seconding interest in one for men. contrary to the claim that "most women have never heard a frank discussion of what makes a woman sexy in their whole lives" they have, constantly, often against their will LMAO. it makes a lot of what's in this article feel kind of trite and obvious (men like big titted baby asians - no way!!) but one on men genuinely has been underexplored. exploring race in this would've been interesting too since that's pretty under explored (there was that okc survey from forever ago but they didn't even recognize that south asians existed lmao)
The house you posted as a McMansion is really nothing of the sort. It’s very tastefully done. The central massing, for example, has symmetrical ornament.
The article is interesting, & as a heterosexual man I can confirm that it is, at least, mostly approximately accurate. If there is a tacit convention of silence & lies on this subject, as you suggest, then you are to be commended for straightforwardly telling the truth.
On the blonde vs brunette dissonance: hair darkens with age, but it also lightens with age (grey). So while blonde hair may carry a youth signal relative to the darker hair of early adulthood, a rich, greyless brunette can carry a stronger youth signal later on. In other words, “lighter = younger” isn’t quite a monotonic relationship across the lifespan.
"There was one study that found that men rated a picture of a woman as more attractive when she was brunette but they were more likely to approach her in a nightclub when she was blonde. Maybe they thought the blonde woman was less attractive but easy. Or maybe they really did think she was more attractive when blonde but felt it would seem tacky to say so."
There's a similar study for tattoos (if it isn't this same one). Men report tattoless women as more attractive, but are more likely to approach tattooed women (I think the setting was a beach or poolside). "Approachable" perhaps a kinder reading than "easy".
Impressively thorough and well-researched write-up. Great work! Your primary audience for this is women, but I just want to say, as a man, that I think you have a very good understanding of what most men like in feminine sexiness.
There is one line I want to quibble with a bit though.
"I think liking a beautiful woman is a bit like preferring salty or fatty food."
Now, I respect that you wrote this to *defend* men who like beautiful women. I get the implication of "just like we don't give people grief for enjoying fatty food *every now and then*, we shouldn't give men grief for enjoying the sight of beautiful women." That's a good point.
Still, there is an important distinction here.
Looking at an image of a beautiful woman is not going to add calories to my body. It's not going to make me gain weight. It's not going to negatively impact my health. It brings me happiness, and at no real cost. This beauty can also genuinely be motivating to men. Certainly, many men have been motivated to self-improvement in order to impress a woman they found attractive.
Now, there are different ways I can find happiness through beauty. It can come through experiencing a beautiful sunset. It can be images of cute kittens. These things are mood enhancers. They're not merely Ok, they're *good*.
Another thing that brings me happiness is watching sports. Seeing excellent athletic performances is exciting to me, as it is for many people.
So here is the comparison I would make to "liking beautiful women". It's similar to liking high-level athletic performances.
Not every woman can be highly beautiful when it comes to physical attractiveness. At the same time, not everybody who plays basketball can be Michael Jordan or Lebron James. See what I'm saying?
We should try to uplift people who are feeling down, of course. We should find the good aspects of people, and compliment them on those aspects. But we should not cast down any form of excellence simply because not everybody can achieve that same level of excellence. I would apply this to athletic ability, to academic ability, and also to beauty and handsomeness, among many other things.
Beauty, in all forms, is a positive. It has no inherent negatives. It is better and healthier than fatty foods or high-salt foods.
I guess you're right. I think it's right to acknowledge that pursuing beautiful women beyond other goals probably has detrimental effects on a person's wellbeing and I wanted to acknowledge that.
So I read this entire article and it has more substance than I anticipated.
But the opening paragraph claiming that women are somehow lied to or kept in the dark about men’s sexual preferences is ridiculous beyond belief. On what planet? It’s like men never shut up about who they find hot.
Great article, excellent writing but what got me really laughing was "Emma Watson’s athletic build indicates that she was born to donate your wealth to pointless causes"
I want to call this post schizo / autistic but I stayed hooked through the entire thing. Sitting like the thinking man statue reading about bush preference analysis lmao.
On bush preference it's age, fashion & sexual imprinting.
