text: Sure, he looks good. But how about his sperm? 
   
   That might not be such a ridiculous-sounding question, now that a new study has identified a link between men's facial attractiveness and the quality of their semen--with handsome, masculine-looking guys having slightly lower-quality semen than other men. 
   
   "To [the] best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of the phenomenon," study co-author Dr. Jukka Kekalainen, adjunct lecturer in the Centre for Evolutionary Biology at the University of Australia in Crawley, told The Huffington Post in an email. 
   
   The researchers have no ready explanation for their finding, although previous research has shown that high testosterone levels can harm sperm production, the New York Daily News reported. And the finding seems to be at odds with the so-called phenotype-linked fertility hypothesis, which holds that females prefer handsome males because their offspring may enjoy hereditary benefits, such as better health and higher intelligence. 
   
   For the new study, which was published in the September 2014 issue of the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, a team of researchers from Spain, Australia, and Colombia performed semen analyses on 50 Caucasian students recruited from the University of Valencia. Next, photos of the men's faces were shown to heterosexual men and women in their twenties, including Caucasians and blacks. 
   
   The women evaluators were asked to rate the men as if they were looking for a long-term mate. The men evaluators were asked to rate the men as they thought women would rate them. 
   
   The researchers also performed an "anthropometric analysis" of the facial characteristics of all 50 men, measuring the size of their eyes, the width of their cheekbones and nostrils, and other markers that previous research identified as masculine features. And finally the researchers compared the men's facial features with the motility (movement), morphology (structure), and concentration of the men's sperm cells. 
   
   In addition to looking for the link between masculine-looking faces and sperm quality, the researchers wanted to know if men's sperm quality was related to their handsomeness. 
   
   "And we found that in fact it is," Kekalainen said in the email. 
   
   But does that mean women eager to find a mate capable of fathering children should be wary of handsome men? Maybe not--at least not until more research corroborates the finding. As Kekalainen said in the email, "we would need more studies to demonstrate the causation and mechanism behind this finding...before giving any mating tips to the females." 
   
   ||||| Tall, dark, and handsome is the popular description used to describe the perfect man for most women. From the brooding and sultry looks of Hollywood favorites, like George Clooney and David Beckham, women swoon over these men because of their celebrated physical attractiveness. However, science suggests setting your sights on much shorter, dark and handsome men, like Tom Cruise, because they make better life partners. According to a recent study (not peer reviewed), short men have a higher income and are more likely to stay monogamous, making better boyfriends and husbands, and standing head and shoulders above their much taller peers. 
   
   Short men have been stigmatized in society because of their stature. The cultural vision of taller men as being physically dominant and potential protectors has been embedded into the psyche of many women, creating a “prejudice” against shorter men. It’s unclear whether women prefer this because of society’s pressure for women to be slim or because of an evolutionary perspective. Dr. David Frederick, an assistant professor of Psychology at Chapman University, examines how social remission processes and our evolved psychology interact to influence our close relationships and our views of what is attractive. He has hypothesized women may prefer a taller partner because it can make them feel smaller, or women have developed a preference for taller men because of the advantages height can provide them in male-on-male competitions, The Huffington Post reported. 
   
   To examine the effects of male height on various relationship outcomes in longer-term relationships, researchers Dalton Conley, a sociologist at New York University, and Abigail Weitzman, a Ph.D. candidate, collected data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics — a University of Michigan project that’s been collecting demographic data on 5,000 families for almost 50 years. This data was used to look at how a man’s height impacts different areas of his relationship after the initial dating period. Conley and Weitzman looked at two sets of data, from 1986 and 2009, and identified 3,033 heterosexual couples. The male sample size was restricted between the ages of 23 and 45, and consisted of men who were cohabitating with a woman. 
   
   The male participants ranged in height from 4-foot-6 to 7-feet. In relation to their partners, their height ranged 9 inches shorter to 2 feet taller. The researchers categorized these men into three groups: “Short” men were defined as 5-foot-6 or less in 1986, 5-foot-7 or below in 2009; “tall” men were at least 6-foot-1 in 1986 and 6-foot-2 in 2009. 
   
   The findings revealed short men were less likely to get divorced, more likely to share housework, and be the breadwinners at home. These men were somewhat less likely to get married, with an 18 percent marriage rate lower than men of average height, at every age before 45. Weitzman believes this is because short men may have a harder time getting married, since they’re viewed as less masculine by society. However, when they do find a partner, the divorce rates are 32 percent lower for short men compared to the rates for tall and average men. 
   
   In regard to housework, shorter men perform eight hours and 28 minutes per week of housework — this comprises about 28 percent of the total — compared to seven hours and 38 minutes for average men and seven hours and 30 minutes for tall men, New Republic reported. Weitzman believes tall men may be “aware of the status that is conferred by their tallness,” which may make them prone to do less work at home. While these men fare better with housework, but they also tend to have higher household incomes than their partners. The researchers estimated 79 percent of short men make more money than their significant others, compared to 70 percent of average men, and 71 percent of tall men. This finding conflicts with previous research that has found taller men earn more money. 
   
