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Lykurg  We're all living in Amerika  1yr ago (putanumonit.com)   4165 thread views

Why Are Women Hot? – Put A Number On It!

putanumonit.com

Primarily relevant to here through the discussion of what people claim to find attractive vs. choose, but also considers various other measures of attractiveness. I dont agree with all these analyses but think its worth posting simply for considering the topic in a lot more detail then Ive previously seen.

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Excellent article, thank you for sharing. Thoughts:

-- With human desire and sexuality in a socially constrained world, always consider that reaction-formation is as strong/important as "natural" desire. The socially dominant man who likes to be humbled in bed; the polite weakling filled with vicious rape fantasies. In this case, consider that the Madonna-Whore complex is seemingly impossible to evict from most people's minds. Some men might be attracted to women in bed not in spite of their lack of upper-class signifiers, but precisely because of that lack of upper class signifiers. They might view those women as less constrained by politeness, or they might feel themselves less constrained by politeness because those women are "different" socially, or both. A man might assume that a "trashy" woman has no superego constraining her in bed, or he might be able to turn his own superego off because she cannot judge him, he can leave the panopticon and explore his desires. Or he may enjoy the appreciation a woman who is "beneath him" offers when she is under him, in a way less constrained than that of a social equal. Which are kind of separate concepts from "hotness;" and complicate revealed preferences.

-- I've nominally been a big advocate of the binary rating system (1= I'd hit that, 0= I wouldn't) and "it's all the same in the dark" when offering advice to friends on romance. All that matters is that you find her attractive enough to make love to, anything else beyond getting hard is irrelevant ego. But if I'm honest, when I look at my own life, I married the (objectively) hottest woman I ever dated, we have a near perfect relationship. And the absolute best hottest sex I've had, the best lovers I've had, have pretty strongly correlated with the societally hottest women I've been with. Maybe this indicates that sex, for me, is at some level about status, that my superego is hiding in the corner even when the lights are off. Maybe it indicates that those women had the kind of confidence that leads to really good sex. At the same time I suspect that a big reason I've been successful with objectively hot partners is because at a conscious level I'm less interested than others, precisely because of the conscious advocacy of the binary rating system.

-- Status competition among men as the primary driver of male sexuality is an important consideration when discussing eg the male in-celibacy problem. At what point is being with a real flesh and blood woman actively status reducing? Is there a point at which friends/society will roast a guy worse for having a fat girlfriend than no girlfriend at all? It's sort of similar to the argument that it isn't that the perennially un(der)employed are lazy, it's that they are dreamers; and they prefer the status of telling people they're working on their book/music/hustle/spirituality/whatever over admitting they work a dead end job. And that might be a rational choice if people put more esteem on unemployed and unrealistic dreamers than they put on McDonald's clerks. In the same way, if the woman you can actually attract is such a low-status symbol that even perpetual virginity is higher status, some men will choose porn and online incel whining over a real flesh and blood lover.

-- Body Positivity has to be the movement I'm most upset has been thoroughly hijacked by morons. There's real social value in telling women that they don't have to meet some absurd standard to be hot, and in telling men that they don't have to only date rail thin models. I've enjoyed a variety of body types in my life, each special in their own way, and I do think some people are held back by an inability to see that, there are some market failures that could make everyone happier if they were corrected. Don't try to be something you can't be, be the best "you" you can be. But there's a big difference between "A variety of body types can be attractive to different people, lean into what you're good at" and "Everyone's body is (equally) attractive" or "morbid obesity is attractive and if you don't agree you might as well have set the dogs on the Civil Rights marchers at Selma!" It's such a shame, because the meme has thoroughly lost the plot that anyone who brings it up is instantly suspected of hamplanet-apologia.

Is there a point at which friends/society will roast a guy worse for having a fat girlfriend than no girlfriend at all?

Yeah, probably - if she is 600 pounds and you are washing her fat folds every day and wiping her butt you're probably past that point.

And the absolute best hottest sex I've had, the best lovers I've had, have pretty strongly correlated with the societally hottest women I've been with.

"Fit, confident people I'm attracted to really turn me on and make the sex good" is not really an insight, unless you've been spending far too much time on the internet.

