Thanks all, although to be honest I already knew that stuff apart from the Sugar-Glider which I've never seen even though I watch plenty of wildlife documentaries.  I will look it up.  It's not easy to explain what I'm getting at because there's so much assumption we give when we hear a question, and the problem with my question is it's one where it's easy to misunderstand what I'm getting at (you all have).

Ok, so let's take what Shane said as an example.  I pointed out earlier that we're attracted to things like breasts and legs but not hands and ears.  Shane says he's attracted to hands, which is fine, but it's not a general thing.

If you look at the sort of competitions that exist between women for the entertainment of men, we have things like "ass" competitions, leg competitions, breast competitions.  In other words there's a pretty much universal thing going on there.

But why those things?

Of course I'm attracted to these things for the same reason any other male would be, but that brings us to what Moriador said, about being attracted to things that may be beneficial in the course of reproduction.  It makes sense, I suppose, but it still doesn't explain why (and that's the bit I'm getting at).

Lets be honest, we don't look at breasts and think to ourselves, hmmm, those would be ideal for feeding my future newborn.  We don't drool over a thigh-gap and think to ourselves, hmmm, those hips have ideal birth-giving properties.

Some scientists might say we think like that, but I can assure you, I absolutely do not.  A whole different set of thoughts enter my mind when I see these things, and I can assure you that child-bearing properties isn't one of them!

You might think this is a strange question but I can prove it's not, quite easily.  If you were to advertise a female Poser figure that was humanoid but had no characteristics of a female, it wouldn't sell.  To understand this, means there must also be something to be had by understanding why we like what we like.

If we knew why we like certain charactaristics of the female form, we would have the power to do better, and we would know why male figures aren't as popular as female figures.  People who are drawn to nice legs, for example, all have one thing in common; they all like legs!  They all like different legs, but, they all like legs.  But if we understood why, we would be able to give our Poser figures the perfect leg, or rather, the kind of leg that would be attractive to the most men.

That's what it's all about at the end of the day: getting the figure optimised in a visual sense, and the only way we're ever going to do that is if we understood what I'm getting at here.  Male Poser figures aren't popular, but to me the reason is obvious; it's because we don't know enough to make male figures as popular with women, as we do how to make female figures popular with men.

You see?

If the vendors creating the male figures knew as much about making them attractive as those creating the female figures do, you proabably wouldn't have this problem of the male figures not being as popular.

All we know is that male figures are not as popular, and the question posed by Clarkie is why?  I think the answer can be found in understanding why, because unless you understand why men are attracted to female meshes more than women are attracted to male meshes, you're never going to understand the root of the problem.

If we had the magic formula, meaning that we knew what was lacking from the male figures, we would incorporate it and our male figures would outsell everyone elses.  Therefore, what we really need to know is why men are drawn to females figures more than females are drawn to male figures.

BlackHearted's original GND is a perfect example of this.  The figure did well because his figure had visual cues that males found more attractive than what was common on the other figures at the time.  They bought the figure because she looked good, but the important thing to rememeber is that she only looked good because he got it right.  He struck gold on getting a good balance of features to work well together.

Why can't a male figure be popular for the same reasons?

**WTF, sorry for the length of this post, in fact probably best not to reply to it, but rather mull it over. **

If we understand why we are attracted to certain things, it makes perfect sense that we would be better equipped to translate that into a figure be it male or female - shouldn't make a difference.