经济学人下载:男性魅力 腹肌绝对是极好的!

Science and technology
科学技术

Male attractiveness
男性魅力

Abs-olutely fabulous
腹肌，绝对是极好的！

Women's expectations of the opposite sex are at least as unrealistic as men's
男女对异性抱有的期望都不切实际，但女性更甚。

MEN have long wondered what exactly it is that women want.
女人到底看重男性身材的哪一点，男人们一直在苦苦寻求答案。

Some pore over men's magazines, with their promises of washboard abs, for guidance.
有些人研读教男人如何获得搓衣板般腹肌的男性杂志，想从中找到答案。

The more scientifically minded look for experimental data.
而更具科学精神的人则会希望从实验数据中寻找答案。

The latest evidence comes from a group of researchers led by Brian Mautz, then of Australian National University.
由布莱恩·莫茨带领的研究小组发现了最新证据。

They gathered 105 heterosexual Australian women and showed them a series of digitally generated pictures of men in which three bodily characteristics were varied—height, shoulder-to-waist ratio and flaccid penis size.
他们选取了105名国内异性恋女性，给她们展示了三种能展现男性魅力的组图，

The women were asked to rate the men as sexual partners.
并让她们以性伴侣的角度去评价这些男性。

In an article just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr Mautz and his team describe their results.
莫茨及其小组在《美国国家科学院院刊》刚发表了一篇文章描述了他们的研究结果。

Happily for the insecure, although the women did indeed find a larger penis alluring, it was not the most important factor.
结果让那些对自己阴茎没自信的男性感到庆幸：尽管女性的确会认为阴茎更大更有吸引力，但这并不是最重要的因素。

That honour went to the combination of broad shoulders and a narrow waist, which accounted for around three-quarters of the variation in attractiveness all by itself.
最重要的是要同时拥有宽肩和窄腰，单单这点就能解释所有男性魅力方差的四分之三。

Height was also only a weak predictor of appeal.
结果还得出，男性魅力也与身高关系不大。

That is odd, says Dr Mautz, because other studies have linked height with all sorts of benefits, from higher salaries to longer lives.
莫茨博士说，但有点很奇怪，因为其他研究经常拿身高和好的方面联系起来，比如高薪和长寿。

The bigger-is-better effect was also subject to diminishing returns: each extra centimetre, whether of height, shoulder width or penis size, was less significant than the previous one.
越大越好的效应也遵循收益递减定律：无论身多高，肩多宽，阴茎多大，每多一厘米，那这一厘米的重要性都会递减。

Nonetheless, even the tallest, broadest-shouldered and best-endowed digital hunks that the researchers generated fell short of perfection.
然而，即便在研究者所合成的数字照片中，拥有最高身高，最宽肩膀和最大阴茎的健壮男性也算不上完美。

The optimum values appear to lie outside the tested range, they note, adding that the maxima are more than two standard deviations from the population mean for each trait.
研究者说，最优值似乎在测试范围外，每项特征的极大值都在总体均值的两个标准差之外，

That means that, for each trait, fewer than 2.5% of the men whom women encounter in the real world will be as generously proportioned as they might hope.
这也就是说，在女性现实世界遇到的所有男性中，就该特征而言，尺寸能符合所愿的少于2.5%。

Men with perfect scores in all three traits will be rarer than hen's teeth.
这三方面都很完美的男性算是凤毛麟角。

The study is not perfect.
该研究并非精确无误。

There was no danger of the women mistaking the digital men for the real thing.
参加测试的女性并不会把虚拟男性看作是真人。

Other factors—such as social status, for instance—may, in the real world, override the physical preferences that the researchers were measuring.
现实世界中，其他因素可能比研究者一直在测量的身材偏好这个因素更为重要，比如社会地位。

And it is hard, when all the subjects come from a single country, to disentangle the effects of nurture from those of nature.
而且如果参与测验的女性仅来自一个国家，那她们就很难将后天形成因素和先天自带特点区分开来。

It is commonly pointed out, for instance, that men's apparent preference for slim women seems to be a relatively modern construction.
比如，普遍观点指出：男性对窈窕女子有明显偏好，似乎是现代西方文化做出的解释。

Erotica from the turn of the 19th century tend to feature much curvier women than their modern equivalent.
相比现代的色情书籍，十九世纪初的则更着重描述拥有曲线美的女性。

Women's preferences may be just as influenced by the culture in which they grow up.
女性喜欢什么样的男性，也许正会因她们成长中所经历的文化的不同而不同。相比现代情色书刊中出现的女性，19世纪初情色书刊会将女性描述得更为妖娆。她们成长所处的文化背景些许会影响女性对男性的偏好吧。

On the other hand, it is a rule of thumb in biology that females are much pickier than males.
而且从生物学的角度来看，有这么一条常理，雌性都比雄性更挑剔。

There are good evolutionary reasons why that is so.
进化论就很好地解释了这一点。

Even in humans, who share the burden of child-rearing more equally than many animals, having children requires far more of an investment of resources from a female than it does from a male—after all, it is the woman who must endure nine months of pregnancy and then breast-feed the baby.
即便在分担子女抚养责任方面，人类在所有动物中算是做得比较公平的了，但是就生小孩而言，还是需要女性从自己身上投入更多。

Women therefore face stronger incentives to spend their relatively limited reproductive resources on only the most attractive men, whose children will be most likely to breed in turn.
毕竟，女性需要怀胎十月，小孩生下后还需母乳喂养。因此就能强烈诱发女性将自己十分有限的生殖资源献给更具吸引力的男性身上，他们的孩子才最有可能接着生养自己的孩子。

Back to the sit-ups, boys.
所以，小伙子，还是仰卧起坐走起吧！