[Gixxermuscle]

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/comm/haselton...y_sexy.pdf

Some Cliffs:

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if muscular men are sexually desirable but
less likely to commit to their partners, women’s attraction to muscularity should differ depending on mating
context. According to strategic pluralism theory
(Gangestad & Simpson, 2000), men have evolved to
pursue reproductive strategies that are contingent on their
value on the mating market. More attractive men accrue
reproductive benefits from spending more time seeking
multiple mating partners and relatively less time investing in offspring. In contrast, the reproductive effort of
less attractive men, who do not have the same mating
opportunities, is better allocated to investing heavily in
their mates and offspring and spending relatively less
time seeking additional mates.
From a woman’s perspective, the ideal is to attract a
partner who confers both long-term investment benefits
and genetic benefits. Not all women, however, will be
able to attract long-term investing mates who also display heritable fitness cues. Consequently, women face
trade-offs in choosing mates because they may be forced
to choose between males displaying fitness indicators or
those who will assist in offspring care and be good longterm mates

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Last, women are most attracted to men
other than their primary mate when fertility is high
within the ovulatory cycle (and thus the benefits of
extrapair mating for genetic benefits are highest;
Gangestad, Thornhill, & Garver-Apgar, 2005). This is
especially true for women whose primary mates lack
sexual attractiveness—the women who, in theory, have the
most to gain from extrapair mating with men who display
costly fitness indicators (Gangestad et al., 2005; Haselton
& Gangestad, 2006; Pillsworth & Haselton, 2006).
One prediction that follows from the dual-mating logic
is that men who display cues of fitness should be chosen
most often as affair partners. Symmetry is a purported
index of fitness (see Moller, 1997); therefore, Thornhill
and Gangestad (1994) examined partner number in men
varying in symmetry. As predicted, more symmetrical men
reported having a greater overall number of sex partners,
more sexual affairs, and a greater number of sex partners
who were themselves mated to other men at the time of
the affair. Hughes and Gallup (2003) found a similar pattern in men with higher shoulder-to-hip ratios, a trait that
may be linked with testosterone. In sum, both theory and
existing evidence suggest that women attend to cues of fitness when selecting sex partners, particularly short-term
mates and affair partners.

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Conclusion
Although past research has focused primarily on the
factors that make women physically attractive to men,
these studies suggest that men’s physical features are
related not only to women’s expressed preferences for
mates but also to men’s and women’s past mate choices
and sex behaviors. From a sexual selection perspective,
this makes sense—these traits may be cues of heritable
fitness and women who expressed these preferences
would have had greater reproductive success than
women who did not. These findings expand on a growing body of literature suggesting that traits that are
costly to develop are important components of male
physical attractiveness. These findings also support the
conclusion that male physical attractiveness plays a previously underappreciated role in women’s mate choices—
and perhaps in how men compete with each other to
attract women’s attention.