I guess? Maybe it's a sample size issue, but if I sit down and list them out, there's almost no correlation in the first 5, barely any in the first 10, and it's pretty weak still. It's only if you look at the podium winners that a correlation is strong. So, no, I wouldn't say that this is experientially intuitive to me at all, as I experienced it in real life. Some of the most talented lovers I had were...not to everyone's taste. Some of the women who were really hot were bad in bed. And take out any one podium winner, if I slept in that day or left early or whatever, and the correlation gets much weaker.

A man might assume that a "trashy" woman has no superego constraining her in bed, or he might be able to turn his own superego off because she cannot judge him, he can leave the panopticon and explore his desires. Or he may enjoy the appreciation a woman who is "beneath him" offers when she is under him, in a way less constrained than that of a social equal.

From "The Screwtape Letters":

You will find, if you look carefully into any human's heart, that he is haunted by at least two imaginary women — a terrestrial and an infernal Venus, and that his desire differs qualitatively according to its object. There is one type for which his desire is such as to be naturally amenable to the Enemy — readily mixed with charity, readily obedient to marriage, coloured all through with that golden light of reverence and naturalness which we detest; there is another type which he desires brutally, and desires to desire brutally, a type best used to draw him away from marriage altogether but which, even within marriage, he would tend to treat as a slave, an idol, or an accomplice. His love for the first might involve what the Enemy calls evil, but only accidentally; the man would wish that she was not someone else's wife and be sorry that he could not love her lawfully. But in the second type, the felt evil is what he wants; it is that "tang" in the flavour which he is after. In the face, it is the visible animality, or sulkiness, or craft, or cruelty which he likes, and in the body, something quite different from what he ordinarily calls Beauty, something he may even, in a sane hour, describe as ugliness, but which, by our art, can be made to play on the raw nerve of his private obsession.

-- I've nominally been a big advocate of the binary rating system (1= I'd hit that, 0= I wouldn't) and "it's all the same in the dark" when offering advice to friends on romance. All that matters is that you find her attractive enough to make love to, anything else beyond getting hard is irrelevant ego. But if I'm honest, when I look at my own life, I married the (objectively) hottest woman I ever dated, we have a near perfect relationship. And the absolute best hottest sex I've had, the best lovers I've had, have pretty strongly correlated with the societally hottest women I've been with. Maybe this indicates that sex, for me, is at some level about status, that my superego is hiding in the corner even when the lights are off. Maybe it indicates that those women had the kind of confidence that leads to really good sex. At the same time I suspect that a big reason I've been successful with objectively hot partners is because at a conscious level I'm less interested than others, precisely because of the conscious advocacy of the binary rating system.

What lead you to this opinion in the first place? It seems there would be a fairly straightforward biological reason to expect sex with hotter people to be more desired. But Jacob also reached for a status explanation of hot people seeking hot partners, without even mentioning the obvious first idea.

You remind me a bit of this, but with efficiency instead of progressivism:

Like, and I'm definitely not being 100% charitable here, reading between the lines, you almost hear, "Men want to rub their bodies against women sometimes and then ejaculate when their genitals are in the rough vicinity of that woman's genitals or other parts and crevices various and sundry. Women also sometimes want forms of this, too. There are some variations about the identities of the bodies involved, but this covers the general case. We will call this interaction "sex", and claim to be the champion of it. Now, how can we eliminate everything else that has historically made this transaction problematic, from a disease perspective, from a fertility perspective, and especially from a social / emotional / power / interpersonal relationship perspective? Once we stop permitting all that other stuff, once we heavily stigmatize all that other stuff, we will be left with 'safe sex', and we will loudly encourage it. And this is what 'sex' will mean as we march into the future, and this will be progress."

Again, I'm being unfair. But if this is someone's model of human sexuality, it's a model that has almost no room for things like seduction, and is likely wary of most kinds of flirting. It's a model that is very uncomfortable with human brains being the most important sexual organ, and of the deep pleasures of sexual tension and the role of uncertainty and imagination and play and teasing in desire.

Side note, but I really would love to run a study where you just showed headshots (all taken in the same light/background) of a bunch of randomly selected people to another bunch of randomly selected people and had the second bunch rate the headshots on a 1-10 scale of attractiveness, then tried to see what latent variables about the people in the headshots (age, BMI, wealth, education) correlated most strongly with the 1-10 ratings.

My hypothesis is that for straight men looking at pictures of women, the 1-10 ratings would correspond really closely to age and BMI. I would be really interested in seeing what the results would be for straight women looking at pictures of men.

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