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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4012 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 23, 2023

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if you're unattractive as hell, whether that's partially in your control or not, dating and relationships will suck for you unless you are genuinely exceptional

There are literally, and trivially, at least a million happy couples of bottom 10% attractiveness people in the united states. They are not difficult to find. I don't think happiness is the highest thing to shoot for in life, but your claims are facially falsified by even superficial engagement with your surroundings, whether that be a population statistics database or your local church.

I mean...I have seen a few? But quite a lot of them have lots of problems caused by what's causing the unattractiveness. I know a woman who had a stroke at 27; she's about 300 pounds. She's doing OK, but her boyfriend had to help her recover early on. If you're very unattractive, you're going to be dealing with hospitals and health problems if lucky, jail and rehab if not.

Most obese people aren't 300 pounds, afaik, (the obesity cutoff for female heights is <= 200 lbs) and most don't have strokes at 27. And even if both partners have serious health problems, one being able to care for the other when one is weaker and the other is stronger seems like an improvement on being alone?

This is poor health (obesity in this case) you're confounding with whatever other set of metrics you're using to define "unattractive" (shortness of stature also appears to be loading strongly on your own scale of undesirable traits, at least for men.)

Hmm. Poor health IS a form of unattractiveness, more or less. There are forms of unattractiveness that are mostly cosmetic (short stature if male, burn victim, unfortunate facial appearance) and there are ways to be unattractive through poor health (such as schizophrenia, other disability, morbid obesity). All of these make people less desirable for partners.

I also believe that there is a small but significant chunk of the population that is extremely unattractive, often for reasons beyond their control, that we do not see much after high school. The disabled. The mentally retarded. Whatever you call the population of people that are frequent flyers in psych ERs or regular ERs for overdoses or suicide attempts. The institutionalized, more or less. Those people are out of sight and hidden from public view. It's not just me that's saying this...Fussell was saying it in the 80s, talking about the "bottom out-of-sight" class.

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