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I agree with your overall point but you're overselling how focused guys are on looks and underselling how much they care about other factors. Both men and women are attracted to creativity and status. Every time I ask a friend what they like about a girl they just started seeing, something creative comes up. "She draws", "She published a novel", "She plays guitar". People with creative pursuits tend to be more interesting to talk to.
Girls max out how attractive they can make themselves. Maybe you start as a physical 5/10. With great effort you get yourself to 7/10, but you're unable or unwilling to advance further. The same distinguishing logic works for the 7/10 as the 4/10. 7/10 looks + cool beats 7/10 + boring. Also you seem more like a peer to rockstar types when you also have a musical career, so it's a winning strategy for nabbing them. See the singer from The Distillers marrying Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age.
Additionally: your theory predicts female rockstars should be mid, but that's not what I see? Girls in bands, both big and small, tend to be a bit prettier and more stylish than baseline. (Pop music girls tend to be just straight hot. Why that difference is another issue entirely). It helps get the audience emotionally invested when you're easy to look at. Once I went to a diner before a show. There was a girl there that was way prettier than anyone else there. She was getting stares the whole time. When I went to see the show I found out she was one of the acts.
Can I just say, the fact you two are using the Hold Steady and the Distillers to support your arguments make me feel like you're competing specifically for my favor and I love it. I hope you both win
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I would agree, but with a slightly different take: the female equivalent to Meatloaf (appearance-wise) would not make it.
Susan Boyle did kinda make it for a bit, but then again she kinda got through as a deliberate freak show and had the TV Talent Show pathway work for her where the Meatiness worked as a point of differentiation.
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Dare I say this effect might be contaminated by social desirability bias? "I like her because she's so creative" sounds a great deal less crass than "I like her because she has cracking tits and she's great in bed".
Even then, no one's debating that, ceteris paribus, creative people are more interesting to talk to. The point is, your friends aren't dating these women because they're creative. Your friends never would've asked these women out had they not found them physically attractive: physical attraction is the rule-in criterion, "being creative" is just gravy.
Maybe I'm overgeneralising from my personal experience + the most famous female rockstars. Dublin's post-punk scene exploded in popularity over the last decade, including a handful of female musicians, and I genuinely cannot think of even one that I would call more attractive than mid. Any list of the greatest female rockstars in history is bound to include Janis Joplin and Patti Smith, neither of whom were anything to write home about in terms of looks even at their peaks. Stevie Nicks, not bad-looking but hardly a knockout. I'll grant that Debbie Harry was a legitimate stunner.
Yeah, suppose a genie who offers men two deals:
I imagine deal 1. gets near universal denial and deal 2. gets easy majority acceptance, where the rejections to 2. mostly come out of risk aversion or concern for some type of monkey’s paw situation.
One point on the 1-10 scale is a big deal though. What if it was 0.1 points on the scale? 0.01?
My broader point is that looks aren't literally everything for guys, even if they're the most important factor. Guys aren't pure looks maximizers. They frequently make tradeoffs against pure looks. This is more pronounced when you look at relationships than casual sex. Imagine a 7.5 whose hobbies are watching the office and tiktok, versus a 7.3 who plays guitar at fun house parties and gets your homies invited. Which would you rather date?
Indeed, it only further highlights how little female “creativity” matters relative to looks, that it’s immediately conceded that we need to divide the delta by 5, 10, or 100 to make the thought experiment less obvious.
It also further highlights the male burden of performance and the female bar being on the floor, where “she draws” or “she plays guitar” is understood to be an earnest compliment for a woman by her boyfriend or husband. In contrast, “he draws” or “he plays guitar” by a woman about her boyfriend/husband would make him sound like a loser without further qualifiers, as such descriptors sound like someone characterising an elementary or a high school family member, respectively.
The 7.3 who likes drawing attention to herself by playing guitar at house parties is likely thotting around even harder on Insta and TikTok than the 7.5 Office and TikTok watcher.
I couldn’t care less about a girlfriend/wife’s ability to get my homies invited places, except insofar the caring goes into the negative, as such ability (holding looks equal) is correlated with traits I wouldn’t want in a girlfriend/wife. The bros are more than able to fend for themselves.
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