Via Andrew Sullivan, more on nature vs. culture in perceptions of attractiveness, in ScienceDaily:
Score one for body language: It seems that body shape and the way people walk hold major cues to their attractiveness to others, according to collaborative research findings published by Texas A&M University professor Louis G. Tassinary and co-author Kerri Johnson of New York University.
“People have always tried to identify the magical formula for beauty, and we knew body shape was important, but we found movement was also key,” Johnson says.
“When encountering another human, the first judgment an individual makes concerns the other individual’s gender,” Johnson explains. “The body’s shape, specifically the waist-to-hip ratio, has been related to gender identification and to perceived attractiveness, but part of the way we make such judgments is by determining whether the observed individual is behaving in ways consistent with our culture’s definitions of beauty and of masculinity/femininity. And part of those cultural definitions involves movement.”