What makes a woman want to sleep with a man? Is it true that a chap can laugh a woman into bed? Does he need to be tall, dark and handsome to stand any chance at all?
Today, in the second extract from the new book Why Women Have Sex, by psychologists Cindy Meston and David Buss, we reveal the features that make a man appeal to a woman, and why, are far more fascinating and complex than you could imagine...
Rules of attraction: A fascinating guide to the complex features that will make a man appeal to a woman
Checklist: Can a man really laugh a woman into bed?
SIZE MATTERS
What sort of body does a woman find desirable? Perhaps the most obvious physical characteristic she looks for in a man is height.
Studies consistently find that women consider tall men to be attractive. In analyses of personal ads, 80 per cent of women state they want to meet a man who is 6ft or taller.
Men who indicate in their personal ads that they are tall have also been shown to receive far more responses from women.
Other studies show women prefer tall men as husbands and put an even greater emphasis on height in shorter-term sex partners. Women even place importance on height when selecting sperm donors.
Two studies also found that taller-than-average men tend to have a greater number of live-in girlfriends and more children, confirming their popularity for romance and reproduction.
And there does seem to be an underlying logic in women's preference for tall men. In Western cultures, tall men tend to have higher socio-economic status than short men.
Each added inch of height has been shown to add several thousand pounds to a man's annual salary.
It is estimated that, on average, 6ft men earn more than £100,000 across a 30-year career than 5ft 5in men.
They also tend to be healthier than shorter men - and if they're policemen, they get assaulted less than their shorter colleagues, which suggests height commands more respect from other men. What more could a girl want?
THE SCENT OF SEX
According to new scientific research, a woman will literally sniff out a man's genetic make-up before she decides if he's right for her.
A woman's sense of smell reaches a peak around the time of her ovulation, the 24-hour window -during the monthly menstrual cycle in which she can become pregnant.
The genes responsible for fighting off disease-causing bacteria and viruses are found in a group of genes called the major histocompatibility complex, or MHC.
Different people have various versions of these genes - and it turns out that women can benefit in two ways from mating with men whose MHC genes are dissimilar to their own.
Such a mate is likely to have more dissimilar genes in general, so finding someone dissimilar attractive might help to prevent many of the birth defects associated with reproducing with close genetic relatives.
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