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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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As always posts like this that equivocate "attraction to bloated corpses" and "making vidya game characters a bit more aggressively bland" leave me thinking that the gamergaters are not the ones with a normal scale of beauty.

The kind of people who unironically claim Zendaya is a 3/10 are the 1%ers.

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Zendaya isn't outright ugly, but something about her is strongly reminiscent of an Olmec head that had its face flattened with a frying pan

I'll climb aboard this train. I saw the recent Dune movies and she is a very plain woman. She's lean in a bad way I don't like. She's entirely flat and lacks a feminine figure. Her face looks decent in photos. But I'm wondering how much careful makeup and editing went into the photoshoots. Her face looks much worse on film.

Comparing her against women her age: she's in the bottom third. Not ugly, but aggressively plain and flat in a unattractive way.

And that's fine for an actress. Not every woman in Hollywood needs to shapely and big breasted.

The very fact that she’s not fat surely puts her in the top half for women her age.

Usually I would agree. But she is so thin and flat that she lacks a feminine figure. She's way too far in that direction.

Not every woman in Hollywood needs to shapely and big breasted.

No, but damn I miss the days when there were more of them in our media.

https://www.cnu.org/sites/default/files/architecture-poll.jpg

80% prefer left. 20% prefer right. When presented with other aesthetics I'm willing to bet that the 20% people will not dissolve randomly into like this or that. Their preference for uglyness will correlate. They'll find themselves saying 'you like Right? did you like B in the A/B painting over there? Omg I liked B too what are the chances'.

High. The chances were high.

I'm afraid I have no idea who Zendaya is.

Zendaya

Google her. Or don't. All you need to know is she's an actress who could definitely win a keynesian beauty contest or ten.

just googled her. Yeah I see what you mean about winning a few Keynesian beauty contests. Anyone describing her as 3/10 is definitely outside my comprehension.

Yeah I see what you mean about winning a few Keynesian beauty contests

Show me those AD-AS curves, baby...

Same Keynes, but different context. I'm actually curious about what @CloudHeadedTranshumanist meant by that qualifier - that even if Zendaya might not be the most beautiful in many particular judges' minds, she would clearly be the most widely-perceived as widely-perceived as beautiful?

She toned it down for Spider-Man: Homecoming (where her character wasn't supposed to be a Love Interest yet), with just hair/wardrobe/body-language choices that you'd think would be another "Hollywood Homely" trope but which worked okay, but even there claiming only 3/10 would be silly.

My intent in pointing at "Keynesian" beauty contests here, was to turn something arguably subjective into a more objective statement.

This is a general pattern I like. People can quibble over say, whether AI have qualia, but turn it into a question about the functions of the system and we can remove a lot of the disagreement. We can quibble over whether Zendaya is 'hot' and wind up arguing from our own preferences, but if we turn it into a question about whether most people would find her hot, we can make more clearly objective statements.

I do think she could win traditional beauty contests too, depending on the judges and the competition.

I doubt she would win if everyone on earth participated, just on priors I'd expect to find still greater outliers than her somewhere on earth. So- yes it's still not that absolute of a claim.

I hate it when my clever jokes turn out be me dumbly not getting a reference. But I learned something today, so thanks for that!

Ahh I'm sorry if I gave that impression that I find these things equivalent. I was trying to use extreme examples to illustrate a point that the same trait that exists in the extreme also cascades down into the merely uncommon. I don't think most of these people are Bloated corpse tier, though those absolutely do exist. It's more a natural consequence of my point about propensity to intensity and yes/no being separate traits.

I think of it as a bunch of brackets. First there is the building that 70% of people prefer A to B. Then there are the aesthetic tastes of those who find themselves in the 20%. Those in the 10% minority opinion etc etc.

So for example I mostly find Stevens Universe to be ugly, but I get why it works and am willing to put up with it. Most people probably find it neutral. There is a certain person who adores its style and hates on actual beautiful things. I'd put them in the 30% bracket.

Then there is Ozy who appears to be the 5% bracket. Everything evolution selected for us to find beautiful/important, symmetry indicating health, indication of running water, open plains allowing for awareness of both predators and resources, kin to treasure and protect, Ozy's mind finds completely unstimulating.

Then there are the people who shudder with delight at the idea of fucking amidst flies over a bloated corpse. Sub 1% bracket.

Dunno if that changes your take on my take but I hope that clarifies my own intuitions on the topic.

"Corpse" is quite defensible in regard to the "white" skin tone; it absolutely does look like "has been found dead, completely drained of blood!". Not sure about "bloated", although I know my taste runs fatter than most men's so I'm maybe not the best judge of that.