The 1970s were the first great age of cunnilingus & bush never bothered anyone (even dirty hippies). I'm married to the cunningest linguist of his HS (thanks to his ex, who gave him the book). I think young guys don't see pubic hair unless they seek it out, so the default becomes hairless. The rest is rationalization after the fact.
Historically speaking, pubic hair comes & goes: Athenian women singed theirs all off. I'm glad I came of age during a pubic hair period because ingrown hairs are a pain.
I wonder why Everything with analysis is autistic or schizo these days. Or “weird”. It’s like deep or important conversations create outgroups, making brainrot/passivity the ingroup.
I’m glad you held judgment but I wonder why those are the words we use for something that is researched.
Thanks for all the research report, epistemic transparency, humor and details! In another universe, there's an article like this exploring men and women's baseline sensitivity to feedback (something something evolution and cooperation) that makes lying to each other the evolutionary stable strategy.
I’ve always found hair to be a highly overlooked trait in terms of attraction, both in men and women, so glad to see it getting a little press! Nothing is more attractive to me than thick, curly hair. I wonder if perhaps my preference for this in both sexes is shaped by the fact I’m attracted to men and women, as I often find straight women far more concerned with men’s body type and level of muscularity than I am, and far less concerned with the intellectual / creative element, as well as things like hair 😂Admittedly; tiny sample size, but I’m curious.
"When I use the word ["curvy"] here I am talking about bodies that have small waists and have one, or several of, wide hips, thick thighs, large breasts, and a generous round bum."
This could be read either as having a small waist in absolute terms (e.g. <x inches) or relative to the other attributes (hips, thighs, breasts, bum).
This makes a difference, because I think the second figure along in the row for "non-curvy" women- the one who is clearly overweight- does intuitively seem curvy (at least in the photo: I'd be happy to accept that maybe that's due to artful posing, and covering part of her waist with her hand).
It seems to make more sense to me to use the second definition, and have curvy be conceptually orthogonal to weight (you can have low/high waist:curves ratios at low or high weights), rather than to either make curvy a euphemism for fat (you can be overweight and non-curvy) or make it stipulatively only refer to people with waists below a certain size (de facto, meaning below a certain body weight).
An odd omission is any discussion of skin colour or tone. While I understand that it wouldn’t be appropriate in a how-to article (because it’s frowned upon or unsafe), I find it hard to imagine it does not influence attractiveness given it’s the first thing one notices about another.
IIRC the OkCupid studies showed pretty large differences between “races”, and while those only loosely correlate to skin colour, I think it shows that it does matter.
I agree it probably does matter. But I think it’s very very difficult to detangle racial preferences from things like
- which race/nation is a primarily consumer of these goods/services or primarily taking this survey
-which race of women is more or less likely to go into sex work and porn
-preference falsification
-whether popular traits are more common in a race. If woman of x race are slimmer, then men are going to reply to them on dating apps more even though, when controlling for slimness they actually prefer y race.
As a result, it felt like too thorny of an issue to wade into without any data I felt like I could really stand behind.
> whether popular traits are more common in a race. If woman of x race are slimmer, then men are going to reply to them on dating apps more even though, when controlling for slimness they actually prefer y race.
this could be accounted for by comparing women of similar weights (which ofc you can't do since you're not doing a formal study or something but would be worth looking into). i suspect a lot of racial preferences women have of men are reducible to height, but i'm not sure.
Gets messy, especially in certain countries and it all being wrapped up in social/status signals.
But on a general level, we know high contrast colouring, and clear/bright skin is more attractive (darker coloured skin can be more obviously ashy or low contrast, and harder to correct with makeup, dye etc).
This makes me feel more demoralized towards men, not less. I can never achieve this level of beauty without shelling out thousands in plastic surgery. And I expect that men enjoy that this saddens women because they think it means we will lower our standards. But it just lends to the credit that men will always be shallow, and if he’s pursuing you despite not being thin, blonde, white with large breasts, that’s he just looking for sex or settling until he access to his preference (or because he never will have access to her). This isn’t a compliment to any woman with an ounce of self esteem.
