What often seems to be the case is that "all the girls fancied one guy" actually means "all the hot girls fancied one guy", obviously with the "hot girls" being the ones who best conform to society's ideals, thus making them the most desirable, the "gold trophy achievement", if you will.
This uses the assumption that Men throughout history cared about what women were attracted to to change it or influence it - they didn't.
Sorta expanded it in the edit, but women being allowed to express sexual desires at all seems like quite a recent thing to me. Changing what women are attracted to isn't going to the big thing when you are denying them as people with sexual needs in the first place.
Kinda agree with this, I can be into muscular men as long as they are portrayed as a sorta soft personality - Thor at the start if the movie where he's an Ass = not attractive, Thor at the end where he's a lot sweeter = Hot. Same with the Rock, he's an intimidating guy but his seems such a sweetie pie that I'm not put off by how big he is.
Sorry. my words are a bit vague (although I wouldn't count a few thousand years as recent, civilization isn't that many thousands of years older) but I mean they weren't trying to get women sexually attracted to a specific type of look of man (like big muscular), the idea that women could want sex at all was repressed. And those who did express sexual desires weren't exactly depicted well either.
Yeah, I'm sure women's preference on naked faceless torsos is going to tell you so much about their actual preferences towards actual men with personalities (and, well... heads). :D
Did you read the article? It said that the biggest men in there are college frat boys, not the big hulk sized guys that people on this thread keep telling you women tend not to be attracted to.
You assume those fictions have anything to do with women's tastes when a hot girl who used to be into a jock falling for the nerd is a fantasy designed for men.
I was/am into all kinds of dudes, but one of my weaknesses--and still is to this day--is the proverbial bad boy. Or just someone who generally gives off a vibe of "slightly dangerous." I sound like I'm full of shit, I know, but there's just something... alluring about someone completely different from me. I don't think I'll be the one to change their ways or whatever, but it's in my nature* to go with/against the flow of the experience.
Yeah, you can't really use fiction as a barometer when the balance of writers responsible for it is weighted so heavily towards cis-het, white, middle class men. Often quite geeky men at that, because writing itself is a pretty geeky occupation!
Dude! You're extrapolating from your anecdotal experience to one of the biggest countries in the world!
"What do women find attractive?"
This is largely cultural. Many native societies never had these as major issues (not saying they didn't exist, just that they're nothing like modern or patriarchal societies).
This sounds pretty anecdotal to me. My high school experience was one of cliques; there wasn't really any single "everybody loves this guy" or "everybody loves this girl". Like, within cliques (sports kids, music kids, theater kids etc.), sure there were more or less popular people, but the standards of beauty and attraction tended to vary wildly from clique to clique. It was far less homogeneous than what stuff like pop culture tends to portray (i.e., very little variety and a strict adherence to certain norms - particularly related to beauty).
You say religion, but the more pertinent answer is land, and what religion was about with regards to land (effectively, the beginning of sovereignty over land, typically widely known land that was also expected to be fertile). Religion may not be about land today, but during its inception, it was pretty much exclusively about land (pretty much every religion with any history has a holy land - and even today we're still fighting wars over the perceived value of said holy land).
Do you have anything to back this claim up or is it pure speculation?
