of people who want them. And so even. Even post mating, that is after mate selection, mate attraction, and mutual mate choice, desirable mate. That's why there's mate poaching. Mate poaching is one of the strategies that we, in my lab with David Schmidt, have studied. But one of the unique aspects of humans is that we compete using language. And that is we have reputations. And humans devote a lot of effort to maintaining the reputations, to building the reputations, to trying to recover reputations after a loss of reputation for various reasons. But we compete for mates using language, and that includes sending signals to the person that we're trying to attract using language, verbal fluency, and obviously, some more recent things like poetry. But also we use language to derogate our competitors. So one of the papers I published very early on was a research project on derogation of competitors. The ways in which people impugn the status, character, and reputations of their rivals with the goal of making them less desirable to other people. And humans do that, and women and men both do that. So it's an interesting thing that we're male competitions. We were talking about the Yanomamo earlier, and some of these overt physical, or what animal biologists call contest competition, where there's a physical battle, males do that. And so a lot of the early attention on mate competition was focused on these sort of ostentatious, overt battles in contest competition. But we compete through language. Um, and. And so there's this big overlooked domain of women, the ways in which women compete with each other using language. And one of the things that astonished me is how observant women are about the subtle, imperfections in their rivals and take pains to point them out. So just, just this is random examples. I went to a party, this is back in my youth, but went to a party with my girlfriend at the time. And I got into this conversation with another woman who happened to be very attractive. But then we leave the party and she said something just casually offhanded like, she said, did you notice that her thighs were heavy? And I hadn't, but next time I saw her, this other woman, I found my attention being drawn to check out her thighs. Well, and originally, it puzzles me why women would derogate other women on appearance. Well, they do it, of course, because men prioritize appearance. But I thought, well, the man can see the woman directly with his own eyes. Why would verbal input alter his perceptions of how attractive he was? And I think that part of it is. I think there are actually two quick answers to that. One is the attentional one. So our attentional field, sure, when they draw attention to it, those what could be very small deviations from perfect symmetry or whatever they are, become magnified in our attentional field. But the other is that who we have as a mate is also a reflection of our own status. And you saw this in a kind of overt and way in the earlier, the last presidential. Not the last, the 2016 presidential election where Donald Trump was saying this was when he was in competition with Ted Cruz, I think in the primary, said, look, look at my wife. Look at Ted Cruz's life and wife. And he really impugned the appearance of Ted Cruz's wife.

So using language, you can alter the dynamics of the social hierarchy, the status hierarchy. Sorry. So you can change the values subtly, or if you have a large platform in big ways, you can move things around just with your words.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. Right.

Fascinating humans. Because it's all socially constructed. Anyway, so this, I mean, the question I have is you said the interesting thing about mating strategies is there's a small pool of desirable mates. And what the word desirable means is socially defined almost by. On purpose to make sure the pool always stays small.

I would have a couple thoughts on that. It's an interesting set of issues you raise. Okay. One is that I think we have evolved adaptations. Part of our psychology is to detect differences. And so this is why, like a, I don't know, a, A Martian or an alien coming down, they might look at humans and say, boy, they all look alike as one. Just like we look at, I don't know, zebras or whatever, and we think they all look, look alike. But what's important in decision making, especially in the mating domain or even friendship domain or. Or coalitional selection domain, is the differences. And so I noticed this, just a concrete example of this. I was sitting around, this is again, ages ago, watching something like a Miss America beauty contest and people with a bunch of other people, and they were saying, boy, did you see Miss North Carolina, what a dog. And so this is astonishing. And so here, like 50 contestants who are selected as the most attractive in their state, presumably, although they claim it's based on talent, but we notice the differences. And this is why I would push back a little bit on the term socially constructed, because I think there are many different meanings of that phrase. And one meaning that some people have one connotation is that it's arbitrary. And. And I don't think it's arbitrary. So this has been another shift in understanding standards of beauty where it used to be believed in the social sciences, you can't judge a book by its cover. Beauty is only skin deep. Don't judge people on the superficial characteristics. But in fact, physical appearance provides a wealth of information about the health status of someone. In the case of males, their physical formidability. And we have formidability assessment adaptations and then fertility as well. So they're a very predictable set of cues to fertility that have evolved to be part of our standards of attractiveness. And they're not arbitrary. There are some culturally arbitrary ones. So like you go to the Maori in New Zealand, for example, and they find tattoos on their lips to be very attractive. So there are some culturally arbitrary things, but standards of beauty, like cues to youth, cues to health in women, clear skin, full lips, clear eyes, lustrous hair, a small waist, hip ratio, I.e. circumference of the waist relative to the hips, is acute to youth and fertility and acute health symmetrical features. So we are a bilaterally symmetrical species, but we all have deviations from perfect symmetry that are due to different things. Mutation load, environmental insults, diseases during development and so forth.

All right, but that's kind of deeply biological. Like there's cues that indicate something that is biologically true about a particular human. So if we'll talk about both men and women. So we're now talking about what men want in the mating strategies when they look at women. So you're saying small waist to hip ratio, right, is how much of that.

