What's the psychological reason why a man might be attracted to a woman with muscles?

Why is a man attracted to a woman with muscle ????? MMmmmmm ??

Ask yourself if in nature there exists a condition which Charles Darwin described as 'The Survival of the Fittest'

Case closed!

This is a reasonably good example of the equivocation fallacy. "Fitness" in an evolutionary context means surviving and reproducing (between the two, the latter is more important). Women who become extremely muscular often stop menstruating. Also, the phrase you mention originates with Herbert Spencer, not Charles Darwin.

It's very rare for muscular women to become infertile a lot of huge fbbs still got kids.

And men who have had a vasectomy can still have kids. It's more difficult to get pregnant at a low percentage of body fat, which reinforces the basic truth: female muscularity has little to do with fitness in a Darwinian sense (never mind that most men do not find fbbs sexually attractive).

The biological, fitness argument for attraction to buff women makes sense to me. And, our brains may be wired to find these women attractive.

Consider humans about 20k years ago. Fitness and survival were daily necessities. Both men and women needed to have a certain degree of strength to survive and support their family units. Those who were naturally smarter and more muscular were probably elevated to leadership status in their clans.

Attitudes about women probably started to change when humans embraced agriculture and settled down. Attitudes continued to change through ancient times and into the Middle Ages probably as a result of organized religion and more so with Christianity (?). Roles and responsibilities in families were redefined and the image of a softer more compliant woman became more prevalent.

Generally, I think women like muscular men for the same reasons that some men admit to liking muscular women.

It’s silly to discuss the extremes of people taking steroids in this context and women too buff with low body fat to have kids. Men and women can get muscular enough to be strong and fit without drugs. Naturally muscular women have a great sex drive and have babies all the time.

There are two things being discussed here. One is a perfectly normal attraction to muscular women. Many guys here have that, they like muscular women because they are fit and radiate strength and health. That could be said to be biological. Then there is the fetish for muscular women. This needs to be strictly distinguished from the first. Read the comment sections or just go to any site that caters to this fetish and you will see immediately that it is very different from a simple attraction to muscular women. It is more conceptual than biological. See how many times guys ask how much they weigh, how big their biceps are, how thick their quads are. You don't really see women caring so much about guys who have passed the 22 inch bicep mark so why do guys care so much about women who pass the 18 inch bicep mark? The number itself is enough to get some guy horny, just the mention of a woman with 19 inch biceps and a 50 inch chest who weighs 220 pounds. This is a fetish and I guess with every person the reason is absolutely different. Now is the fetish common amongst guys who are physically below average? Or is it more prevalent amongst men who are themselves muscular? A lot would be known by that. But obviously we don't have the data.

There are two things being discussed here. One is a perfectly normal attraction to muscular women. Many guys here have that, they like muscular women because they are fit and radiate strength and health. That could be said to be biological. Then there is the fetish for muscular women. This needs to be strictly distinguished from the first. Read the comment sections or just go to any site that caters to this fetish and you will see immediately that it is very different from a simple attraction to muscular women. It is more conceptual than biological. See how many times guys ask how much they weigh, how big their biceps are, how thick their quads are. You don't really see women caring so much about guys who have passed the 22 inch bicep mark so why do guys care so much about women who pass the 18 inch bicep mark? The number itself is enough to get some guy horny, just the mention of a woman with 19 inch biceps and a 50 inch chest who weighs 220 pounds. This is a fetish and I guess with every person the reason is absolutely different. Now is the fetish common amongst guys who are physically below average? Or is it more prevalent amongst men who are themselves muscular? A lot would be known by that. But obviously we don't have the data.

Good question. Among active competitors in fitness/physique competitions, I think you'll normally see muscular women with relatively fit partners or partners of at least "average" fitness. I'm speaking general appearance only - no one knows what anyone's labs are saying. That's just anecdotal, not scientifically observed. And it's far from an absolute, even anecdotally.

But active competitors are only a very small fraction of the population of strong, muscular women. The partners of that much larger group of women are likely to look quite a bit like the rest of the world.

