The Science Behind the Olly Murs Divide
"Men are from Mars and women are from Venus,” the old saying goes. Even if the sexes aren’t actually from different planets, the distance between how men and women see one another can sometimes be astronomical, in part because our ancestors faced different evolutionary pressures in the sexual domain. A recent example showed this stark divide. The Internet blew up in late April when British pop star Olly Murs, who has recorded with Demi Lovato and Flo Rida, went from a bulky “dad bod” to a shredded physique after a 12-week fitness transformation. And contrary to progressive dogma about the sexes being the same in all things, men and women responded very differently to the before-and-after pictures. Women preferred the “before” photos, while men, both straight, bi, and gay alike, preferred the “after” photos.
As the Murs pictures and discourse were trending across the web, sex researcher and doctoral candidate William Costello of UT Austin conducted an informal poll about it, which itself went almost as viral. The results revealed the primeval preferences that divide men and women over whether guys should be jacked or flabby.
Source: Instagram.
Costello’s Twitter poll found that 23.6% of respondents were men who preferred the “before” photo, while 42.6% were men who preferred the “after” photo. Women showed significantly less interest in Murs’s shredded physique: 26.8% of respondents were women who preferred the “before” photo, while only 7% were women who preferred the “after.”
Commenters on the poll reflected these different sexual preferences. Women made comments such as “I’m a before lady. I don’t like that rippled look.” And “Women don’t want men who look self-obsessed.” Men, on the other hand, generally celebrated Olly’s sculpted look, saying, “He looks great” and “Well done mate, doing God’s work.” Multiple male commenters even accused women of “lying” about their preference for the dad bod look.
In keeping with the recent cultural “vibe shift”, the public is increasingly fixated on a hyper-masculine male ideal, which manifests in phenomena like the public reaction to Murs’s new body — as well as a plethora of “before and after” posts on social media of gymfluencers going from moderate body fat to extremely shredded. Costello sat down with Queer Majority to explain the underlying sexual psychology behind the different ways men and women responded to Murs’s body transformation, and what it means about the ancient past and our present day culture.
Costello explained that women overwhelmingly find men who show signs of physical strength but also have some body fat (between 10-20% is women’s ideal) more attractive because of the cues these attributes send to women searching for mates in the modern environment. The lean physique signals a variety of traits to women that make an average body more attractive to them than the cut, shredded look.
“What type of guy is this?” Costello said, giving voice to the thought process. “Is he likely to be very self-obsessed? Is he likely to have a lot of time for me? Is he likely to be courting a lot of attention from other women?”
Costello explained that women use a man’s body type as a proxy to answer these questions. “Muscularity itself just comes with trade-offs,” he told me. “Is he dangerous to me or to others? There's loads of different cues that have to be picked up on. And it seems that the [‘before’ picture of Murs] crossed the threshold for muscularity enough for women. He looks strong, but it also didn't cue all those other negative perceptions that the ‘after’ photo did.”
Heterosexual men consistently overestimate how attractive a lean physique is to women. They generally expect that women will be more interested in them in and outside the bedroom if they get in great shape. To be sure, muscularity is highly correlated with sexual success for men. However, men “gain a lot of status among other men by being jacked and being the type of guy who’s deferred to and seen as high status by other men,” explained Costello. It’s the status position that makes muscular men attractive to women, not their muscularity alone.
A common refrain from humanities departments to these sorts of claims about sexual psychology is that social differences between the sexes are socially constructed. This view is at odds with biology.
“The evolutionary perspective on sex differences and sex similarities is that we only expect sex differences in specific domains where each sex has faced different selection pressures throughout evolutionary history,” Costello said. Certain features, such as the digestive system, are sexually monomorphic because they evolved with similar selection pressures for both men and women.
However, “sex and reproduction is such a different animal for men and women and carry such consequences for women throughout evolutionary history that it would be remarkable if it didn't also shape psychology to attend to that biological difference,” added Costello. “It would be as if evolution had selected for the biological machinery for bipedal locomotion but with no psychological inclination to walk — as if evolution had selected for these sex differences in the entire mammalian lineage and then suddenly just wiped them clean and then rebuilt them [through culture].”
The relationship between sexual selection and human traits is not limited to the mind and body. Our ancestors replaced their bodily tools used to engage in contest competition — the process by which men duel each other over mates – with hand-held ones.
The retreat of certain sexually dimorphic traits from our prehistoric ancestors, such as fangs and similar features on the bodies of hominid males, is thought to have occurred when our ancestors developed hand-held weaponry approximately 500,000 years ago. Today’s hyper-muscular males engage in a type of contest competition because, as Costello put it, they “literally intimidate other men away” with their physical strength while conferring status from other men.
A bridge between that prehistoric world and the modern one is the cross-cultural consensus on female beauty. In hunter-gatherer, agricultural, and industrial environments across various cultures and ethnicities, standards of female beauty are generally the same despite any culturally constructed local variations. This well-demonstrated finding in the social sciences shows an enormous degree of continuity in male sexual preferences across time and space, supporting biological explanations for male sexual preferences.
In the modern environment, there is also measurable evidence of psychological sexual differences. “A lot of these sex differences become paradoxically larger in more gender-egalitarian countries,” Costello told me. “For example, the sex differences in desire for short-term mating are larger in egalitarian Norway and countries like that. And that's completely explainable on an evolutionary account, but the precise opposite of what you would expect [if the mind were a blank slate].”
Nor would “undiluted male sex psychology” be present in gay populations if the human mind were empty at birth and entirely informed by culture. Gay men are significantly more promiscuous simply because they do not need to negotiate with female sexual preferences to obtain sexual gratification. “It’s the reason there’s cruising for gay men, but there’s not really cruising for lesbian women,” says Costello.
Social constructionist psychology is not the only distortion that confuses young people about the nature of sexual preferences. “Over the last couple of decades,” Costello said, “even decade on decade for the last 60 or 70 years, women have been saying they value [male] physical attractiveness more.” Social media and dating apps have played a role in that increase in recent decades. Many men now feel significant pressure to improve their physical appearance.
While the psychological harms of sexual objectification are widely acknowledged when it comes to women, men face objectification of their own, and are increasingly going to extremes to change their appearance. As per Costello, more men are excessively exercising, developing “eating disorders and body dysmorphia”, and even having cosmetic surgery to make themselves more attractive.
Costello’s poll reveals that the extreme “looksmaxxing” some men pursue in search of a date or girlfriend is not necessarily desirable or healthy. It is, however, a reflection of our deep evolutionary past, distilled through modern social technologies at a specific cultural moment when an extreme and idealized male physique captivates the public imagination.
Published May 15, 2025
