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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3232 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 6, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is there anything to thé theory that the relatively early shift to love matches over arranged marriages has selected Western Europeans for greater phenotypic attractiveness?

That doesn’t make a ton of sense.

You’d only get a selection pressure if love matches offered a competitive advantage to attractive/attractive couples over attractive/ugly or ugly/ugly ones. My understanding of male sexuality suggests that partner hotness was not actually the limiting factor. Ugly/ugly couples were and are definitely willing to pop out as many kids as they can afford.

Ah, but medieval Europe was monogamous, and even if bastards clearly existed they probably had a much lower survival rate than legitimate children, and lower odds of reproducing even if they survived. The medieval European social structure tended to result in more eligible women than men in most social classes for long stretches at a time.

Bastards? No, I’m saying ugly couples are willing to have plenty of kids in wedlock. A guy whose farm feeds 10 is liable to end up with 10 kids whether he pairs off with the prettiest girl in the village or an absolute goblin.

Also I guess I doubt the bastard survivability claim.

This sounds similar to the armchair "war filter" theory that current day eastern european women are mostly attractive due to the fact that so many men were slaughtered in the 20th century that those who remained could choose only the most attractive as mates. I'm not sure evolution works that fast.

As @ZanarkandAbesFan suggests, there may not be a clear consensus on whether the median European (white?) woman is more attractive on the whole (and I'll use your phenotype term, meaning basically clear skin, facial symmetry, good straight teeth, healthy hair, etc but correct me if you mean something else) than her counterparts in other ethnicities. I assume we're talking about women of a certain age range?

Is it generally agreed that Western Europeans (and people of WE descent) are more attractive?

I don’t think this is the case? It’s very, very, very hard to disentangle beauty from wealth.

You can see a bit of dynamics on smaller scales with skin tone ranges as defined by tans in-community: historically traditionally whiter skin implied you were rich enough to stay indoors, but in more modern times tanner skin implies you’re rich enough to spend free time outside, but these are fairly weak and obviously context dependent. But that’s clearly not what you’re talking about.

The fact of the matter is that by the time a post-puberty person can “fairly” judge attractiveness, they have a ton of stereotypes and social influence floating around. Plus, wealth often leads to fitness and attractiveness even semi directly, both in things like bone structure, teeth, weight, muscle tone, and more (some of which also have socioeconomic connotations). Also, worth noting as an aside, measures you’d assume to be universal indicators of appeal are not perfectly universal - if I remember correctly there are differences in eg hip ratio preferences that differ between groups. All this to say that it’s a fool’s errand to make a claim like that.

Anecdotally it’s whatever. I don’t think it’s wrong to have preferences even if they aren’t perfectly fair. I think it’s wrong to discriminate, but I’m not gonna bat an eye if someone says Ukrainians are the best or something, but don’t pretend it’s some universal truth

Was this meant as a reply to me or OP?

You asked if Western Europeans are the most attractive. The answer is pretty clearly that there’s not only no data to suggest this, but some major methodological issues on top if you wanted to investigate this, so practically there’s no way to know. Beauty standards are like, pretty famously in the realm of culturally subjective. So it’s functionally an intractable problem. I would thus further opine that it is therefore not worth thinking about.

Now whether you were genuinely promoting the idea, or using a Socratic method to pick apart the assumptions of the OP, that I failed to figure out. I figured it would serve both purposes here, I guess.

Now whether you were genuinely promoting the idea, or using a Socratic method to pick apart the assumptions of the OP, that I failed to figure out.

The latter. Not that I'm totally convinced that OP's premise is wrong (and I don't really agree that it's an intractable problem) but my issue was more with taking it as truth to the extent that we can start thinking about what the broader implications might be.

I doubt you could get an article published suggesting this but if you look at the revealed preferences of almost any other group of people when they have any choice to mate with Europeans at all, this seems quite obviously true. “Western” bit is a stretch though. Slavs or actual Caucasians obviously win over English/French at physical beauty. Southern Europeans too imo.

almost any other group of people when they have any choice to mate with Europeans at all

Potential counter example: my white former classmates, former coworkers and current coworkers.

There aren't that many Asians in America, but they seem to be preferred by many of the white people I know. The pairings I notice far exceed any expected amount not explained by a large bias in each others favor. I also married one, so I'm not judging.

I also did such dating, no judgment. Replied under the other thread

He did say "any other", though, which roughly matches with my impression. AFAIK it's also true that there are specific combination that are over-and under-represented, and white male asian female is extremely overrepresented.

East Asian women were the first counter-example that came to mind for me. Do white women tend to win out over them when it comes to revealed preferences?

Main driver in wmaf relationships is usually the Asian woman being very into the man and doing way beyond an equivalent white women to keep the relationship going. I have seen this countless times and experienced once myself dating such a girl (I am Turkish, white presenting enough for East Asians). It’s definitely quite a pleasant and attractive feeling as a man when a woman works so hard for you and this is the main attraction for most white men in such couplings.

I still think white women would definitely win in an “equal” setting where they aren’t insufferable and fat. Unfortunately they often are in relative terms.

Not unlikely. People are going to be more focused on looks if they are choosing a partner for themselves rather than trying to find a partner for someone else.

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