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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?

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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.

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