The British Channel 4 series: "The Truth About Female Desire" was a fascinating and wide ranging exploration of female sexuality with a firm grounding in science. Whether you saw the programmes or not I hope you will be interested in the reviews. This review section repeats how the programme was run and then covers the (often subconscious) ways women select a mate and try to keep him.

For the programme, eight women volunteered to be 'sex guinea pigs' and assist scientists trying to discover more about how women's sex organs work and women's sexuality as a whole. They were invited to an hotel where they stayed together for the duration of the series of experiments.

Generally it is agreed that for having a family, women look for a fertile man who is also healthy and intelligent. The scientists devised a number of experiments to investigate and illustrate some of the mechanisms that are used to achieve this. Ten men were invited to the laboratory to act as guinea pigs in these trials.

In the first test involving the men, the women had to feel a hand of each man through a hole in a curtain and to choose the one they liked best. Most of the women thought they were choosing the men with the larger hands thinking that this might select a man who would be more capable of looking after them. This seemed logical as they all agreed that they preferred men who were larger in size than themselves as this gave them the feeling that the man would be in control.

It turned out, however, that they actually tended to choose hands where the man had a relatively long ring finger. It has previously been discovered that men that develop long ring fingers had generally been exposed to more testosterone in the womb before birth resulting in a greater fertility and those with a longer index fingers had more oestrogen and tended towards lower fertility.

Of course these type of results as always only apply 'on average'. Any individual man may not fit in with the ring finger trend and similarly an individual woman's reaction to finger lengths may not always fit the average. In addition women take many other factors into account both consciously and subconsciously when selecting a partner.

In the next test the men had been asked to wear a T shirt for a week without washing it and then place it in a jar. The women had to smell each shirt and choose the one they preferred. Most chose the T shirt that had been worn by the male model - one of the more masculine men.

In the last test all the women watched silhouettes of the men dancing one at a time and each chose the one they fancied the most. They all chose the man with the best physique that moved rhythmically.

The scientists agreed that choosing the perfect partner is very complex. In many cases women are unaware of what is going on in their own minds and often they use their intuition shaped by such factors as tested in the experiments.

Finally the biological basis of how a woman chooses a man based on looks was investigated. The women looked at a series of pictures of male faces and chose the ones they found most desirable. They also had a computer image of a man's face which they could adjust (morph) to make them more attractive to themselves. The image could be made more or less symmetrical and more masculine or feminine.

The interesting thing to come out of this was that the more attractive women tended to choose men with the most masculine faces whereas women who thought of themselves as less attractive chose less masculine looking faces.

The explanation given was that masculine faces indicate high levels of testosterone which should lead to easier reproduction. On the other hand, more masculine men have been shown generally to be more likely to have extra marital affairs that could end a relationship affecting the chance of producing children and reducing the support available for children already born.

So subconsciously these women knew that such men will reproduce well but tend not to be reliable.
Their choice of best sexual/life partners therefore becomes a trade off but the woman's choice is
also influenced on their view of the level of their own attractiveness and thus ability
to keep a masculine man from 'going astray'.

The series proved to be very interesting and informative. If you missed it keep an eye out for the repeat which is sure to come sooner or later!