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Notes -
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 😿)
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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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