Biological advantage of smaller females?

Question

I was watching a documentary today - you may have seen it too - it was called "S&M, short and male". it was all about how we as a society have a bias towards how we view short men, and how we all prefer tall men and perceive them as more attractive. I can understand this bias, if you are looking at it from a females perspective. when choosing a potential mate, it is inherent that we choose one who we deem to be fit, or likely to survive and therefore be more able to provide for offspring.

This got me thinking about how the opposite is often true for girls. many men prefer women who are smaller in size to themselves. this may be proportionally- height wise, or just bone structure. Can you think of any reason men, thinking in terms of instinct and inherent human nature, prefer smaller women?

Answer 1

short

height-wise

depends proportion of the female

bone-structure

depends on diseases

vision depends on eyesight

hearing

possible could have mental illness or depression

Answer 2

Because they tend to eat less, so it would be easier to provide for them!

Answer 3

There was a study that showed smaller women had more children taller women were slightly more masculine in their life choices.

Being shorter in women is probably a sign of higher fertility and lower testosterone levels. So it's sexually seleceted for.

"Dr. Daniel Nettle, from The Open University, examined data from a survey of 10,000 people born in 1958 and looked at the link between height and number of children in 2000, when they were 42.

Shorter women were more likely to have children, and taller men were less likely to be childless, according to the report published online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Women who were about 4 ft 9 in to 5 ft 1 in tall were slightly more likely to have children than women of average height, which is 5 ft 4 in.

In contrast, men of average height--5 ft 10 in --had fewer children by middle age than men who were 6 ft 1 in tall.

Nettle said the height difference accounted for less than 1% of variation in reproductive success. But repeated generation after generation, it could represent a powerful evolutionary force.

"It seems that tall men and petite women are favored in evolutionary terms, even in a modern population, so the height difference between men and women is unlikely to disappear," he said in a statement.

The difference in reproductive success seems to be because women taller than average and men shorter than average were less likely to find long-term partners.

"We have come to think that men pay attention to physical characteristics of their mates, whilst women pay more attention to status and resources," he said in the statement.

"In the case of height, this is clearly not true; in choosing a husband, size matters." "

Answer 4

Really interesting question.  If you look at other species, sexual dimorphism (differences in sizes between the sexes) are based upon competition for mates and social grouping.  Monogamous species tend to have very little differences in size and shape between males and females.  Males tend to be bigger when there is competition between males for mates, at least with mammals.  Bugs usually are the other way around- the females are larger than the males.  That's because males have a very limited role to play in reproduction: They fertalize eggs, nothing more.  Mammals need more parental investment and males can (at least theoretically) stick around and play a role in protecting and nurturing offspring.  Insects have less parental investment and 99% of that is with the females, so they are built like war machines and males are built to be messengers.

In humans there's the role of culture to consider.  I would say, being a short man (5'6") that I am not attracted to taller women.  All kinds of women are attracted to me, because I'm really smart and terribly good looking (Sigh.  It's my lot in life to be amazingly wonderful.  I've learned to live with it.).  My spouse and I are about the same height, and we are very egalitarian.  When you find  (as you often do) men being larger than the woman in a marriage, there is often more of a pronounced discrepency between dominance in the relationships.

An interesting note:  My wife just gave birth, and I experienced "couvade" (sympathetic pregnancy) which is often related to elevated social status for women.  It was a real trip, I'll tell you!