Sexyness, Not Just about Looks, but Also about Gait

Being sexy is not limited to the way you look; a new research made by Texas A&M University psychology professor Louis G. Tassinary and co-author Kerri Johnson of New York University shows that it is also about the way you move.

"People have always tried to identify the magical formula for beauty, and we knew body shape was important, but we found movement was also key. When encountering another human, the first judgment an individual makes concerns the other individual's gender," explained Johnson.

"The body's shape, specifically the waist-to-hip ratio, has been related to gender identification and to perceived attractiveness, but part of the way we make such judgments is by determining whether the observed individual is behaving in ways consistent with our culture's definitions of beauty and of masculinity/femininity. And part of those cultural definitions involves movement."

"It turns out that decisions about a particular individual's attractiveness are high level ones which integrate an entire complex of cues, one of which, again, involves how the individual moves." continued Johnson.

The research was made on 700 volunteers involved in a series of five approaches, three of which included animated representations of people walking. The attractiveness mark in case of women raised by about 50 % when they walked with hip sway, and attractiveness mark for men increased with over 50 % when they walked with a swagger in their shoulders.

The common concept of the 1990s said that female physical attractiveness was based primarily on the waist-hip ratio, with an "ideal" of about 0.7 and beyond that meant less attractive.

But early researches employed just simple line drawings, asking subjects to mark attractiveness based on evolutionary arguments, like certain waist-to-hip ratios predicting more fecund females, which were regarded as being more attractive. "Using our more dynamic figures, it became clear to us that the waist-to-hip ratio is just one cue to perceived attractiveness", said Tassinary. "Knowing the cognitive mechanisms undergirding the relations between judgments of attractiveness and body cues is essential to understanding human evolution," Tassinary notes.

Moreover, physical manifestations of "femaleness" vary across human cultures: western cultures favor a smaller waist-to-hip ratio (the "hourglass" line), while others may prefer a larger ratio (the "tubular" line). "Not only has the research proved fruitful and significant, but it is a model for collaboration in the academic realm," Tassinary notes.

"The current findings bolster our understanding of how and why the body is perceived attractive. Body cues bring about the basic social perception of sex and gender, and the compatibility of those basic precepts affects perceived attractiveness", said Johnson.