Someone once quoted a research at me:
Men were shown photographs of female body parts and asked to judge the attractiveness. The result was that men (of all ages) found 14 year old females the most (sexually) attractive.
I have tried to locate this or similar research, but to no avail.
Do you know of experiments researching at what age (men or) women are perceived to be most attractive (by male or female judges)?
Are there any moderators of this judgement (like age or gender of judge)?
OkCupid, a free online dating website (through which I've met two girlfriends myself, incidentally), does some pretty interesting research on the profiles and activity of its users. This particular research blog post presents some fairly on-topic results in "Exhibit C: Looks":
@ArtemKaznatcheev rightly pointed out some range restriction here, so this can't address the validity of an age estimate below 18 years directly, but two things are worth noting:
It's not clear to me whose ratings these are or how exactly they were collected (as a user of the site, I remember a 1-5 rating index, and chose to rate women only), so it's hard to trust these results, especially in terms of their representativeness of a general population. Artem also pointed out that a better method for controlling social desirability in these ratings would hide direct information on age from respondents; OkCupid's research differs from the kind you're asking about in that regard too. Nonetheless, it's an empirical hint at the more explicit answer to the related, subjective question where respondents do have this info. Social desirability and age info are present in many normal social interactions after all, so removing age info deliberately might reduce naturalistic applicability of results anyway.
This blog post presents many more graphs on related topics that might interest you (e.g., as alternative operationalizations of attractiveness, or as behavioral correlates), but only one seems to address a moderator directly. That moderator is attractiveness itself! A quote follows this graph:
If you separate out the absolute best-looking women, almost all of whom are very young, and also remove the people you won't realistically want to date (the worst-looking women), you find that everyone else's attractiveness doesn't change much with age.
In other words, given that nobody is drop-dead gorgeous or drop-dead hideous, your average 25 year-old is roughly as good-looking as your average 35 year-old. Yes, throwing out the prettiest of the pretty young things is a clumsy handicap to put on an age-by-age comparison. But at the same time, for the vast majority of men, the best-looking women are simply out of reach, so it's actually accurate to exclude them as possibilities. In fact, unrealistic male expectations inspired this article, so we want to do everything we can to correct for them.
Many of you are probably scoffing at the idea that many 35 year-olds are as attractive as many 25 year-olds, but there are social factors at work that you might not consider as you go through life making judgments. Most importantly: nationwide, thirtysomethings are much more likely to be married and therefore much more likely to have stopped optimizing their attractiveness. So the typical 35 year-old woman you see out in the world isn't representative of the single 35 year-olds who are still dating and looking good.
I'm particularly doubtful of this second graph though, because it doesn't seem clear that the top and bottom deciles were identified and excluded separately within each year of age. "If you separate out the absolute best-looking women, almost all of whom are very young" actually sounds more like excluding the top decile while ignoring age, which might invalidate this graph. Removing the most extreme deciles of the sample while ignoring age would necessarily flatten the "everybody else" line somewhat, given any asymmetry in relationships between age and membership in these deciles of attractiveness across all ages.
Edit by what. Delete or edit as you see fit.
Nick, I too see a problem with how the most and least attractive women were deleted from the sample. I add this as an edit, as it does not warrant its own answer, but is too long for a comment.
If attractiveness declines with age, we must assume that it declines equally for all women, until this is disproven. So we must assume that a woman who is among the most beautiful at age 21, while still among the most beautiful at age 35, will have lost in overall attractiveness. The same goes for the average and the unattractive woman. We must assume (because we don't have the data) that over all women of all ages and all levels of attractiveness, we have a parallel decline in attractiveness with age, as shown in the graph below:
Now, if you delete the most and least attractive women from your sample, across all ages, you will, as the graph shows, create a sub-sample with no decline in attractiveness. This is an artifact of you tampering with the data and has no explanatory power whatsoever.
If on the other hand you delete the most and least attractive women for each age group, the general "slant" of the graph and the decrease in attractiveness that it represents does not change at all.
What I believe is that okcupid.com do not want to anger their older female customers, so they pimped or sugarcoated their data in a way that flatters the vanity of those women and allays their fears of being unattractive. In short: this section of their blog is advertising, not research.
No. Female beauty is believed to be related to the physical traits of their fertility which is maximized in the 20s. Men prefer partners around the age of 20 for one night stands (this is true for their sexual fantasies as well) and for long term partners sometimes older than 20s but generally younger than themselves. Women prefer sexual partners of their own age.
The present study examined desired minimum and maximum ages for mates across five different levels of relationship involvement (marriage, serious relationship, falling in love, casual sex, and sexual fantasies) comparing individuals of 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 years old. Consistent with previous findings, women preferred partners of their own age, regardless of their own age and regardless of the level of relationship involvement. Men, on the other hand, regardless of their own age, desired mates for short-term mating and for sexual fantasies who were in their reproductive years. However, with regard to long-term mates, men preferred mates who, although younger than them, were sometimes above the age of maximum fertility. Explanations for these findings are discussed.
-Age preferences for mates as related to gender, own age, and involvement level
In the absence of contraception, female fertility reaches its maximum in the mid-twenties (which is the estimated age of evolved attractive composites), declines by about 20% in the mid-thirties, and then falls precipitously by a further 60% during the forties
-Mate choice decisions: the role of facial beauty
female beauty can best be explained by a sexual selection viewpoint, whereby selection favors cues that are reliable indicators of fertility.
There's data in this reddit post that points to about 14 being the age girls are at their most attractive to men (exactly as biology predicts): Science AMA Series: We are Alan Sanders, Michael Bailey, and Gary Beecham, co-authors of a recently published study on the genetics of male sexual orientation, Ask Us Anything!.
Waist to hip ratio seems to be a strong indicator of mate choice, even more than facial beauty (which was alluded to above). Google scholar will point you to hundreds of articles concerning the subject. Hence the age group with the 'optimum' waist to hip ratio (~0.7) will tend to be favored by men.
My biggest Problems with studies like the Okcupid...they only allow for members 18+. So you end up with data skewed a bit higher than would probably be norm. Also with the social stigma of finding someone attractive underage, if the person is aware they would say NO. Also men in their 20's tend to want a girl they can take drinking so that it is somewhere they are familiar/comfortable with and of course, drunk girls are easier (not condoning in any way just saying it happens)
I have heard of these studies too. And they get buried from search engines with these new "studies" On I heard came up with 15 and one was 16. The 16 one I know a place you can find it: The documentary are all men Pedophiles
http://watchdocumentaries.com/are-all-men-pedophiles/
At 5:28 he quotes a guy, who did the pathological studies. And the whole thing is full of the kind of general info you might be looking for. I would just give you the guy's name but it's foreign, being spoken by someone with a mild accent. I just have no idea.
