Sarah Sands: Women want... different things at different times

Just as health experts issue contradictory evidence over whether wine is good for you, so women are proving astonishingly indecisive about the attributes they seek in men. Maybe it depends on whether they have been drinking. A survey published last week by Lynda Boothroyd, a psychologist at Durham University, concludes that women may want muscle in the short term but long term they prefer men with more feminine features, associating this with fidelity, warmth and better parenting.

The surveyconfounds the assertions of men's magazines that metrosexuality is dead and real men are back – but they never asked the women, did they? The answer would have been one of dreadful complexity and ambiguity. As men have always feared, women can change their minds. The attraction of feminine men is that of the mirror image or soul mate. It is noticeable that famous couples sometimes look like brother and sister. Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis, Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow, David and Sam Cameron. The androgyny, the fluidity of the Shakespearean boy still has a powerful attraction.

If you look at the poster boys for teenage girls they tend to be feminine. You may not subscribe to Heat magazine's Torso of the Week feature, but it is revealing about girls' taste. Lee Mead, from the Joseph reality show, scores highly, as does the actor Eric Mabius, who plays Daniel Meade in Ugly Betty with their sweet, feminine faces.

Teenage girls who are alarmed by their own suddenly visible sexuality react instinctively against manly features. Girls are also exaggeratedly maternal and they respond – don't we all? – to sweetness and poignancy. The lost boy is an irresistible figure. The actor who best captures inner vulnerability is Leonardo DiCaprio, who survived screaming girls to become a first-class actor.

As girls become more assertive they tend to want the more overtly masculine. I see that Emily Watson, who plays Hermione in Harry Potter, is going out with a rugby player. She must know, first, that his tastes will be simple and cheap – beer and reruns of Top Gun; and second, that he is physically more powerful than she is. Charlotte Church made the same calculation with the Welsh rugby player Gavin Henson, although he also displays a cunningly metrosexual streak.

Church and Watson are examples of girls meeting boys in the middle. If women become too dominant then they want the girlie boys again. Germaine Greer had such a taste for male submissiveness that she even wrote a book called The Beautiful Boy. The double-edged compliment was to treat young men as sex objects. They were both adorable and virile. The expression Greer favoured was: "Sperm running like tap water." Like the best compliments, it was most destabilising to those excluded – in this case older men. The accusation of impotence is considered as mitigation in crimes of passion. Ingrid Tarrant should bear this in mind.

What Women Want is a wholly contemporary area of study. It is the title of books, magazine articles and a film starring Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt. The plot is about a chauvinist alpha male who develops empathy and thus respect for women. Gibson in real life undid his good work in the film by drunkenly addressing a female police sergeant: "What do you think you're looking at, sugar tits?" If you have built your fan base on the back of Mad Max and Braveheart it is a bit hard for the public to start demanding that you behaving like a character from Ugly Betty. But he confirmed a generalised female dread that even as men nod gravely at their young female colleagues' analysis of credit derivatives, they are thinking: "What do you think you're looking at, sugar tits?"

Feminine features convey youth – and young men are instinctively less sexist – and racist – than an older generation. There is also a stiffness about exaggeratedly masculine features, which make women feel imprisoned. I cannot look at Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, without wanting to run. Barack Obama, on the other hand, has a gentle, engaging delivery that makes one want hang around him.

But this is where a conflicting aspect of female Darwinism appears. Women choose less dominant features because frankly they look easier to live with. But when it comes to being looked after they want the clunking jaw. Obama is not attracting the female vote in the way that he should be. He is a little bit too feminine. David Cameron is also stalling on the women vote, which has wilfully swung to the iron Prime Minister.

Cameron and his political daddy, Tony Blair, share a quality admired by psychologists and married women, which is an energetic sex life with their wives. On the eve of the 2005 election Blair told The Sun that he could do it five times a night. How we miss him. In this month's Bazaar, Rachel Johnson mentions that a friend of hers had met Sam Cameron at a party in Notting Hell and noticed that she smelt of sex. This anecdote may be vital to the reversal of the Tory leader's political fortunes.

To use the language of academic research, I hope that I have demonstrated how women's tastes alter according to age and circumstance. As a teenager, my image of male perfection was David Cassidy, with his girl's face and hairless body. I have now moved on to General Sir Mike Jackson. Similarly, I am left cold by the bad boys who break girls' hearts. When tear-stained teenagers talk of giving one more chance to an unfaithful, feckless, lazy bum I have to devour my lip. Why aren't those silly girls writing to the brave, decent young soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who are begging for pen pals?

The balance between the sexes is a delicate mechanism. Françoise Sagan said: "I like men to behave like men – strong and childish." Women want to look up to and down upon their men. Too much dominance on either side breaks the inner workings of the relationship. I find some masculine traits crushing. A combination of the bombastic and the vain you sometimes encounter in the City or the golf course or in politics. On the other hand, I am frivolously sentimental about other masculine characteristics. I can be quite kinky about builders' hard hats. My husband is a middle-class, Oxford-educated, managing director of a London business but because he comes from Yorkshire I try to pass him off as a character from Billy Elliot.

The corollary of whether women want men to be more feminine is whether men like their women masculine. In recent years we have witnessed a feminist cringe. There have been fears that overachieving women are missing out on husbands and children. There is some evidence that high-flying trainees bail out when they glimpse the future.

The lesson that women must choose between their man and their job was acted out by Ségolène Royal, the French presidential candidate whose partner, François Hollande, made it clear that the job should be his. Husbands of successful women need to be self-contented, dour (Angela Merkel's husband, Joachim Sauer) or guilty (Bill Clinton).

Even the self-contented ones attract some suspicion. It was the diehard feminist Erica Jong who said: "Beware of the man who praises women's liberation. He's about to quit his job." Men who marry for a slow-lane life are demonised in a way that women are not. I have sympathy for men who complain that women are cruelly hypocritical. They say that they would like more domesticated men, then they leave their poor househusbands for a testosterone-filled CEO. I think it is true that women can be ambivalent about running houses and careers. They may be tired and fretful but they also love to feel needed.

Male admiration for domestic achievement is more intimate and heartfelt than anything in the office sphere. It is why Margaret Thatcher always took responsibility for Denis's supper. The contract was that she disappeared during the day, but Denis was always her priority. In return, Denis backed her.

There are hundreds of self-help books for women on how to keep men happy, far fewer for men. The list of what men want usually boils down to basics: 1. A woman who is fun; 2. Sex; 3. Sharing meals (cooked by the woman); 4. For his girlfriend/wife to be supportive about his work and to boost his confidence; 5. For his girlfriend/wife to look good; 6. For her to listen to him and respect him; 7. For time off for sport, hobbies, male friends.

Funnily enough, women want rather similar things. I would refine the rules to tact and kindness. It was not conducive to a happy relationship for the husband of a heavily pregnant friend of mine to mime an elephant's trunk whenever his wife came into the room. I think that a couple that boasts "at least we are always honest with each other" are off to hell in a handcart.

It is confusing to men that women want different things at once, because men tend to be more linear-minded. Once they have found a wife they like the look of and she does not cause any trouble, they are reasonably contented.

But relationships to women are what golf is to men – something to be worked on and improved. They want men to be gentle and humorous and decisive and protective. Their moods change. Sometimes they feel like square-jawed Americans and at other times they rather fancy Nicolas Sarkozy. They may like the idea of controlling the television remote without altogether understanding how it works. They want their men to be father, brother, son and gay friend. If men only listen to women and love them, then it does not matter if they look like Keats or Spartacus.

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