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Notes -
Baby boomers and Gen Xers described a woman of average attractiveness (neither ugly nor hot) as "plain". Gen Z describes such women as "mid".
Does no equivalent word exist for Millennials?
I will say that it's always struck me as sad sour-grapes-ish cope to talk as though the median woman was as unattractive (to men) as the median man is (to women). Although then again, my tastes in women have always been slightly off-center, so it's possible that when other guys showed me their concept of a ten I was always just shrugging at the idea that it was anything special.
I'm curious who your friends considered a ten that you disagreed with.
Mostly specific classmates I don't remember and you wouldn’t know, but in terms of celebrities the ultra-stereotypical examples are Megan Fox or Pamela Anderson, whose popularity I always thought of as a statistical curiosity but not something particularly relatable. I found my bottom-quartile female classmates significantly more attractive just on the basis that they were younger and physically present in the room with me.
Well, that hardly seems like an apples-to-apples comparison. Presumably if you had a choice between having sex with one of your bottom-quartile female classmates and having sex with Megan Fox, you'd opt for the latter.
Is Megan Fox what is supposed to be a stereotypical 10? I didn't remember how she looks like so I went and looked up, and tbh I am not a huge fan. Kinda confirms I have weird tastes - I'm not a big fan of many celebrities (speaking purely visually) that are commonly considered 10 in the US. Of course, comparing virtualized image on screen with a living person in the same room is pointless.
Fun activity: Compile a hotness matrix to encapsulate your personal "weird tastes".
I did something similar recently, looking at all the notches on my bedpost and sorting them by ethnicity, body shape and breast size.
Unsurprisingly, slim Asian women with small breasts predominated.
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I think she's really hot in that one screenshot of Transformers (you know the one). But that's largely down to the pose/lighting/situation, and in general don't think she's all that hot (above average for sure, but not a 10). But I also think most Hollywood actresses aren't as hot as they're made out to be. I don't like the overly made up aesthetic that they're going for.
Y'all are, I'm sorry to say, fucking crazy.
Both her and Madison Beer (identical and slightly improved phenotype) are unbelievably hot.
I actually don't mind her music either, and she's not scared of showing off her body in the videos either.
Long faces considered harmful.
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Simulation confirmed.
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Certainly she was widely considered one of the most desirable women in the world at the tail end of the 2000s.
Okay, just further expounding upon the grim point I made about myself in a comment below:
Whenever I'm considering the relative attractiveness of actresses in movies and shows, I always like to check their dates of birth and when the project was actually filmed. It's like my equivalent of checking the early life section. It doesn't always turn out how I expect when I think to look it up, but it certainly does most of the time.
And of course most people know that 22-year-old Megan Fox in Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen mogs all subsequent Megan Fox. But IMO, she is herself mogged by 19-to-20-year-old Megan Fox in the first live-action Transformers, who is in turn super mogged by 14-to-15-year-old Megan Fox in Holiday In The Sun. She's maybe slightly mogged by the slightly younger 14-to-15-year-old Olsen twins in the same movie, but the three of them are all super mogged by 13-to-14-year-old Emma Watson in Prisoner Of Azkaban. Is she mogged by her 11-to-12-year-old self in Chamber Of Secrets? Maybe, I would need to go refresh my memory to say, but I think I've dug myself deep enough at this point.
And sure, a significant contingent of the world's entire male population got a celebrity crush on Emma Watson growing up because she was put in the spotlight, and I'll readily admit that she was above-average attractive. But not that far above average! Not top percentile, maybe not even top decile. If she'd been a bit closer to my age and gone to my school, she'd have just been another physically attractive girl, somewhere towards the upper end of a vaguely-sorted pool that included basically every girl who didn’t have something extremely wrong with her. Because at the end of the day, I don't really intuitively believe in Helens of Troy. I just don't think there are girls all that much more beautiful than a normal baseline girl's lifetime peak, which is around puberty. Now, I'm aware that my personal opinion is both deeply socially unacceptable and not representative of the typical man, but - you see how those two things pull in opposite directions, right? Like, you've seen all those studies where men list what age of women they're attracted to and the graph mysteriously starts at 18 and immediately plummets? Really broken world we've got here.
Are you a pedophile?
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At the time I would have spouted off some not-particularly-self-aware shit trying to hype up the importance of the physical presence, the personal familiarity, the chance at a relationship, blah blah blah, but with the dubious benefit of hindsight, NEET years, introspection, etc, I feel comfortable saying that no, actually the "younger" part was basically sufficient. Which is a much more troubling thought now than it was then, when it could be charitably/optimistically phrased as "an age peer".
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