Female sexual attractiveness seems more egalitarian than people acknowledge
[CW: Partial nudity]
I’m a straight man. If you’re a straight man who befriends other straight men, you will occasionally have conversations that sound like this:
A: I hate how Hollywood is pushing all of these unattractive actors lately. I want to see more people like [Celebrity Name].
B: God, [Celebrity Name] is so bad. I would let [Celebrity Name] choke me to death with her thighs.
C: Dude, I would shave my face off with a cheese grater just to sniff the feet of [Celebrity Name].
D: [Celebrity Name] is kinda mid. But I would do that for [Celebrity Name 2] though.
C: You’re full of it. [Celebrity Name 2] is the one that’s mid.
These conversations are fun, but I’ve always found them a bit weird. Not because I have different picks, or because I’m unfamiliar with the level of horny that would compel a man to reach for the cheese grater, or even because I’m that stereotypical rationalist who is oblivious to the social protocol of exaggerating disagreements for banter. The premise just doesn’t really make any sense. There are no “extraordinarily” attractive women. The ceiling for female sexual attractiveness is not very high.
That’s not to say there aren’t contextual circumstances which can elevate attractiveness of an ordinary woman in that moment. Makeup matters a lot. BMI and general physical health matters a ton. The clothes a woman chooses to wear matter, as does her personal presentation and how much she’s signaling sexual availability. Start tuning all of these factors together, and of course one can craft a superstimulus like this:
But that’s cheating. Men aren’t getting the awooga reaction from this image because the model is prettier than all of the other 25 year olds, they’re getting it because she’s in lingerie, striking a pose that accentuates all of her curves, in a suggestive setting.
If you instead check out candid or semi-candid photography of famous sex symbols, they just look like… Normal young women. Even when she’s in professionally done makeup, I’m kind of skeptical that the average man would clock Sydney Sweeney as worthy of distinct adulation:
Not to pick on her, here are some other pics of Known Quantities in similar venues:
All of these women are attractive, but as far as I can tell they’re only as attractive as the pretty women one meets in real life. It’s when they have good makeup on, in front of a professional photographer, striking a flattering pose, that they become something else. But that amount of effort would be sufficient to elevate most women who have similar ages, similar BMIs, and a face in the top quartile.
Am I just unusual? I could be, but I don’t think so. Biographies about famous sex symbols often bear the same thing out, that these women’s beauty is the result of obsessive optimization, and that even so, before the woman becomes a celebrity, she’s treated as just kind of pretty:
Perhaps all of this is quite obvious. But this is not how people talk about female sexual attractiveness! People, especially women, talk about it as if there’s a significant, native difference in supermodels’ broad appeal. They speak as if Marilyn Monroe were genetically gifted in inspiring romantic affection, above and beyond any woman you were ever likely to meet. She’s an outlier, but an outlier in the sense that someone who’s 6′2″ is an outlier, not an outlier like Michael Jordan is an outlier.
So what’s going on here? Well, I think I understand the reason men do this. Having the conversation this way is funny, everybody participating knows what celebrities look like, and men obviously have different personal preferences, so it can go on forever. The reason women talk like this is true is more mysterious to me, though. I can think of a few reasons:
Women just get negged by men about this all the time. Having really strict preferences is attractive to women, and one extremely common way to do that is to pretend that it’s very important to you that your partners are 9.9/10 and not 9.8/10.
There are artificial barriers preventing “merely” 8⁄10 women from competing in certain industries (modeling, acting, Instagram) that make differences at the high end professionally significant even if they’re not relevant in courtship.
Maybe women’s sense of each other’s beauty is more discriminating than men’s.
Maybe the small differences in sexual attractiveness at upper echelons compound over the course of a woman’s life, and so to women these differences are salient, even though to men they don’t actually matter that much.
Some women probably don’t distinguish a sex symbol’s actual physical attractiveness from the other characteristics that would make her rarely and especially appealing to women (like fame, wealth, etc.), and they’re neglecting to account for these factors being less salient to men.
I’m guessing also that a lot of women want to believe that sex appeal can go to 11, because it would mean women as a class have more power than they actually do.
I don’t have a good conclusion on which of these is more plausible than the others, but I’d be interested in finding out.
Tails come apart. The most successful actresses are not the most attractive women.
Yes, I was going to leave this comment.
It’s strange to use the fact that popular celebrity actresses are not stunningly attractive in candid photos as evidence that women don’t get that (naturally) attractive. Celebrity actresses are selected for a whole lot more than attractiveness, plus eventually they get old/out of their prime age (why are you exclusively displaying images of late twenties/early thirties women when it’s widely accepted that attractiveness peaks at 21 or younger?).
Furthermore, the fact that celebrity actresses only look good with makeup / in certain clothing etc. is again partially a product of their selection process—they are chosen for looking and acting well on camera, not being naturally overwhelmingly beautiful in person.
I didn’t select their photos because they were successful actors, I selected them because they’re the celebrities I see cited as extraordinary on the internet, and because they either appear at the top of popular surveys for most attractive women, or are the most viewed women on deepfake websites.
