Preferences for facial femininity/masculinity across culture and the sexual orientation spectrum

Abstract

Judgments of attractiveness have many important social outcomes, highlighting the need to understand how people form these judgments. One aspect of appearance that impacts perceptions of attractiveness is facial femininity/masculinity (sexual dimorphism). However, extant research has focused primarily on White, Western, heterosexual participants’ preferences for femininity/masculinity in White faces, limiting generalizability. Indeed, recent research indicates that these preferences vary by culture, and other work finds differences between gay/lesbian and heterosexual individuals. Aspects of identity such as culture and sexual orientation do not exist in isolation from one another, but rather intersect, leaving a critical gap in understanding. Our research therefore bridged across these hitherto separate areas of inquiry to provide a more comprehensive understanding of facial femininity/masculinity preferences. We tested how White British and East Asian Japanese individuals’ culture and sexual orientation (including, crucially, bisexual individuals) predict their femininity/masculinity preferences for White and East Asian women’s and men’s faces, using two experimental tasks (forced-choice, interactive). Results show that individuals’ culture and sexual orientation consistently interact to predict their preferences for femininity/masculinity in women’s and men’s faces, and we furthermore reveal bisexual individuals’ preferences to differ from those of other sexual orientations. We also find differences between experimental tasks, with greater preferences for femininity emerging in the interactive task, compared to the forced-choice task. Altogether, our findings highlight the importance of considering intersecting identities, consequences of methods of measurement, and shortcomings of extant explanations for preferences for facial femininity/masculinity.