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Friday Fun Thread for August 21, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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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.

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?

Most guys want tits and ass, big as can be, and appear to be attracted to symbols of social dominance[0]. Young women right at the point of sexual availability (biologically, 13ish, which is why men have the evolutionary response for this) dominate all others in the desirability game[1]; after that, that they will make themselves up to evoke this as well. If you ever noticed that most women look angry, that's why.

As a mirror image, most women are attracted to symbols of physical dominance[0]- most commonly the rewards that dominance brings.


[0] Note that they expect this dominance to be used against competition- against others of the same gender- not against them directly in a relationship. They also tend to be much less attracted to people who exhibit cross-dominance; normal men don't generally select tomboys (physical dominant), normal women don't generally select effeminate men (social dominant).

I suspect this also has implications for why certain homosexuals and bisexuals have the attraction patterns they do.

[1] Which is why feminists push for higher and higher ages; restricting supply of the most desirable goods increases demand and price for the middling ones is Econ 101.

Most guys want tits and ass, big as can be

It's more complicated than that. Men want curves, yes, but we also want thinness. What we are actually trying to maximize is something like the breast to waist ratio. Which is why images like this are a male superstimulus.

Extreme implausibly-sized boobs like that completely fail as a superstimulus for me - they stop hitting my eye as humans, let alone as especially attractive women - although this is presumably related to boobs in general doing less than they're supposed to for me. It's certainly not that I'm immune to superstimulus - I've followed the anime waifu trail long enough to know how that goes. But the superstimuli that hit for me are maybe a bit more abstract, more about idealized appearance and behavior, and not about specific body parts exaggerated beyond a human level (or even pushed to the upper limit of the real human range).

I assume that that particular image was half-joking. See the zillions of images in J. Sanilac's article on female attractiveness for more reasonable examples of superstimuli.

Humans are imperfect by nature. So in real life men rarely have the option to pick exactly what they want, and compromise is the norm. To avoid hurting feelings they publicly pretend their compromise was their ideal all along. Imaginary substitutes, however, allow men to bypass the limitations of reality and get something that actually does look just like their ideal.

The best guides to men's real beauty preferences, therefore, are imaginary women selected in private. These fall into three main categories: sex dolls, erotic drawings, and computer-generated women like those above. In this section I'll analyze each in turn.

Thanks for posting that; it's what I'm trying to evoke/working off of, just couldn't find the article.