Noticed something recently. As an alien, you could read pretty much everything Wikipedia has on celebrities, both on individual people and the general articles about celebrity as a concept… And never learn that celebrities tend to be extraordinarily attractive. I’m not talking about an accurate or even attempted explanation for the tendency, I’m talking about the existence of the tendency at all. I’ve tried to find something on wikipedia that states it, but that information just doesn’t exist (except, of course, implicitly through photographs).
It’s quite odd, and I’m sure it’s not alone. “Celebrities are attractive” is one obvious piece of some broader set of truisms that seem to be completely missing from the world’s most complete database of factual information.
Analyzing or talking about status factors is low-status. You do see information about awards for beauty, much like you can see some information about fiances, but not much about their expenditures or lifestyle.
I haven’t checked wikipedia for that, but I don’t think the trend is surprising. I think that a big part of it is just that it feels creepy to comment on a specific person’s attractiveness in polite company. And Wikipedia is polite company. If an actress is particularly pretty it would feel kind of weird for someone to add that to their wiki page. I can half remember a tv interview from the early 0′ies, I think it was Johnathon Ross interviewing Kiera Knightly about her new film, and he said something which implied that he thought a big part of her appeal as an actress (or even the main part) was that she was really attractive. Regardless of the truth of that position, it seemed that both she and possibly also the audience found it a really cringe topic of conversation.
I am sure there are other websites (which are Not polite company) where you will find a lot of people talking about how attractive they find one celebrity or another.
Part of the issue is like that celebrity, as wikipedia approaches the word, is broader than just modern TV, film, etc. celebrity and instead includes a wide variety of people who are not likely to be exceptionally attractive but are well known in some other way. There’s individual preferences in terms of who they think are attractive, but many politicians, authors, radio personalities, famous scientists, etc. are not conventionally attractive in the way movie stars are attractive and yet these people are still celebrities in a broad sense. However, I’ve not dug into the depths of wikipedia to see if, for example, this gap you see holds up if looking at pages that more directly talk about the qualities of film stars, for example.
I think there’s also a “it’s obvious to everyone, so archaeologists of the future won’t find any mention of it because no one has had to explain it to anyone” factor. (I heard that archaeologists and historians know much less about everyday life than about significant events, although the former was obviously encountered much more often)
Noticed something recently. As an alien, you could read pretty much everything Wikipedia has on celebrities, both on individual people and the general articles about celebrity as a concept… And never learn that celebrities tend to be extraordinarily attractive. I’m not talking about an accurate or even attempted explanation for the tendency, I’m talking about the existence of the tendency at all. I’ve tried to find something on wikipedia that states it, but that information just doesn’t exist (except, of course, implicitly through photographs).
It’s quite odd, and I’m sure it’s not alone. “Celebrities are attractive” is one obvious piece of some broader set of truisms that seem to be completely missing from the world’s most complete database of factual information.
Analyzing or talking about status factors is low-status. You do see information about awards for beauty, much like you can see some information about fiances, but not much about their expenditures or lifestyle.
I haven’t checked wikipedia for that, but I don’t think the trend is surprising. I think that a big part of it is just that it feels creepy to comment on a specific person’s attractiveness in polite company. And Wikipedia is polite company. If an actress is particularly pretty it would feel kind of weird for someone to add that to their wiki page. I can half remember a tv interview from the early 0′ies, I think it was Johnathon Ross interviewing Kiera Knightly about her new film, and he said something which implied that he thought a big part of her appeal as an actress (or even the main part) was that she was really attractive. Regardless of the truth of that position, it seemed that both she and possibly also the audience found it a really cringe topic of conversation.
I am sure there are other websites (which are Not polite company) where you will find a lot of people talking about how attractive they find one celebrity or another.
Part of the issue is like that celebrity, as wikipedia approaches the word, is broader than just modern TV, film, etc. celebrity and instead includes a wide variety of people who are not likely to be exceptionally attractive but are well known in some other way. There’s individual preferences in terms of who they think are attractive, but many politicians, authors, radio personalities, famous scientists, etc. are not conventionally attractive in the way movie stars are attractive and yet these people are still celebrities in a broad sense. However, I’ve not dug into the depths of wikipedia to see if, for example, this gap you see holds up if looking at pages that more directly talk about the qualities of film stars, for example.
I think there’s also a “it’s obvious to everyone, so archaeologists of the future won’t find any mention of it because no one has had to explain it to anyone” factor. (I heard that archaeologists and historians know much less about everyday life than about significant events, although the former was obviously encountered much more often)