Women Are Attracted To Dudes Who Look Like Their Own Brothers, Says Creepy New Study

Are you as uncomfortable as we are right now?

Guess what, fellas? Sigmund Freud wasn’t entirely wrong about familial sexual attraction! Turns out women aren’t necessarily sexually attracted to their fathers — but instead, they kinda sorta are to their brothers. 

Mmm…the subconscious is a wild, wild place, isn’t it?

According to a new study, it seems as though many women are subconsciously attracted to dudes who look like their own brothers. So yeah, not exactly the Oedipus complex as Freud vehemently argued, but close enough.

In the study, which was published in the scientific journal Evolution and Human Behavior, female participants were shown columns of pictures of a woman, her partner, her brother, and three other random men, and then were asked to rank the faces on facial similarity without knowing if the people in the pictures were related or not.

The results showed that, oddly enough, there was “clear evidence for perceptual similarity in facial photographs of a woman’s partner and her brother.” 

In layman’s terms, this means that the women had partners who looked like their own brothers. Gross? Yeah, maybe a little.

“[Our findings] were not a rule or true of every woman but we do find that, at levels greater than chance, partners did show some subtle resemblance to the women’s brothers,” Lead researcher Tamsin Saxton told The Independent.

That said, if you’ve ever thought you kinda look like your girlfriend’s brother, you were probably right. You probably actually look like him. But it’s okay, because you’re not actually related to your girlfriend, so it’s not incest. But still weird, though. Maybe it’s best to not think about it too much.

Anyway, now that I know this information, I’m never going to stop thinking about it when I look at the face of the person I’m about to hook up with. Thanks, science!

H/T: The Independent