This shit is so sad, goddamn.
These graphs have vexed and fascinated me to no end. They are from the OKCupid founder Christian Rudder's book Dataclysm. He used OkCupid data to make them, and I wish he gave more details about how. He said they were from ratings, not a survey. Specifically he said "all the trends below are true across my sexual data sets, but for specificityās sake, Iāll use numbers from OkCupid" and "this isnāt survey data, this is data built from tens of millions of preferences expressed in the act of finding a date." So I'm assuming men were shown pictures of women (if they were given other profile info, like their actual age, I'm not sure) and asked to rate their attractiveness. What his other sexual data sets are, I do not know. Maybe this is touched upon elsewhere in the book, but he doesn't elaborate in the section with these plots. I want to know the age range of the participants in the pool because it appears that there were no men or women under 20. I believe OkCupid allows anyone 18 and over, but maybe Rudder only used people 20 and older for some reason. Here are a couple of pages from the book for context:
Regardless, I would love to see a real study done like Dembar mentioned:
if the men in this study were asked to answer by just giving a number, vs seeing photos of women at different ages, I bet the results would be different.
If men were asked to rate the attractiveness of photos of girls/women of all ages (including ones under 18 ) without any indicators of their actual age (neutral hair and clothing, no makeup), thus eliminating cultural clues and pressure to give a socially acceptable answer, the results would be very elucidating. It would also be interesting if they were asked to guess how old each are. I've tried to find studies like this, but I haven't had much luck. If anyone knows of any, please let me know.
Here are some interesting tidbits I found in my search so far:
Here are the average preferred spousal age differences men and women reported from surveys across several different countries (
link).
Here's an interesting study where men and women were tasked with creating the most beautiful female face (
link).
"The local population (mean age 19.9) had a Nasion-Chin measurement of 112 mm; similar to the 111.8 mm for 18 year old Canadian females. In contrast, the beautiful female composites generated by the experimental subjects had significantly smaller Nasion-Chin measurements, with the highest rated face having an estimated Nasion-Chin measurement of an 11 year old female according to the Farkas growth curve."
"The mean lip size of the beautiful faces corresponds to the peak size, characteristic of I4 year old females."
"However, the beautiful composites in the current study were judged to be 24.9 years of age"
A study with men rating female faces for attractiveness and measuring them in terms of facial maturity (
link).
"More interesting is the influence of Facial Maturity and Facial Averageness on the attractiveness evaluations. The former variable measures the dissimilarity of the female participantsā faces to the faces of girls aged 11ā14. The latter measures the closeness of the participantsā faces to the average female face. According to our results, Facial Maturity affects womenās attractiveness as rated by men, suggesting that men focus on cues for youth when evaluating female faces. This is in line with previous results showing that for men, the most attractive versions of adult womenās faces are those proportioned like young faces."
A study surveying single people, asking about tolerated age differences in a partner (
link).
"We also found interesting results for the oldest and youngest acceptable partner. In general, men accept women who are approximately 10 years younger, but only 4.5 years older, than they are; women accepted men who are approximately 8 years older and 5 years younger. At first glance, this looks like a complementary pattern. This pattern changes when how these tolerated age spans vary with the participantās age is considered. As men grow older, they accept even younger women, but their tolerated age span regarding the oldest partner they would accept is unrelated to their own age. On the other hand, women tend to accept younger men as they grow older, but the oldest partner they will accept decreases as they age."
All in all, what ages people self-report as their preference, what ages they actually rate as most attractive, what ages they actually pursue and partner with in real life in the short term, and what ages they pursue and partner with in the long term are all related but distinct categories.
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