Is our deep biological past, on top.

Of which we can build all kinds of different standards of beauty. So, you know, we have many things going on in our brain. Our value of other humans in selecting a mate might incorporate a lot more variables as we get into the 21st century. So how quickly does our valuation of a mate evolve relative to the evolution of the human species?

Are you using evolve in the sense of culturally evolved?

Culturally evolve and then relative to biologically evolve?

Yeah, well, I think that there are some things that are biologically evolved, some standards, standards of attractiveness and there are some of the things that I mentioned. So in male evaluation of females, let me back up and just say what is the underlying logic? Why would we have standards of attractiveness? So here's the interesting thing, and this gets back to your earlier question about what is unique to humans or what distinguishes us or what set us off on the path that we did is chimpanzee males do not have any difficulty figuring out when a female is fertile. She signals that like crazy with the bright red genital swelling, olfactory cues, she goes into estrus. In humans we have, and this was actually a third thing that I wanted to add earlier. We have concealed ovulation. Okay, Relatively concealed ovulation, which is remarkable given how close we are primatologically to chimpanzees. And so there's a little bit of evidence that there are subtle changes that occur when women ovulate. Women not on hormonal contraceptives.

But it's mostly concealed.

But it is largely concealed.

I think that's a feature of bug in like, did we evolve that? Is that a cool inventor, a powerful invention for the human species?

I think it's an adaptation in women that women have evolved concealed ovulation. And I think it's a feature, not a bug.

Yeah, it gives more. Would it give more power for women to select a mate?

There are a couple different hypotheses about it, but the one that I think is most plausible is that, you know, again, comparing it to chimps, FEMA goes into estrus. The male just has to try to monopolize her while she's in that estrus phase and then they basically ignore the females after that. If you can't know when a woman is fertile, then you have to stick around a lot longer. And so I think long term pair bonding co evolved with concealed ovulation. And with that also a very different form of sexuality, which is that we have sex throughout the ovulatory cycle and chimps don't. You know, there's a little bit of mating, a little bit of sex toward the edges of the estrous cycle, but very little.

So that actually makes mating a more fundamental part of interaction between humans than it does for chimps. So meaning like year round, every day, constantly selecting mates in terms of biologically speaking. So what else do men want today in the 21st century versus in the caveman days?

A wonderful question. To answer it though, I have to distinguish between long term mating and short term mating. And in long term mating it gets very complicated. So as a.

That's one way to put it.

Yeah. Well, so I teach a course in human sexuality at University of Texas at Austin. And one of the things this is back in the days when there were chalkboards and you taught with a piece of chalk and wrote things on the board. And what I would do is I would ask the class, I'd teach this large class, 1 to 200, I'd say, what do women want? Tell me all the things women want in a long term mate. And so I would start at one end of the blackboard. There were like five blackboards. And they'd say, well, I want a mate who's kind, who's understanding, who's intelligent, who's healthy, who's got a good sense of humor, who shares my values. And I just go and I fill out five blackboards and then run out of space. And so first this large number of characteristics that people want and then specific magnitudes of those characteristics or amounts. I say, you want a mate who's say, generous with their resources. And they say, yes, I want mates generous with their research. So I said, so like a guy who, this is in women's mate selection, the guy who at the end of every month gets his paycheck and gives it to the local wino on the drag. I said, well, no, not that generous. Okay, generous toward me, not. Not indiscriminately generous. And so you want a mate who's ambitious, you know, who's a hard worker. Yes, but. But not a workaholic, you know, and so, and so then you get to interactions among different characteristics.

So there's a lot of characteristics, a lot of variables in this very complex optimization problem for women.

Yes, that's right. And more so for women than for men. So, and then when I turn to the men and I say, well, what do. And then I run out of space after about a blackboard and a half because they can't think of anything else. So the women, I think there's a.

Lot of explanations for that besides the lack of the number of variables. It's also, you know, I mean, that's interesting. So what's the difference between the variables? So on the men's side, what are the variables?

Well, in long term mate selection, there's a lot of overlap. So things like intelligence, good health, sense of humor, an agreeable personality, someone who's not too neurotic or moody or emotionally volatile. But there are key differences as well. And the differences stem from basically fall on the delimited number of domains. So for men, it's physical attractiveness, physical appearance and youth are the two real big ones. Okay. Men prioritize those more than women do. And so that's why you have phenomena such as this quote, love at first sight, where sometimes men can walk into a party and they see a woman across the room and say, I'm going to marry that woman. That's the woman for me. Women very rarely do that. Now, most men don't do that either. But men are much more inclined to fall in love at first sight. And that's because they prioritize physical appearance. Why? Because physical appearance provides that this wealth of information about a woman's fertility status. And this is from, from an evolutionary perspective, from a purely reproductive perspective. In business school they would call it job one. Job one is you have to select a fertile mate. So those who, in our evolutionary past, who selected infertile mates, so postmenopausal women, for examp, did not become our ancestors. So we are all the descendants of this long and unbroken chain of ancestors who, all of whom succeeded in selecting a fertile mate. But fertility cannot be observed directly.