> I expect that men enjoy that this saddens women because they think it means we will lower our standards. But it just lends to the credit that men will always be shallow
Imagining that one's outgroup has a bad opinion and then using that bad opinion to update further against them has got to be one of the worst sins of thought possible. You could convince yourself of literally anything this way.
i mean the opinion isn't imagined she's taking issue with the opinion this author has laboriously attempted to prove (so either you disagree w the author or you have to accept this person's premise for their judgment)
oh I thought by the "bad opinion" you were referring to the beauty standards, not relishing that they make women sad. the person you're replying to's point still stands even if you were referring to the latter though since the opinion that's bothering them (the central focus on their comment) are those around the beauty standards not the imagined relishing
I don't know if it helps at all, but I think it might be worth looking at this all in context. This is people talking about their highest preferences - and then taking the averages as a rule.
For the first part - there are always ideals that are unattainable by most. Most men would be more attractive to more people with larger hands. Or taller or with broad shoulders. Taking aside attractiveness, most people would rather have professional athletes on their local basketball team. That doesn't mean they don't love and appreciate their local teammates even though they will never be even close to as good as the worst player in the NBA.
To the second part, averages absolutely obscure a lot of outliers. Something OP explicitly mentions several times is those outliers. Even the most popular favorites weren't 100%.
OP is talking about a level of maximizing attractiveness that is part of the world only in extremely isolated parts of the world and in fantasy online.
I can assure you, out here in the world people absolutely love and are attracted to a variety of people. They show it too. It's everywhere if you look.
I'm sure you have a celebrity you go absolutely crazy for or think are incredibly attractive. When you are dating, are you constantly mentally comparing your dates to him? If you find someone and fall in love with them, will you feel like you are settling if they don't have every exact feature you think is ideal? Neither do most men.
If you find the men who are, ditch them.
I found this article fascinating, but also mostly irrelevant to most people's lives honestly.
You don’t encompass any of what you’re suggesting women to do and you’re married. So if you’re proof that women don’t need a fraction of what’s in this article then what use is it?
Is Aria proof that NO woman needs it? Because a data point of 1 only really means that SOME women don't need it. You can of course feel free to not care, but then you're setting your pool of men to also mostly be those that don't care. Some women won't find that an acceptable trade, and that's fine too.
I wouldn't stress about it too much. A thin, white, blond woman with large breasts is just one of the more common preferences, it's not universal. It's definitely not my own preference or the preference of many men I know.
As to men being shallow, well, yes, but I think everyone already knew that, and I also think it's basically the same as women's preferences. You could easily find the statistically most common preference among women, and I think it would probably be something like a six foot tall white man with a full head of hair. What percentage of men on earth is that? Or even men in America? I don't know exactly, but I'd expect it's roughly similar to the percentage of thin, white, blond women with large breasts. So it seems to me that we're basically in the exact same situation.
What you are forgetting is that men have a difficult-to-achieve ideal, but they also have a very wide range for what they find appealing. A man who goes after a chubby flat-chested woman is not making do until someone better comes along, he is usually genuinely interested in her. There have been plenty of hot women who have been cheated on or passed over for a more dowdy one, because while men prefer hotter women all things being equal, all things are not equal and hotness is not the most important factor a lot of the time.
You would (presumably) prefer a man with perfect health and lots of money in an ideal world, right? But that doesn't mean you are settling until you find the richest healthiest man, you can love a guy who is just normal. You're not going to immediately run out on a guy with acid reflux when someone without it comes along, even though it is obviously never going to be rated as a feature of masculine sexiness.
Most interesting post I’ve read in a while. You should do one for men! :)
seconding interest in one for men. contrary to the claim that "most women have never heard a frank discussion of what makes a woman sexy in their whole lives" they have, constantly, often against their will LMAO. it makes a lot of what's in this article feel kind of trite and obvious (men like big titted baby asians - no way!!) but one on men genuinely has been underexplored. exploring race in this would've been interesting too since that's pretty under explored (there was that okc survey from forever ago but they didn't even recognize that south asians existed lmao)
You sound upset.
The house you posted as a McMansion is really nothing of the sort. It’s very tastefully done. The central massing, for example, has symmetrical ornament.
The "heaviest model" link is broken.
The article is interesting, & as a heterosexual man I can confirm that it is, at least, mostly approximately accurate. If there is a tacit convention of silence & lies on this subject, as you suggest, then you are to be commended for straightforwardly telling the truth.
