Big Foot Love: Rural Indonesian's Defy Dominant Theory of What's Attractive

Researchers have found that both men and women in a remote farming community of Indonesia are more attracted to women with big feet. The finding goes against the dominant, transcultural view that women with smaller feet are perceived as more attractive.

According to a report by the University of Washington, people are biologically hardwired to prefer smaller feet, with men viewing small feet as a sign of a potential mate's youth and fertility. (Also recall a Chinese cultural pastime of breaking toes and binding feet so growth is stunted to a "desirable" three inches.)

But the latest study of the Karo Batak, who live scattered across rural villages in the north of Indonesia's Sumatra region, found an overwhelming preference among the villagers of both genders for big feet.

Geoff Kushnick, the lead author of the study on Karo Batak foot preference, said that the group's preference for bigger feet is linked to their agrarian society and lack of exposure to Western media.

"Universal features of physical attractiveness are typically thought to suggest that mate choice criteria are hard-wired in humans and that they evolved tens of thousands of years ago," Kushnick said.

"This new research supports that idea that cultural transmission of mate preferences allows humans to adapt to local environments, and this may trump hard-wired preferences."

For his experiment, Kushnick showed 159 Karo Batak adults five drawing of a bare-foot woman with her hair pulled back and wearing a shirt and calf-length skirt. The drawings were identical except for subtle differences in foot size.

Men and women participants both selected the drawings of the woman with the largest feet as the most attractive.

The study's results go against the results of a global study that found societies have a preference for small feet. (Respondents from Iran, Lithuania, Brazil, the United States and India rated women with small feet more attractive, but those from Cambodia, Papua New Guinea, and Tanzania preferred women with big feet.)

The discrepancy prompted Kushnick to wonder why it was the Karo Batak preferred big feet, when people in cultures around the world showed a preference for small feet. To find out more, he compared his results with the results from the earlier study, looking for an association between societies' foot-size preferences and three potential factors - patriarchal values, rural versus urban ecology, and exposure to Western media.

Kushnick determined that rural ecology and less exposure to Western media had a statistical association with a peoples' preference for big feet. A preference for smaller feet was statistically aligned with people from urban settings with more exposure to Western media. Patriarchal values did not make a difference.

"My analyses support the notion that culturally transmitted preferences that allow people to adapt to local environments can trump evolved preferences," Kushnick said. "Cultural and social influences play a stronger role in mate choice than some evolutionary psychologists are willing to accept."

Though a local Karo Batak man offered an equally astute and perhaps more digestible explanation for his taste in feet:

"Why would anyone like a woman with small feet? How would she work in the rice field?"

Kushnick's research is published in the journal Human Nature.