It’s the butt curve that counts, not size

If you were convinced that men just lust after a humongous female butt or sheer beauty, then you have to think again.

A new research suggests that there is more to what attracts men to a woman’s rear quarters. It is the curve rather than the size of the posterior. This is according to the research conducted by the University of Texas in Austin.

They discovered that men are not so much about how big the butt is, than how curvaceous it appears. The curvature at the spine is what determines whether men will love it or not. It is this curve that gives a picture of the shapeliness for men.

The research sampled men aged between 17 and 34 years who were asked to rate how beautiful a woman was, based on the images of silhouettes of women who had been asked to stand sideways. Interestingly, the images had been changed to make the spine curve at various angles distinct from the other in protrusion of the butt.

The study found out that most men seemed to prefer the images where the lower spine curved at about 45 degrees between the back and the buttocks.

The size of the butt did not determine whether the men liked what they saw or not, but the angle at which it was inclined. Most of the 200 men who were part of the research seemed to prefer posterior spinal angles that were closest to 45 degrees.

The study’s coordinator, Eric Russell, noted that: “This enabled us to conclusively show that men prefer women who exhibit specific angles of spinal curvature over buttock mass.”

And to further the argument, cultural aspects of life have been thrown to the study, beauty alone is not what attracts men to curvy posteriors. It is widely believed in numerous cultures that women with curvy backsides can easily cope with pregnancy.

“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 the foetus and offspring, and who would have been able to carry out multiple pregnancies without injury,” says the study’s lead author, David Lewis.

This, therefore, suggests that traditionally, there is belief that women have a better ability to carry babies, and also to ‘hunt’ for food for their children, which is what most men would want anyway.

What this means eventually is that there is more to what men want in a woman than just beauty, and that is the woman’s physical features. David Buss, a co-author of the study says, “This adds to a growing body of evidence that beauty is not entirely arbitrary, as many in mainstream social science believed, but rather has a coherent adaptive logic.”

This research just leads to more debate on what exactly constitutes beauty in women. In the end, it is a debate that has no end in sight – at least in the foreseeable future.