Use some cues.

Exactly. And there are cues that are probabilistically related to this underlying quality of fertility that we can't observe directly.

And we're doing that computation in our heads. What about men? What do men want for short term mating?

Well, so for short term mating for both sexes, physical appearance looms very large. So women are. No, physical attractiveness and appearance, they're important for women in long term mate selection. So I don't want to mislead anyone on that. They're just not as important as they are for men. And so a lot of characteristics come for women before physical appearance, physical attractiveness.

So women. So if we switch to women, what do women want? They want also physical appearance for short term mating.

Yeah.

Physical attractiveness. What else? Well, some cues that represent physical attractiveness, that maybe represent health.

Well, here's. This is your.

I'm learning a lot here.

Yeah, well, so, but you're also asking a very interesting question about what is controversial within the evolutionary psychology field. Right. And not totally resolved.

So that's why you're on the sixth edition of the book and there could be a lot more editions coming.

Yeah, I revise it every four years or so because there's four years of new interesting work. And so it deserves updating. But the traditional, I should say answer to your question is that women go for good genes, cues to good genes in the short term and cues to resources in the long term. And this has been a hypothesis that advocated. I didn't come up with this one by Steve Gangestad, a former student of mine, Marty Hales and Randy Thornhill and some other very smart players in the field. And what they used as markers of good genes are things like symmetrical features and masculine features. So strong jawline, high shoulder to hip ratio, you know, other other sorts of masculine features. But I started to doubt this explanation for what women want in the short term because of some other findings. So for women, a lot of short term mating is not one night stand mating, but rather it's affair mating. So if you ask the question why do women have affairs? So let's restrict the question for the moment. My colleagues would argue, well, women have affairs because they're trying to get good genes from one guy while they're getting investment from the regular partner, the husband. Okay, but the problem is that when women have affairs, 70 plus percent tend to fall in love with or become attached to their affair partner.

Now, sorry, what percentage? 70?

Yeah, 70%.

Some large majority.

Yeah, 70% or more. In contrast to men, where it's more like 30% of men who have affairs fall in love with or become attached to their affair partner. So, but from a design perspective, an engineering perspective, if you will, that's a disastrous thing if you're just trying to get good genes. So you're trying to retain the investment of one guy while getting good genes surreptitiously from this guy who presumably has more falling in love with him, becoming attached. That's not a feature you want.

Yeah, it's bad engineering.

Yeah, exactly, it's bad engineering. And so I developed an alternative hypothesis that I call the mate switching hypothesis, which is that affairs are one way in which women divest themselves of, of a cost inflicting partner or a partner who things aren't working out well with. And it's a way to either transition back into the mating market or to, or to trade up in, in the mating market. And so anyway, so these are, these are probably the two leading hypotheses about why, why women have affairs. And I am putting my money on the mate switching hypothesis. My esteemed colleagues are putting their Money on the good genes hypothesis. But I think the evidence for the good genes hypothesis is starting to look shakier than initially.

Well, this is a heated debate. I mean, mate squishing sounds like a. So. So from a game theory perspective, from an engineering perspective, it seems to make a lot more sense. Unless you put a lot of value in lifelong, sort of in the long term mating some kind of value in the lifelong singular relationship like monogamy. Yeah, and maybe we do psychologically, maybe there's a big evolutionary advantage to that.

And we do. But we also know that divorce is, you know, and breakups are also common and occur in all cultures.

So we're just not very good at this thing. Well, either we're not good at the mate selection, such that maybe we're not incorporating all the variables well, or we're just not good at monogamy, period, from an evolutionary perspective.

Well, I think that's another debate. No, that raises an interesting set of questions. So I think that, I mean, one issue is longevity. So I mean, we didn't live to be 70, 80 years old and over 99% of human evolutionary history. And so we didn't necessarily evolve to be mated monogamously with one person for decades and decades and decades. But I also think that long term pair bonding is a critical strategy, but mate switching is also a critical strategy. So if you have a mate, for example, who becomes cost inflicting or becomes sufficiently debilitated, or who suffers an injury such that like in hunter gatherer societies, where the mate can no longer hunt, can no longer provide resources for their kids and the woman, this becomes a problem. And so I think that we have adaptations to mate switch and to divest ourselves from some partners and trade up in the mating market under certain conditions. And those conditions will differ for men and women.

What are some of the cues in terms of what women want? I go to the gym. It's a hotly contested debate. You said evolutionary psychology, and this is in the Bro Psychology forums that I visit multiple times a day. No, I'm just kidding. What's the most important cue of appearance for guys? What muscle group is the most important to work on? Do women care about biceps is what I'm asking.

In terms of physical appearance, a good shoulder to hip ratio. So relatively wide shoulders relative to hips is one. Women tend to prefer men who are physically fit and well toned, but not muscle bound. So like if you go to, I don't know, some like those early when Arnold Schwarzenegger.