Boobs vs. Butts: Male Tastes Differ (& Your 10 Isn’t Everybody’s)

You shouldn’t treat her like a ‘10’… Because even the most beautiful girl is only a ‘10’ to a certain chunk of the male population.

I came across a fascinating 1968 study on male preferences in female body part sizes this weekend. The study asked men to rate various female silhouettes, like these:

Then, at a separate date, in what the male subjects thought was a separate study, the researchers had the same men answer a number of questions about themselves.

They then compared the men’s body type preferences to personality attributes and other dimensions to look for correlations. And they discovered (as you might imagine) that different types of men like different types of women.

The body type ratings men gave were of figures that looked like this:

And the personality dimensions and background details the men provided information on covered the gamut, from social interaction styles to what kind of magazines they read.

We’ll talk about the findings of this study and a few other ones, if you’re curious to know what your taste in women says about you. But more than that, the point of this post is going to be to give you one additional tool to help take the girls you really like off any pedestals you have them on... By driving home the point that while you might think she’s a complete 10/10, there are plenty of other men who don’t, and odds are she doesn’t even view herself that way.

So You Say She’s a 10?

When I was new to cold approach, and I was hanging out on the biggest pickup forum of the time, mASF (that forum’s defunct now, but you can still join ours), at first I’d be really excited when I’d see guys talking about how they were sleeping with these girls who were “10s”.

Man, I thought back then, I wonder if I’ll ever get there someday. I viewed these guys as possessing some sort of secret master-type knowledge of women, and probably flawless verbal technique and total understanding of the game.

But then I started to see some of these guys post pictures of girls they’d slept with. And my reaction would invariably be, Whoa. THAT girl is not a 10. Not even close!

Well, at least she has nice teeth.

I wouldn’t say that to them, because I didn’t want to be rude. But my opinion of them would go from, “Titan of Game, sleeping with the world’s most beautiful women,” to, “Dumpster diver who doesn’t even realize he’s a dumpster diver.” I thought these guys were deluding themselves, telling themselves these girls were 10s who were maybe just barely bangable, at best.

Yet, I’d go out and try their techniques out on girls I personally found super cute, and I’d discover they worked. And I’d scratch my head and say, It’s crazy. Do they not realize this stuff works on CUTE girls, too? Why are they sticking with those Plain Janes when they can use the same stuff they’re using now and get hotter, higher caliber women?

For a while, I figured I just had better fundamentals than these guys did. Maybe these guys just never took time to develop their charisma, I thought. So I was able to use the same stuff they were using and get better results out of it.

It took me years, and hanging out with quite a few seducer pals, before I fully learned the biggest reason the girls I got appealed to me so much more and the girls these guys got appealed to me so much less, and it wasn’t because they had crummy fundamentals (every guy I’ve met who gets laid reliably has great fundamentals).

The real reason was this:

Your 10 isn’t my 10. And my 10 isn’t yours.

Alek had a great article about this a few months back. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you check it out now:

• “Is She Too Hot? Well, Looks are Subjective”

In it, we included pictures of six girls, side-by-side, taken from a thread on our forum where guys listed out their dream lays. And in the comment section below the article, readers rated the order of hotness they put each girl in.

#5 first, then #2, then #... Etc.

And what you saw was multiple different guys who were no slouches with women putting women in completely different places. One guy might think Girl #1 was the hottest girl of them all, and put Girl #4 dead last. But another guy might think Girl #4 was the hottest, and Girl #1 in the middle of the pack.

This is important to understand. It’s key to the point of this article.

It’s also another reason why I recommend you discard the 1-to-10 looks rating scale. In addition to this scale causing you to psyche yourself out by rating a girl higher value than you see yourself as, it’s also, frankly, just not accurate.

That’s because a “10” to you almost certainly is not a “10” to me... And vice versa.

And if she isn’t being treated like a “10” by every guy out there, she also isn’t going to have some kind of de facto “10 behavior”... Like many inexperienced men often assume beautiful girls must have.

Different Men, Different Preferences

That 1968 study, titled “Correlates of Heterosexual Somatic Preference”, as you recall discovered different men prefer different body types differently.

