Keep in mind that typical men's magazines are not performing Gallup-level polling to come up with their ideas of what "women" prefer.
Most often, it's simply the feeling of one of the writers, who is most likely in his early to mid 20s, and has a close group of people he associates with regularly.
Have one of the guy's from the mail room write the article, and we might be stunned with the revelation that women prefer facial tattoos and eyebrow piercings.
There has been some actual "research" into the matter by pop science mags. (There was another recent thread here on that very study.) But judging from the overview (I was not privy to an extensive methodology section or able to view the raw data) it was a fairly poor study and the results wouldn't have any practical application, IMO.
You are right about the observations in the men's mags--little of it has to do with actual research. When it does, most of the writers have no idea what the data really mean or how they were derived. List articles are written mostly to be controversial and generate arguments/conversation. It's all about selling copies and ads.