If sex differences in preferences for looks or status exist at levels of attractiveness relevant to most ordinary people, they ought to surface as significant numbers of beautiful women trading their beauty for relatively unattractive but high-status men. McClintock refuted this "beauty-status exchange" occurring for most young and middle aged partners.

A more likely sex difference is in the levels of the minimum necessary thresholds for looks and status. Namely the ugliest woman that men are willing to date may be more beautiful than the ugliest man that women are willing to date, and the minimum required status (or his minus hers) for women to consider men dateable may be higher than that for men. It may be that speed dating studies to date have restricted their sample to individuals above a certain threshold, or that the meta-analysis has conflated these low-end sex differences with the lack of sex difference in higher levels into a single correlation. Studies on individuals without romantic partners (who presumably were rejected by failing the opposite sex's criteria in interactive attraction contexts) would be a good place to examine this hypothesis. Should sex differences in the minimum looks/status threshold exist, e.g. unpartnered heterosexual men would be especially low in status compared to partnered men, and unpartnered women should be especially ugly compared to partnered women. Studies should ideally control for the sex difference in partner difference in selectivity.

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