Each body part (breasts, butt, legs) had five (5) possible representations in the study:

• -2 (much smaller)
• -1 (somewhat smaller)
• 0 (average)
• +1 (somewhat larger)
• +2 (much larger)
  

On average, the ‘standard figure’ – averaged size breasts, buttocks, and legs – received the highest ratings. And on average, the figures where the three body parts – breasts, butt, and legs – were either all larger or all smaller than average received the worst ratings.

The only configuration men liked more on average were the +1 breasts (somewhat larger breasts), which men overall liked about slightly more on average than totally standard female body types. Everything else (larger or smaller breasts, butts, or legs) brought men’s ratings down. The biggest minus went to big +2 buttocks. But if you’re a butt man and you’re about to say, “Hey, wait a minute!”, don’t worry – we’ll get to that.

Now, as you recall, the researchers also had these men answer various questions about their backgrounds and personalities, and that’s where the real fun begins. That’s because when you set averaging aside and instead looked at who prefers what, the picture grows far more colorful.

Here’s what the researchers found on the subject of who likes what:

• Everything big: men who like breasts, buttocks, and legs all big tend to have a strong need to achieve things. They also tend to drink a lot.

• Everything standard: men who prefer a completely standard figure (no bigger or smaller than average parts) are the most common group. They are also more likely to be disorganized in their personal habits.
  

• Everything small: men who prefer their women’s breasts, buttocks, and legs all small “persevere in their work”, “are not cynical about authority”, and tend to be upper class.

• Large breasts: men who like girls with big breasts tend to date a lot, have masculine interests, like sports, and browse pornography (this was in 1968, so they found these guys all read Playboy a lot more than the other men in the study). They tend to have more need for sex and like to make witty comments and be the center of attention. They’re independent and not very nurturing, though they do no persevere as much in their work. The men who preferred the largest breast sizes tended to be ones who consumed more pornography (perhaps having their desire for very large breasts shaped by the porn they consume).

• Small breasts: men who like girls with small breasts drink alcohol less often, and drink less of it when they do drink. They’re more likely to hold fundamentalist religious beliefs, and more likely to be depressed. They’re more nurturing, not cynical of authority, and tend to come from large working class families. They lack in achievement motivation and, at least in college, are indefinite about their career plans. Men who like small-breasted women opt for engineering majors over business majors in school.

• Large buttocks: men who like big butts have higher need for order (neatness, organization, cleanliness). The men who like the largest buttocks (+2) are more dependent socially, more self-abasing (i.e., they blame themselves for things and feel guilty), and are more emotional, yet are not psychologically minded. In college they tend to be business majors.

• Small buttocks: the men who liked women with little butts tend to persevere more and do not need to be the center of attention. They usually are not education majors in college, and are not that interested in sports. They’re more likely to have been breast fed as infants.

• Large legs: men who like large legs on their women are more likely to abstain from alcoholic beverages. Personality-wise, these men are self-abasing, non-aggressive, psychologically minded, and have slow personal tempos. They are inhibited and restrained in social situations.

• Thin legs: men attracted more to women with small legs, unlike their more restrained large leg loving peers, have strong needs for social participation. They’re nurturing (helpful), affiliative (they like to be involved socially), and exhibitionist (center of attention). They often give up on tasks before they reach completion.
  

Some pretty weird relationships in there, right? I bet you had no idea your butt size preference said so much about you.

Of course, there are other dimensions in these ratings as well. For instance, black men are twice as likely as white men to select as most attractive women with larger hip and buttocks sizes, and 1.7x as likely to choose women with thicker thighs. And indeed, if we look at world maps, we can see some clear distinctions in the butts vs. breasts divide (based on searches on PornHub originating from these countries):

Europe, Asia, India, Australia, and Argentina (which is almost entirely European descent) have more interest in breasts. Africa, the Middle East, and South and Central America are more interested in butts. The United States, with its diverse ethnic makeup, leans toward butts as well.

However, even within the U.S., there are divisions:

Compare that map to a map of racial distribution in the United States:

... and you’ll notice the preference for breasts very roughly lines up with English, French, and Germany ancestry, while the preference for butts is (again, very roughly) matched up with African American and Hispanic ancestry.

PornHub didn’t have breasts / butt for Alaska and Hawaii, but if I had to guess, Alaska would be boob country (predominantly white folks there). Hawaii might well be too – it’s mostly white and Asian.

