Everybody's punching up.
The diversity in preferences makes "up" impossible to define and order consistently between people. If you take a survey of a population for an ordered ranking, in desire ability as potential spouses, of a particular sample set, you might get wildly different rankings.
And then those same people might rank things differently depending on who they would most want to have a one night stand with.
Even laying out specific physical characteristics and asking about attractiveness will get those isolated features ranked differently. Heterosexual men will disagree on whether it is attractive, unattractive or neutral for a woman to be:
- Being very tall
- Being very short
- Having an athletic build
- Having pale skin
- Having curly hair
- Having tattoos
- Having a Ph.D.
- Speaking multiple languages
- Being Christian
- Being vegetarian
We're all just looking for compatibility. What that means will vary from person to person, and what is very attractive to one person might be a huge turn off to another.
I'm generally of the view that you want to be with someone whose unique traits are positive to you, and who sees your unique traits as positives, too. That way both can fall within that stable equilibrium of both believing that they've married "up."
Fun fact, that gene is only about whether you can smell the compound in the piss, not whether your body processes asparagus into that smell.
They tested this by having people smell other people's urine, and found that the people who can smell it in their own piss can also smell it in the piss of everyone who eats asparagus, even of the people who claim not to produce that smell.