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Well, it's nice to see that science is finally taking our weekly snail-mailed letters seriously and has followed our suggestion of studying highly important matters for once!
Traits that for decades have laid the foundation for a gay subculture have been seeping into the LGBT mainstream in recent years. Leading gay GPS app "Scruff" is evidence of facial hair's trending moment. But a new study finds that women aren't exactly more attracted to a man's lip locks, despite its perceived amplification of masculinity. Are gays in line with the results?
Researchers at Canada’s University of Lethbridge and Barnaby Dixson of New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington (that's a mouthful, but hey, we like those!) studied women's attraction to bearded men versus clean-shaven men. “Women … do not rate bearded faces as more attractive than clean-shaven faces," the researchers revealed in the new issue of Behavioral Ecology.
But the reasons those behind the experiment think that women aren't more attracted to bearded men might prove to be basis for gay men finding bearded men more attractive.
According to the L.A. Times:
With beards, the men looked older and more aggressive than they did with their beards shaved. The viewers also ascribed higher social status to the men when they were bearded than when they were baby-faced. Women said that the clean-shaven faces were more attractive than the whiskery ones.
Vasey and Dixson wrote that their research suggested that beards did not evolve in early humans because women found bearded men more attractive (as Charles Darwin believed). Rather, natural selection favored bearded faces because hairier men were more successful at conveying aggression and securing loftier social status.
“These findings suggest that beards play a stronger role in signaling a man’s age, social status and potential threat than in augmenting physical attractiveness," researchers write.
Thats fine! More scruffy men for us!
So, if the study included gay men as participants, would the results be similar?
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