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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.
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 12-to-13-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.
I could be wrong, but I think I recall Aella's studies (or maybe someone else's?) suggesting peak physical attractiveness for women is somewhere around 16, which matches my intuitions.
But I think there are a couple of dynamics going on that distinguish a "celebrity 10" from an individual 10.
They have to be a celebrity at all. While there were plenty of girls at my highschool who I would have rated as 10s, definitely more attractive than most celebrities, none of you will ever agree with me that they are 10s because you never saw them and don't know what they look like. Short of sharing facebook photos (many of which have been deleted since then), which I wouldn't do anyway and violate their privacy, I have no way of communicating this properly. It isn't shared knowledge, they are not valid candidates for "the most attractive women" in popular discourse, because they are not famous.
Broad appeal. A woman with a specific look that some men really like and others don't might end up a 10 for 10% of the population and a 7 for 90% of the population. Meanwhile another woman might be a 9 in basically everyone's estimation. If you look around you you might find 10% of women have the specific look that appeals to you and conclude they are more attractive than the universal 9, but lots and lots of men are going to agree that the 9 is attractive, so when people average scores together the universal 9 might end up at the top while each of the niches end up lower on average (and then when we grade on a score the 9 curves up to a 10)
Aging gracefully. Due to social concerns and/or cognitive dissonance, a lot of men are not going to admit that the 16-year-old is a 10, even if they are physically attracted to her. So the set of 22 year olds are going to get a lot more external praise and validation. Therefore, a woman who retains a higher fraction of her teenage peak appearance into her 20s is going to be at the top of the ratings as far as people say them out loud, even if in literal terms she is less attractive than other 16 year olds or even her own 16 year old self.
So I think 22-year-old Megan Fox is considered peak due to hitting all of these points. If she were not famous, few men would genuinely treat her as a 10 in terms of preferring her over the top 5% of women they've ever met in real life. But she is famous, and has broad appeal, and was attractive in her early 20s, so the discourse goes the way it goes.
Aella actually has an article suggesting the late 20s as the peak of female attractiveness. Another article on this topic that has been discussed here is J. Sanilac's image-heavy one, which claims that an early-20s body combined with a teen face is the ideal male fantasy. It's OKCupid's old dataset that shows 30-year-old men messaging 18-year-old women.
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