A study by Eleftheriou et al. (2019) found that:

  • The more facially attractive a man was judged to be, the more likely it was that participants were willing to have sex with him (r = 0.987, p < 0.001).

  • The more facially attractive a man was judged to be, the less likely women were to intend to use a condom during sex (r = -0.552, p = 0.007).

  • The average perceived STD likelihood for a man had no significant association with his average perceived attractiveness or with participants’ average willingness to have sex with him.

  • The more attractive a participant judged herself to be, the more she believed that, overall, men are likely to have a STI.

  • Women showed significantly higher condom use intentions with men who they rated as less attractive (p < 0.0005), men who they rated as less likely to carry or transmit an STI (p < 0.0005), men with whom they were less interested in having sex (p < 0.0005), and when they estimated that fewer of their peers would also have condomless sex with him (p < 0.0005).

  • Women with a higher lifetime sexual partner count were more likely to have employed a "condom resistance tactic" ("Since the age of 14, how many times have you successfully avoided using a condom with a man who wanted to use one?").

  • Women with a higher lifetime sexual partner count were more likely to have had a STI.

In other words, whether a man is facially attractive was the most important studied predictor of whether women will use a condom during intercourse. It is worth noting that none of the "condom resistance tactic" options involved using other forms of preventative contraceptive (oral, IUD, etc.), and a few were inherently deceitful in nature.


Study statistics:

  • 480 (English-speaking female) participants

  • Average age = 20

  • 89.1% of participants reported that they were exclusively attracted to men

  • Average lifetime (heterosexual) sexual partner count = 3.7

  • 8.8% of participants reported no lifetime sexual partners (virgins)

  • 4.6% of non-virgins reported having had a STI

  • 0% of women with only 1 lifetime sexual partner reported having had a STI

  • 23.8% of women with at least 15 lifetime sexual partners reported having had a STI

  • 54.8% of non-virgins reported having employed a "condom resistance tactic"

  • 29.5% of non-virgins reported "getting him really aroused and then starting to have sex without a condom"

  • 18.3% of non-virgins reported "getting him so sexually excited that he agreed to have sex without a condom"

  • 17.8% of non-virgins reported "reassuring him that she was clean (did not have any STIs) so that he would have sex without a condom"

  • 16.7% of non-virgins reported "telling him she didn’t want to use a condom because sex doesn’t feel as good with one on"

  • 2.7% of non-virgins reported "preventing him from getting a condom by staying on top of him"

lifetime sexual partner count vs prevalence of a condom resistance tactic

lifetime sexual partner count vs prevalence of having had a STI


These results can be regarded as evidence for the sexy son hypothesis, proposed by statistician and geneticist Ronald Fisher (1930). His theory—expanding upon Darwin's much overlooked emphasis on the sexual selection for male traits by females—states that beauty may have evolved by a feedback loop (Fisherian runaway) to become so attractive to females that they are readily willing to copulate with a beautiful male irrespective of other considerations (his ability or willingness to provide for and protect the female), because the male's beauty—which is partly heritable and a possible indication of high genetic quality (genetic diversity/low inbreeding index/heterozygosity)—confer on their offspring a potential reproductive advantage. The same does hold true for the opposite case (males more readily copulate with beautiful females), but males can afford to be much less selective/more promiscuous because they do not need to pay the cost of carrying and giving birth to the offspring (Bateman's Principle of differential parental investment). Hence, women's behavior of disregarding the ability to provide merely at the benefit of better looking offspring has much more drastic implications.

As the authors mentioned, these results may be more easily explained when we consider the work of Fishbein et al. and Williams et al., who found that risk information about a partner is sometimes ignored when the partner is attractive.

Because the mean age of the study is very young (20), it is entirely possible that an older demographic of women past their reproductive years (40+) would report an even higher likelihood of having employed a condom resistance tactic.

It could very well be argued that the tactic of "preventing him from getting a condom by staying on top of him" despite him wanting to use one (which 2.7% of non-virgins reported employing) is rape. This could share relevancy to the fact that as many American men (1.1%) report being "forced to penetrate" each year as women report being raped, despite the fact that a much smaller percentage of men than women report victimization over a lifespan, which is mathematically only possible if a smaller group of men than women are being victimized repeatedly, perhaps providing evidence for exclusive selectivity (based on a man's facial attractiveness) in women's choices of which men they sexually victimize.

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