NDLI: Why Do the Karo Batak Prefer Women with Big Feet? : Flexible Mate Preferences and the Notion That One Size Fits All

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Kushnick, Geoff
Copyright Year	2013
Abstract	Men may find women with small feet relative to body size more attractive because foot size reliably indexes nubility—i.e., age and parity. I collected judgments of attractiveness in response to drawings of women with varying foot sizes from a sample of 159 Karo Batak respondents from North Sumatra, Indonesia, as part of a collaborative project on foot size and attractiveness. The data revealed a contrarian preference among the Karo Batak for women with big feet. The judgments were compared with the results of an existing cross-cultural study that found a preference for women with small feet in aggregate, but a mix of small- and large-foot preferences in the societies taken individually. Using contingency table analysis, I found that ecology and less exposure to Western media were associated with a preference for women with big feet; patriarchal values were not. The findings suggest that human mating preferences may arise in response to local ecological conditions, and may persist and spread via cultural transmission. This has implications for the concept of universality espoused in some versions of evolutionary psychology.
Starting Page	268
Ending Page	279
Page Count	12
File Format	PDF
ISSN	10456767
Journal	Human Nature
Volume Number	24
Issue Number	3
e-ISSN	19364776
Language	English
Publisher	Springer US
Publisher Date	2013-05-31
Publisher Place	Boston
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Mating preferences Evolutionary psychology Universality Karo Batak Anthropology Behavioural Sciences Biological Psychology
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Sociology and Political Science Arts and Humanities Anthropology Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

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