(also, the United States is a whole lot more German than I realized)

Anyway, the point of all this is:

While we as men often think that our preferences must translate to every other guy, they don’t.

You may see a guy dating a girl with a figure that isn’t your ideal and say to yourself, “Ah, poor schmuck. He needs to step up his game and get a girl with a better ass / better tits,” but she may well have an ideal figure for him... And different size breasts or buttocks might make her less attractive to him instead of more.

Faces (as you saw in that article from Alek) are every bit as dramatic, and for various reasons. For instance, as a 1999 study discovered, people tend to prefer opposite sex partners with similar face shapes to their own.

You and I are likely to have very different tastes in women if our face shapes are very different from one another’s. You’ll go for girls who look more like you, and I’ll go for girls who look more like me.

Your 10 is Not a 10

So is any girl really a ‘10’?

I think there are actually two kinds of girls men consider ‘10’s:

• The made-up 10: this is the girl I talked about not getting taken in by in “You’re Passing Up the Hottest, Coolest Girls.” She’s the one who has to spend two hours on hair, clothes, makeup, and fake eyelashes, then throw on her best pouty aloof face, before she goes out. But when she does, a lot of guys drool all over her and tell their buddies she’s a ‘total 10’. Never mind the fact that when she wakes up the next day she often will look instead like a ‘total 6’.

• The girl next door 10: this is the ‘genuine’ 10. It doesn’t take her hours to go from 6 to 10. She just rolls out of bed and she’s a 10 to you already. Some combination of her fundamentals and other characteristics makes her striking to you just as she is.
  

The girl next door 10 is the one with more variation between men, because we’re talking about an assessment of her actual physical characteristics. The made-up 10 we’re assessing how good she is at painting her face, taking care of and doing up her hair, preening and posing, and the like, in addition to her ‘base’ (what she looks like underneath the makeup). You’ll find most uninitiated men a lot more inclined to agree a girl is a ‘total 10’ if her neckline plunges low enough to show off her cleavage and her makeup hides all signs of imperfection. But they will still have plenty of disputes about which dressed-to-kill girl is an 8 and which is a 10.

The takeaway, either way, must be this: that girl you think is a total babe fought for and desired by everybody... isn’t.

Even in social circle, I’ve listened to guys rag on and debate various girls within their circles. You’ve probably seen this. Unless there’s only one hot girl in your social circle, or all your friends have really similar tastes to yours, there’s probably disagreement among you and your friends about which girl in your circle is the hottest.

What that means is that even for a girl you consider supremely gorgeous, not every guy is treating her that way. She doesn’t walk around considering herself God’s gift to men (unless she’s a narcissist, of course).

Whether she actually is or not under the makeup and poofy hair is anyone’s guess.

She’s just a girl. Maybe prettier than ordinary, and if so, she probably knows it. But she probably doesn’t think she is the most beautiful girl.

Once you’ve had a few beautiful girlfriends under your belt, you’ll likely have seen this: any of your girlfriends who weren’t narcissists will experience doubt about their looks. They might tell you they know they’re beautiful sometimes, while other times they will tell you they’re not that beautiful or that they wished they were as beautiful as this or that other girl (then sometimes they’ll take it back – “I didn’t really mean it, I just wanted to see how you’d react. I am more beautiful than her!”, but sometimes it’s sincere).

You’ll also notice girls care a lot about your taste in women. Former girlfriends, girls who catch your eye, even which girls you think are cute or not in shows and movies. They’re doing that in part to gauge how beautiful they are – if you only go for really beautiful girls, she’s in good company and she must be beautiful. If you go for girls all over the map, that’s a much less ringing endorsement of her beauty. She does this because of the subjective nature of beauty; even the most beautiful girl out there wonders sometimes if she is really beautiful, or if people are just saying it (or maybe the guys she dated weren’t all that picky).

Different guys have viewed her looks in different lights, based on their own face shapes, race, class... Even whether they’re restrained or uninhibited socially.

So, yeah. No pedestals. She doesn’t see herself as perfect either. Just some girl trying to make her way through life.

Focus on good fundamentals, decent game, and make the approach.

You’re not up against all the world’s elite men to get her, no matter how hot she is to you. Because there are plenty of men out there who don’t consider her all that hot... No matter who she is.

Make the approach, and let things end up where they may.

Chase