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Ada Calhoun

Ada Calhoun

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Ada Calhoun is the editor-in-chief of Babble, a consulting editor at Nerve.com and a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review.... read more

Men Prefer Hot Women, Say Overpaid Researchers

Posted Sep 5th 2007 10:24AM by Ada Calhoun
Filed under: Science, Sex

Don't you just love CNN Health? They're always introducing some new duh-riffic study with lots of fanfare: "Breaking news: children need love!" or "This just in: Pope is Catholic!" And now, apparently, another crack-team of researchers has made its ground-breaking contribution to science: "Men want hot women, study confirms." You don't say.

But this study is particularly absurd. First of all, it involved forty-six German speed-daters, hardly sexual exemplars for the species. Second, it used the uber-un-scientific standard known as "attractiveness level." How can this be objective? (This photo, by the way, is what Getty Images gives you when you search for "attractiveness.")

And given that hotness is a very subjective thing, how can any conclusions be made like, "Men tended to select nearly every woman above a certain minimum attractiveness threshold." How'd they calculate this, HotOrNot.com?

The sooner scientists give up on trying to quantify something as nebulous as sex appeal, the better. Besides, as any good sex researcher knows, all men and women have to do to raise their "attractiveness level" is don a baseball or cheerleader uniform. Now can we have some of that grant money?

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