14 DAY TRIAL // The latest study by Dr. Viren Swami of the University of Westminster in London and published in the journal Body Image marks a victory for Miss Average, the Daily Mail says, in that it shows men don’t find long legs on a woman attractive. Wary of extremes, men would rather go for women who are proportionate in terms of legs and body length, the study has learned.
The findings of the study are nothing short of a pleasant surprise for women as well, as many of them are under the illusion that men would choose a supermodel type any given minute over a normal sized girl. This explains the different answers male and female participants in the study gave as regards the pictures they were shown, all of them portraying women with various leg lengths.
“Faced with the choice of a woman whose legs are much longer than the rest of her body and another whose legs account for half her height, men will set their sights on the latter, a study found. To pin down the most attractive legs, the researchers asked more than 1,000 men and women to rate the attractiveness of a series of images of female bodies. In each case, the legs had been lengthened or shortened slightly, to alter the ‘leg-to-body ratio,’ but the overall height remained the same,” the Mail writes of the study.
“The men, by and large, preferred mid-length legs – that is legs that accounted for half of overall height. However, many women thought the men would prefer the sort of longer legs on display in New York this week when model Lily Cole wowed admirers at a [recent] film premiere. The findings surprised the researchers, including Dr. Viren Swami, of the University of Westminster in London,” the same publication adds.
The explanation for that may also be found in the fact that men, upon seeing a woman with incredibly long legs and a short torso, immediately see a signal that she is not exactly fit to carry babies. In short, in terms of attractiveness as regards proportions, the leg-to-body ratio is essential, the study concludes.