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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   3760 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 20, 2023

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Curious: are there any serious studies/papers/books/etc. on what constitutes beauty and physical attractiveness, particularly for women? (Would also be fine w/ a personal write-up). I'm interested in something relatively layman, but not boring party line platitudes like "beauty is subjective" and such (or, OTOH, incel-adjacent dorks sperging on about "canthial tilt" and such crap.[1])

For a while now... I've been feeling disoriented about my inability to verbalize when I find a specific person physically attractive, beyond broad, almost-meaningless (and shallow—makes me feel vaguely uncultured) descriptors like "thin", "good face" or "young". It's like I'm lacking control, unable to even articulate what I feel; it's a very torturous feeling.

[1] perhaps I'm being uncharitable here. But I'll admit I do feel an almost-atavistic sense of disgust toward them, for reasons I cannot really fully articulate why (but is perhaps related to their being incel = low social value, ergo disgusting, or something crude like that...yeah, I know. Irrational me 😿)

Survival of the Prettiest, the Science of Beauty (book) talks about the different features we find attractive (primarily in women). The reasons we like paleness, certain body ratios, symmetry, etc. Mostly it boils down to neoteny, health, and sexual dimorphism.

It also talks about how you can exaggerate those features and end up with Jessica Rabbit, who technically looks ridiculous, but she still seems sexy. I guess all of anime bears out those tendencies as well.

For a while now... I've been feeling disoriented about my inability to verbalize when I find a specific person physically attractive, beyond broad, almost-meaningless (and shallow—makes me feel vaguely uncultured) descriptors like "thin", "good face" or "young". It's like I'm lacking control, unable to even articulate what I feel; it's a very torturous feeling.

Read old poetry. We used to have language to talk about all those things. About what kinds of eyes, noses, cheeks, skin tones, hair, the poet found beautiful. In these degenerate times, we stopped talking about Aquiline faces and just ask whether you're a tits guy or an ass guy.

This sounds like a good idea, perhaps it's just a lack of vocabulary. Do you have any specific suggestions? Not well-acquainted with poetry in general; older poetry even less so.

The ‘cel adjacent stuff is rarely entirely wrong, it’s just that obsessing over your wrist diameter or canthal tilt / whether you have ‘hunter eyes’ is extremely personally destructive behavior.

In general, most people without physical deformities are at least moderately attractive (facially) with clear skin, low body fat, symmetrical features, small noses, high cheekbones and a defined chin/jaw (the last thing in part determined by body fat anyway). The other stuff is relevant at the extremes but obsessing over it is, as I said, destructive.

Body type preferences seem to have more variation but in general again not being fat, wide hips and ‘curves’ for women, height and shoulder width for men are probably the most important things.

What's always confused me is where beauty becomes subjective. I will gladly acknowledge that Margot Robie is very good looking, but she also leaves me cold.

Where it gets confusing is wondering how many other people see the women I find attractive the same way I see Margot Robie. When I look at the row of canonical "10s" (sorry, "9.5s") linked at /r/truerateme I'd swap their placing with the 7s. For example Taylor Hill (whoever she is) could be an average checkout assistant. I say that because I used to work as a checkout assistant and had half a dozen colleagues who were more attractive and I still wouldn't have rated them as "1 in 50,000 ultra attractive top tier super models". Taylor Hill looks directly comparable to Summer Glau but with a slightly lower hairline, but Summer Glau is rated as 5.5 there!

I suppose no matter which way you cut it there will always be a degree of subjectivity that can't be captured in an objective description.

The best method I can think of to begin to start getting a handle on the matter would be to have people subjectively rank the set of faces in that chart and then figure out where the results overlap and where they split into groups who prefer different "types" that still share a lot of overlapping ratings within those types. Probably somewhere like that website (amihot.com? I can't remember) would also have a reasonable dataset. Until that question has more detail the "beauty is subjective" platitudes make an important, if overstated, point.

I will gladly acknowledge that Margot Robie is very good looking, but she also leaves me cold.

I get the same feeling, which is why I’m sympathetic to the idea that what we are “socialized” to find attractive and what we actually find attractive are two different things.

In a way, this is to her benefit. I can’t see Barbie being as successful as it was if the lead was distractingly attractive like some other Hollywood actresses.

I haven't bothered to see Barbie, but I respect Margot Robie as an actress; she's very skilled, and as a person seems very vivacious. I agree that most of her appeal and talent is lost in stills; she moves amazingly.

But Florence Pugh's couple seconds of having her tits out in Oppenheimer did way more for me that Margot ever has.

A confounding factor is that she’s no spring chicken at this point, well on the wrong side of 30.

You’ve also likely seen her engaged in various degrees of hoetry across multiple films, which may have killed any sort of warm feeling you might otherwise have had toward her, potentially even inducing a sense of male ick.

I've seen a lot of women a lot older than Robbie engaged in a lot more unattractive roles that I nevertheless find much more attractive. It's not about age or the reputation of the characters she plays, it's about having different levels of response even if the subject is objectively "beautiful".

