U. Teuscher, C. Teuscher | Article published in Personality and Individual Differences 42 (2007) 631–639. 1 Reconsidering the double standard of aging: effects of gender and sexual orientation on facial attractiveness ratings Ursina Teuscher 1 and Christof Teuscher 2 Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego. ABSTRACT This study reconsiders the “double standard of aging” hypothesis, which states that older women are judged as being less attractive than older men. We considered the subject's sexual orientation (i.e., heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual) and showed that older women were not judged more negatively than older men per se. Male subjects exhibited a stronger youth bias than females, but only if the target picture was a potential sexual partner. Females showed an equal amount of preference for youthful faces, independent of the target's sex and regardless of whether the target was a potential sexual partner. Keywords : attractiveness, double standard of aging, gender, sexual orientation, age preference INTRODUCTION Studies analyzing attitudes towards aging and the elderly have often found that older women are judged more negatively than older men (e.g., Berman, O'Nan, & Floyd, 1981; Deutsch, Zalenski, & Clark, 1986; Laurence, 1964). This phenomenon was first referred to as the "double standard of aging" by Susan Sontag (1972), who suggested that modern urbanized societies allow two standards of male beauty: the boy and the man, but only one standard of female beauty: the girl. An explanation for this is provided by evolutionary theories: they assert that youthfulness is a more salient cue for men than for women when faced with the task of mate selection, due to the fact that women’s fertile years are typically more limited than men’s, and more precipitously terminated by the onset of menopause (cf. Bailey, Gaulin, Agyei, & Gladue, 1994; Kenrick & Keefe, 1992). Previous studies have suggested that men are attracted to relatively younger women (Kenrick & Keefe, 1992), that men place greater emphasis on physical attractiveness because of its value as an age cue (Buss, 1989; Feingold, 1990; Thornhill & Gangestad, 1999) and health indicator, that women’s femininity is perceived to decrease with age, which is not the case for men's masculinity (Deutsch et al., 1986), and that age is a more salient cue for men than for women (Kogan, 1974; 1979). Thus, most studies have been supportive of the double-standard-of-aging hypothesis, although there have been exceptions for attractiveness ratings (Zebrowitz, Olson & Hoffman, 1993), for attitudes towards the elderly (Kite, Deaux, & Miele, 1991; Öberg & Tornstam, 2003), and for the double 1 Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to U. Teuscher, Department of Cognitive Science, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093-0515. E-mail: ursina@teuscher.ch. URL: http://www.teuscher.ch/ursina. 2 Christof Teuscher is now with the Los Alamos National Laboratory.