Dashriprock,

Herbert Spenser, not Charles Darwin you write....Er... ok... but that even increases the odds that the Survival of the Fittest is the principle factor of evolution. Neither Spenser nor Darwin wrote about the menstruation of human females to my knowledge, and as far as your suggestion that "Fitness" in evolutionary terms implies menstruation over survival, perhaps you may acknowledge that if one is dead, one is unlikely to menstruate... YES ????

MMmmmm ??? Case still closed.....

Menstruation is not an attraction trigger for males in our species. Males do not reliably know when females are menstruating (Buss talks about this in the above-linked podcast, offering plausible reasons for why this might be the case).

Survivial is instrumental -- it's often necessary for reproduction -- but between the two, reproduction has priority. A man can live a happy, satisfied life to the age of 100, but if he's not having offspring (or aiding the offspring of his siblings), then he's likely a dead-end. This in part explains why evolution has selected for organisms who find pleasures ephemeral: You eat; you get hungry again. You bang the woman of your dreams; you still want to bang again (and different women). And so on.

Fitness is not necessarily what's good or right.

Generally, I think women like muscular men for the same reasons that some men admit to liking muscular women.

Women have a strong preference for tall men, so does it "make sense" for men to have a strong preference for tall women? The muscular women of today, and women in general, can achieve a kind of super-normal stimuli. Because of food, exercise, chemistry, and plastic surgery, women can have a teeny-tiny waist, and huge breasts. The vast majority of men prefer women who are "toned."

Articles on Yahoo might say, "Such-and-such Celeb's abs are amazing." I click on it, and almost every time say, "I don't see abs." This sub-culture is on the fringe -- much different than the preferences of most people. Which is fine.

I neither enjoy this stuff nor struggle with it.

But it's definitely not biological.

And men who have had a vasectomy can still have kids. It's more difficult to get pregnant at a low percentage of body fat, which reinforces the basic truth: female muscularity has little to do with fitness in a Darwinian sense (never mind that most men do not find fbbs sexually attractive).

Beyond a certain point, maybe. But absent intensive (5 days a week or more) training, supplementation, and PEDs... the trope that fitness trainers trot out is true: weight training will not, as a rule, make a woman look "bulky". Most women look better with the addition of muscle, even by non-schmoe standards because increased muscle enhances the female curves, improves a woman's posture, makes her potentually a better dancer and lover, etc. To me this suggests that fitness and muscle on women were selected for in the EEA... especially considering that a certain degree of strength and robustness is required to bear and raise children.

This is why I believe that we schmoes are attracted to very muscular women because they represent a supernormal stimulus -- an exaggerated version of something we naturally respond to positively that evokes an exaggeratedly positive response.

I'll throw in a counter point. No one has the first damn clue as to why. They just know they find them irresistible. I doubt anyone can truly articulate why they love muscle woman anymore than the conscious can predict and control tonight's dream. The whole thing is being worked out on another level.

So I can throw out crazy guesses so here are two.

1. Opposites attract. For the Darwin in us, perhaps there is something in our genes that thinks if you mate with that, you are going to have kids that are highly favored. Well you may say that's an old wives tale. But I've known some pretty smart old wives in my time.

2. The male sex drive is incredibly strong and sometimes something goes wrong. Now I'm not saying anything is wrong with any of us. But it does kind of suck as the female bodybuilder pool must be the smallest club on Earth. But for example I know a guy who was super into older woman. Like over 75. It made no sense to anyone but it's what he had to have. Now it can go much more haywire . . .you can be attracted to just a part of a female's body, you could be attracted to just her shoes not even the girl. Some poor guys are attracted to 5 year old girls or boys. That is not a choice. And worst of all a very few are only attracted to killing them. Ted Bundy would come back to the corpses and have sex with his victims dead body for weeks.

In this regard women are much more "ordinary." But in the final analysis one knows not to what one is moved towards. And never for forget that the universe owes you no deference to explain "Why." A scientist never asks why. He may dare to ask how but never why. Your only 5 why's away from why are we here?

MMmmmm ???

What?

