Abstract
Women find masculinity in men's faces, bodies, and voices attractive, and women's preferences for men's masculine features are thought to be biological adaptations for finding a high quality mate. Fertility is an important aspect of mate quality. Here we test the phenotype-linked fertility hypothesis, which proposes that male secondary sexual characters are positively related to semen quality, allowing females to obtain direct benefits from mate choice. Specifically, we examined women's preferences for men's voice pitch, and its relationship with men's semen quality. Consistent with previous voice research, women judged lower pitched voices as more masculine and more attractive. However men with lower pitched voices did not have better semen quality. On the contrary, men whose voices were rated as more attractive tended to have lower concentrations of sperm in their ejaculate. These data are more consistent with a trade off between sperm production and male investment in competing for and attracting females, than with the phenotype-linked fertility hypothesis.
Highlights
There is considerable evidence that women perceive masculine traits in men as attractive
Preferences for masculine voices have been found to vary across the menstrual cycle, peaking at the fertile phase [10], and to depend on relationship context, with a stronger preference for masculine voices when rating in the context of a short-term partner [11,12]
Consistent with previous studies of voice attractiveness, we found that lower pitched voices were rated by women as being attractive and masculine [5,6,59,60] giving our study external validity
Summary
There is considerable evidence that women perceive masculine traits in men as attractive. Voice attractiveness has been found to correlate with men’s self reported number of sexual partners in North American populations of students [13,14], and in a natural fertility population of hunter-gatherers, the Hadza of Tanzania, men’s voice pitch was found to be a predictor of the number of living offspring fathered [15]. These findings suggest that sexual selection via female choice may have played a role in the evolution of sexual dimorphism in human voices. The aim of our study was to determine whether voice pitch might convey biological information relating to men’s fertility, information that could provide women with direct benefits from mate choice
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