When I see Katey Sagal or Monica Belluci playing mama bear to a crime family I don't consider that their character is dangerous and low class, or that the actress is in her 50s. I see an attractive mediterranean brunette with nice tits. That's my type. When I see Robbie I see a photogenic blonde woman with an average body. That's a nice type, I can see that, but it's not mine.

One thing about Robbie is that I think she's more videogenic than photogenic -- looking at an image search she doesn't look like anything special, but in the moving pictures she's quite good at portraying hotness. This is a valuable trait for a movie actress I imagine.

Are y’all really this age-obsessed? There’s plenty of actresses in their 40s who I still find extremely attractive. Amy Adams is 49 and is still substantially more attractive to me than Margot Robbie

A fairer comparison would be comparing Robbie to her younger self. I would say she's significantly more attractive in Wolf of Wall Street than she was in Barbie.

Amy Adams has aged extremely well, no doubt about that.

Truerateme’s chart is literally just the personal preference of the guy who made it. The ‘10s’ are all pretty, certainly, but everything above 8 is completely arbitrary.

That's how I understood it, which is fine if it's understood as such but from what I've seen he vigorously mods anyone with a different opinion from his "true" ratings. I'd say the arbitrariness is already beginning at the 3s, but that only speaks to my point about teasing out personal preferences from broader agreement.

It's a bit of a wasted opportunity because that sub isn't exactly unknown so it shouldn't be too hard for him to put together a survey, pin it to the top of the sub, and gather a statistically valid amount of responses. I suspect that there'd be some interesting disparities where some people really like certain types that others are basically indifferent to.

Maybe not what you’re looking for, but the most accurate heuristic I found is “health” broadly (inclusive to sexual fitness). So you can understand bodily attraction this way — fat in the right places is conducive to healthy children (the fat stores are transferred to the child), good skin quality is conducive to hormonal bonding with a child which takes place from skin contact, face can signal someone’s mental health. Then there’s “personality” which usually comes down to high energy (a consequence and costly signal of health) and stress resilience (a consequence of health). Innocence can be attractive because it means a woman is capable of a healthy level of sexual bonding, and at the same time a dominant personality can be attractive because it signals good health and high energy and high stress resilience. I haven’t found one thing commonly considered attractive that does not signal health. Even gait signals health and you can diagnose mental status by someone’s gait. Dressing beautifully means the intelligence to discern beauty from ugliness which actually requires skill in pattern-matching (there’s a reason humans under 16 will usually dress silly).

I'm not sure of a source that is both serious and targeted at layman. Awhile ago, possibly on a related forum, there was a thread discussing the pair of articles "Why Are Women Hot?" and "Dispelling Beauty Lies: The Truth About Feminine Beauty".

I'm pretty sure not everything claimed in those pieces is supported by the academic literature. There are a bunch of academic studies, though it's unclear how repeatable the results are. From memory, generally people prefer faces that are close to but not exactly symmetric. Composite images of population average faces score highly, but not highest, on attractiveness. People tend to approach a "8s" with traits they find particularly compelling rather than "10s."

I'm pretty sure not everything claimed in those pieces is supported by the academic literature. There are a bunch of academic studies, though it's unclear how repeatable the results are. From memory, generally people prefer faces that are close to but not exactly symmetric. Composite images of population average faces score highly, but not highest, on attractiveness. People tend to approach a "8s" with traits they find particularly compelling rather than "10s."

This actually meshes well with what "J. Sanilac" writes. In my opinion, both men and women having an individual "type" when it comes to faces is the more important message than "men overwhelmingly prefer figure-eight female bodies". The typical heart-shaped face that is common in AI-generated art is attractive, but it doesn't make you go "hnnng" if you know what I mean.

People tend to approach a "8s" with traits they find particularly compelling rather than "10s."

This is something like what the old OKCupid blog found. There, it was that people whose physical attractiveness ratings averaged out as an "8" did much much better if that "8" was an average of very high and much lower ratings than if it was a simple low-variance "everyone rated them 8/10". Their hypothesis was that it was a game theory thing, that each person has better odds going after someone they find uniquely attractive rather than someone who is equally generally attractive ... but based on the data in this other blog post I can't rule out the hypothesis that everybody was just disproportionately messaging their own personal 9s and 10s and the general 8s were thus at the back of a lot of lines.

OKCupid blog found.

I think that is the source I was thinking of. I'm glad my description was at least accurate enough to dig up the correct post. It's a bit tricky to recall nowadays, especially since so many of the original blog posts have been memory holed.

Going to second “Dispelling Beauty Lies”. The guy who wrote it gives off serious quack energy, but pretty much everything in the article rings obviously true to me.

His whole deal on twitter seems to be tilting at strawmen. He seems to think he's addressing women who could be curvy sex goddesses but instead choose to be flat-chested stick-girls.

The reality is that nobody has that much control over their body shape. Keira Knightly isn't going to become Christina Hendricks just by putting on a few pounds. They're both working with what genetics gave them.

Women already know that curves are attractive.

Although he is right about long hair.

The reality is that nobody has that much control over their body shape.

Or do they? He quite specifically calls out stick-girls and tells them to get a titjob and wear skirts that flare out instead of emphasizing how much they resemble a closet door.

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