Of course, for any category of women you put up there—instagram models, regular models, onlyfans models, actors, singers—you’re gonna get the response “Ah, but those aren’t the prettiest women!” Fair enough, but I suspect that if you or romeo left an example of a particular woman you find more attractive than Ana de Armas, you’d find that actually a large proportion of observers disagree with you and like Ana de Armas more. My thesis is not that you can’t find a woman that you find significantly prettier than her, but that it’s very hard to find a woman who broadly and significantly more appealing.
Also, I feel like what you and Romeo are saying is not actually incompatible with the broader point? It’s a little like if I said that height was normally distributed, and as evidence I pointed out that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was only 1.5 feet taller than the average human, and someone went “But the tallest person in human history, Robert Wadlow, was 8 foot 11 inches!” If these women are so rare that they can’t leverage their attractiveness into fame or professional success, and they don’t seem to be the ones mating with high status men, then of what use is it?
What use is it to be that attractive? Probably not much. Two of the four most beautiful women I’ve ever seen were at the cash register in a shop. (One of the others, the most beautiful one, was probably a university student (in Louvain, long ago); I’ve no idea about the fourth, but she was in my local shopping center, which isn’t a glamorous place.)
Could there be an observation bias at play here? Could it be that most extremely beautiful women do live glamorous lives but you are not a part of those scenes?
On average, the most successful actresses are certainly more attractive than their male counterparts at least. While both tend to be good looking, a man who is not attractive but has other talents (funny, athletic, good at physical acting, charismatic) tends to have a better chance at fame than a woman with the same talents and the same flaws.
FWIW I’m a straight man and the last conversation like that I recall having was like 11 years ago.
Do you have, in your model of male attraction, a distinction between romantic attraction and sexual attraction? I’ve commented on it before, but briefly, I think romantic attraction is a long-term pair-bonding thing, and sexual attraction is about short-term mating opportunity.
Both can inspire strong emotions… But I think, for romantic attraction, there are several extra things going on, or at least are significantly stronger. There tends to be less substitutability, whereas for short-term mating, it’s a lot easier to see a second woman and think “Eh, she’ll do.” It tends to depend more on background information about her that makes her admirable (e.g. imagine that you know she’s a very kind person, then imagine you know she’s a cold heartless bitch behind her smile), while sexual attraction seems to be more about the way she looks right now (though background information about her sexual openness or willingness is relevant). I guess there can be obsessive thinking in both cases, but… It just seems more plausible that one can get really deep into Romeo-style romantic fantasy that intensifies the feelings, whereas with sexual fantasy, one can simply masturbate and then you quickly get out of that particular loop.
Therefore, I suspect the ceiling is higher for romantic than for sexual attraction. Helen of Troy I’m sure appealed to both, but I imagine the main effect came from the romantic.
I’ll also note that the “superstimulus” picture has her whole body, while the “underwhelming” pictures are of the face and a few inches below. In my model, the latter mostly appeals to just the romantic interest; and, if we’re trying to evaluate it as just a picture isolated from anything else we know about her, then, well, that does subtract away almost everything.
If you haven’t been in a conversation, in a challenging project, and in bed with someone, you have absolutely no idea how attractive they really are.
Perhaps this is also obvious, but I want to just make sure we’re on the same page by mentioning that physical attractiveness is just one small part of overall attractiveness. Our culture emphasizes it a lot and I don’t think it does anyone any good to emphasize it more.
In my observations, overindexing on physical attractiveness causes heaps of trouble to everyone involved.
If you were just going to hop in bed and then go on your way, that overindexing and the type of conversation you described would make more sense. But you’re not going to do that almost ever, are you?
To androphiles: Is the same true of men? Why or why not?
All I can say is that my experience has been different. I have met “extraordinarily” attractive women in my life. And while I wouldn’t use the cheese grater metaphor, I understand the feeling.
I’m curious if they persist in seeming that way. I’ve realized that for me there are people who felt that for a slice of time, but later didn’t, for no clear reason.
I think this might be selling Marilyn Monroe short, because from what I’ve heard, she was also extremely charismatic and skilled at building her image. Which is kind of a different but parallel point to yours—lots of women can have pretty faces and pretty bodies, but what really makes a few like her stand above and beyond (besides the luck of being in the right place at the right time to become world famous) is also the talent to leverage that and make it shine. A model for example needs to know how to pose; a well-rounded variety act needs to be pretty, emotionally intelligent, good at conversation, at coordination, with the patience and persistence to suffer through all sorts of treatments and make-up… there’s a lot! It’s just not all physical.
That’s just trivially true, isn’t it? Among women who were already pre-selected to have similar faces, ages and BMI’s to movie starts most of them can be made extremely attractive, with the help of right makeup, clothes, context and so on.
The difference is that some people happen to be part of this group of women with similar faces, ages and BMI’s to movie starts and some do not. There is no contradiction here.
I’d say, more of an outlier than being 6′2, less of an outlier than Michael Jordan.
Basically, because society as a whole actively conditions women that their looks is the most important thing about them. This includes some of the factors that you’ve mentioned.
I would think so, but people seem to disagree!
You’re confusing popular sentiment with actual differences in looks. There are very large differences between good looking and the best looking people, though clothes and makeup can close the gaps
Related survey.
I would say that you laid out a pretty compelling argument, maybe status does actually make people look more attractive than they’d otherwise be seen as.