   Throughout the study, the researchers noticed a consistent pattern with short men and their partners: They were more likely to partner with women who are older, less educated, and younger. Twenty-one percent of these men were with women who had not completed high school, compared to 16 percent of average men, and just 12 percent of tall men. Also, when it comes to age, it is not just a number for them. In the entire sample size, only nine percent of men partnered with a woman who was more than three years older. Age is an area where the short men can exude their masculinity by partnering with a younger woman. 
   
   This study coincides with another recent study published in the Journal of Family Issues, which found women err on the side of caution when it comes to height and online dating. About 50 percent of women restricted their online dating searches to men who were taller than them. This finding was also consistent when the same team of researchers took a survey of college students and found about 30 percent of women would feel “awkward” or “weird” dating a shorter guy. 
   
   Perhaps it’s time to put an end to these men getting the shorter end of the stick. After all, your Mr. Right could be shorter than you. 
   
   Sources: Conley D, Weitzman A. From Assortative to Ashortative Coupling: Men’s Height, Height Heterogamy, and Relationship Dynamics in the United States. NYU Population Center: Working Paper Series. 2014. 
   
   Emerson MO. Yancey G. Does Height Matter? An Examination of Height Preferences in Romantic Coupling. Journal of Family Issues. 2014. ||||| Guys with classically masculine facial features, such as square jawlines and pronounced cheekbones, may produce sperm of a lower quality than men who don’t share the same features, a new study finds. 
   
   The findings rely on an oft-studied phenomenon in the animal kingdom known as the phenotype-linked fertility hypothesis. It states the greater presence of male sexual ornaments signals a stronger vitality for reproduction. These ornaments are typically anatomical in nature, such as the set of feathers on one species of bird or the song of another. 
   
   But in humans the hypothesis hasn’t gotten much attention. So researchers recruited a group of 62 college students, from both Colombia and Spain, to rate the physical attractiveness of select pictures of men who had donated their sperm earlier in the experiment. Researchers censored all but the subjects’ faces, including hairstyle, to minimize external influences. 
   
   ketrin1407, CC BY 2.0 
   
   They compared levels of attractiveness, masculinity, and sperm health to determine which features, if any, correlated with one another. The results were decidedly lukewarm. While they did find a significant negative relationship between masculine features and sperm motility, the significance vanished when the team controled for outright unhealthy sperm. It was the outliers, in other words, that were doing the heavy lifting. 
   
   So, the hypothesis didn’t seem to ring as true as they might have expected. But they did find a relationship between how males perceived males versus how females perceived males. The subjects most likely to rate the faces as attractive were other men, and particularly among the Spanish students. 
   
   “This suggests that male facial cues may provide culture- and sex-independent information about male fertility,” they wrote. However, it also indicates humans may be poor judges of attractiveness when it comes to people who are culturally near to them. And males, on average, are worse judges than females. 
   
   What does the study say about the phenotype-linked fertility hypothesis as it relates to humans? Unfortunately, not much. A large camp of evolutionary biology likes to believe the animalistic traits we possessed as ancient hominids have changed to accommodate modern-day mating rituals. All women want tall, protective men in good social standing, they are apt to say. Beneath our material, hi-tech infatuations are primal desires that prove even if we’re a population of smart animals, we’re still animals. 
   
   Science is increasingly finding these theories don’t hold much water. Tall men, with their far-reaching gaze, may have the advantage over short men when it comes to scanning the plains for enemies, or dinner, but if a woman’s goal is to keep a tidy house and send her kids to college, short men — the biological underdogs — tend to prevail. 
   
   Prior research has upheld the link between elevated testosterone levels and poor sperm. In their study, masculine men were thought to have low sperm counts in part because they don’t need as much, being the sexual dynamos they are. However, since the researchers were also measuring attractiveness, it’s worth mentioning the attractive men (who weren’t necessarily masculine) had better sperm. Chalk this one up to round jaws and low cheekbones. 
   
   Source: Soler C, Kekäläinen J, Núñez M, et al. Male facial attractiveness and masculinity may provide sex- and culture-independent cues to semen quality. Journal of Evolutionary Biology. 2014.
target: – Macho guys may attract more women, but the quality of their sperm might not be of he-man standards, a new study suggests. Oddly, the sperm of good-looking guys—but not necessarily macho ones with square jaws and distinct cheekbones—is just fine, reports Medical Daily. The link was found when researchers analyzed the semen of 62 Caucasian men, then compared its motility and structure to facial measurements of masculine traits and ratings of their attractiveness, the Huffington Post explains. Scientists theorize that the macho man trades virility for a gravely voice and ripped arms, and high testosterone hinders sperm production. Meanwhile, the study casts doubt on the belief the "phenotype-linked fertility hypothesis" (read: fancy feathers and pretty songs attract more ladies) applies to humans. A study that claimed short guys are preferred by women over tall ones, long believed to have the evolutionary upper hand, has also poked holes in that theory. But don't revamp your mating habits just yet, girls—researchers say their findings need further study. (Short guys are also less likely to divorce you.)