Dashriprock, I think you're missing the point. I'm talking pure natural assets in the world of nature. A fast cheetah will catch more prey and thus survive to breed, while a slow one will die an won't be around to menstruate. Faster cheetahs run faster because of physical advantages, and capable leg muscles on cheetahs I assume are the assets that give her that edge... The same goes for most animals.. the fittest survive, the unfit do not.. Case closed maybe ?

We live in a world of trade-offs. You rarely get something for nothing. You also have to look at diminishing utility. I think my office chair can hold 250 lbs. Well, that's no problem. But what if I sprang more for a chair that could comfortably hold somebody who weighs 500 lbs? The chair would probably cost more money, and there's almost no benefit. In other words, there's a threshold -- and then rapidly diminishing returns. Admittedly, I do not know much about cheetahs, but I'm inclined to believe that super-fast female cheetahs are not much sexier than other still very fast cheetahs. But much of this misses the point because we need to make a distinction between males and females. Females tend to be choosier for almost all species, including plants. In mammals, most females reproduce but not as prolifically as a few males. Males have been called nature's way of "rolling the dice." A woman in her lifetime might give birth to 12 children, but some men can impregnate hundreds of females.

So look at human beings. It's estimated that two-thirds of our ancestors are female. All of this becomes even more complicated with the radical changes by technology. For instance, now some of the men who have the most offspring have the fewest number of sexual partners (above zero). There are very attractive guys who have upwards of a hundred partners, but relatively few children, and even then they're probably only having kids because birth control was not used properly in alcohol-fueled hookups.

Beyond a certain point, maybe. But absent intensive (5 days a week or more) training, supplementation, and PEDs... the trope that fitness trainers trot out is true: weight training will not, as a rule, make a woman look "bulky". Most women look better with the addition of muscle, even by non-schmoe standards because increased muscle enhances the female curves, improves a woman's posture, makes her potentually a better dancer and lover, etc. To me this suggests that fitness and muscle on women were selected for in the EEA... especially considering that a certain degree of strength and robustness is required to bear and raise children.

This is why I believe that we schmoes are attracted to very muscular women because they represent a supernormal stimulus -- an exaggerated version of something we naturally respond to positively that evokes an exaggeratedly positive response.

I like the last paragraph. The jacked women on this site have not been seen in history. They're kinda like candy bars, not natural fruit (which is smaller and less sweet than the long-domesticated fruit we buy). If there's some kind of wiring, an ultra-jacked woman can be like crack to some guys, but still, the vast majority of men find it not just unattractive but repulsive. When it comes to chocolate vs. fruit, I think people almost universally prefer the former. If they don't, then it's because they know it's bad for them, and their executive function overrides their base appetites.

Pregnancy puts huge demands on the body, so some strength would be required. We were also a less sedentary species.

Couldn't we at least try to have a clue?

Physically weaker guys being into this is a correlation but not a causation.

Some of this may have to do with free-floating anger.

I'll throw in a counter point. No one has the first damn clue as to why. They just know they find them irritable. I doubt anyone can truly articulate why they love muscle woman anymore than the conscious can predict and control tonight's dream. The whole thing is being worked out on another level.

So I can throw out crazy guesses so here are two.

1. Opposites attract. For the Darwin in us, perhaps there is something in our genes that thinks if you mate with that, you are going to have kids that are highly favored. Well you may say that's an old wives tale. But I've known some pretty smart old wives in my time.

2. The male sex drive is incredibly strong and sometimes something goes wrong. Now I'm not saying anything is wrong with any of us. But it does kind of suck as the female bodybuilder pool must be the smallest club on Earth. But for example I know a guy who was super into older woman. Like over 75. It made no sense to anyone but it's what he had to have. Now it can go much more haywire . . .you can be attracted to just a part of a female's body, you could be attracted to just her shoes not even the girl. Some poor guys are attracted to 5 year old girls or boys. That is not a choice. And worst of all a very few are only attracted to killing them. Ted Bundy would come back to the corpses and have sex with his victims dead body for weeks.

In this regard women are much more "ordinary." But in the final analysis one knows not to what one is moved towards. And never for forget that the universe owes you no deference to explain "Why." A scientist never asks why. He may dare to ask how but never why. Your only 5 why's away from why are we here?

Best take so far