On the blonde vs brunette dissonance: hair darkens with age, but it also lightens with age (grey). So while blonde hair may carry a youth signal relative to the darker hair of early adulthood, a rich, greyless brunette can carry a stronger youth signal later on. In other words, “lighter = younger” isn’t quite a monotonic relationship across the lifespan.
Wee typo here btw: “OnlyFans girls, influences, and the girlfriends”
On the hair, I think you're probably right. In general I think ashy/greyish tones are risky on older women. A warm honey blonde would be fine though
Thanks for pointing out the typo!
np
"There was one study that found that men rated a picture of a woman as more attractive when she was brunette but they were more likely to approach her in a nightclub when she was blonde. Maybe they thought the blonde woman was less attractive but easy. Or maybe they really did think she was more attractive when blonde but felt it would seem tacky to say so."
There's a similar study for tattoos (if it isn't this same one). Men report tattoless women as more attractive, but are more likely to approach tattooed women (I think the setting was a beach or poolside). "Approachable" perhaps a kinder reading than "easy".
Impressively thorough and well-researched write-up. Great work! Your primary audience for this is women, but I just want to say, as a man, that I think you have a very good understanding of what most men like in feminine sexiness.
There is one line I want to quibble with a bit though.
"I think liking a beautiful woman is a bit like preferring salty or fatty food."
Now, I respect that you wrote this to *defend* men who like beautiful women. I get the implication of "just like we don't give people grief for enjoying fatty food *every now and then*, we shouldn't give men grief for enjoying the sight of beautiful women." That's a good point.
Still, there is an important distinction here.
Looking at an image of a beautiful woman is not going to add calories to my body. It's not going to make me gain weight. It's not going to negatively impact my health. It brings me happiness, and at no real cost. This beauty can also genuinely be motivating to men. Certainly, many men have been motivated to self-improvement in order to impress a woman they found attractive.
Now, there are different ways I can find happiness through beauty. It can come through experiencing a beautiful sunset. It can be images of cute kittens. These things are mood enhancers. They're not merely Ok, they're *good*.
Another thing that brings me happiness is watching sports. Seeing excellent athletic performances is exciting to me, as it is for many people.
So here is the comparison I would make to "liking beautiful women". It's similar to liking high-level athletic performances.
Not every woman can be highly beautiful when it comes to physical attractiveness. At the same time, not everybody who plays basketball can be Michael Jordan or Lebron James. See what I'm saying?
We should try to uplift people who are feeling down, of course. We should find the good aspects of people, and compliment them on those aspects. But we should not cast down any form of excellence simply because not everybody can achieve that same level of excellence. I would apply this to athletic ability, to academic ability, and also to beauty and handsomeness, among many other things.
Beauty, in all forms, is a positive. It has no inherent negatives. It is better and healthier than fatty foods or high-salt foods.
Thanks so much!
I guess you're right. I think it's right to acknowledge that pursuing beautiful women beyond other goals probably has detrimental effects on a person's wellbeing and I wanted to acknowledge that.
I think you're right about the detrimental effects, however.
My beautiful D cups cause back strain and poor posture :P but otherwise I agree with your point.
So I read this entire article and it has more substance than I anticipated.
But the opening paragraph claiming that women are somehow lied to or kept in the dark about men’s sexual preferences is ridiculous beyond belief. On what planet? It’s like men never shut up about who they find hot.
Well, when I wrote the last post, loads of people told me I was wrong. This piece, everyone is telling me what I’ve said is obvious.
I guess I think we’re in bubbles
But no woman is in a bubble away from what men find hot, not even lesbians. How could you believe that for a second? 🙄
My comments
Have you considered that your comments are the bubble?
Great article, excellent writing but what got me really laughing was "Emma Watson’s athletic build indicates that she was born to donate your wealth to pointless causes"
I want to call this post schizo / autistic but I stayed hooked through the entire thing. Sitting like the thinking man statue reading about bush preference analysis lmao.
Good work.
Thanks so much!
On bush preference it's age, fashion & sexual imprinting.
The 1970s were the first great age of cunnilingus & bush never bothered anyone (even dirty hippies). I'm married to the cunningest linguist of his HS (thanks to his ex, who gave him the book). I think young guys don't see pubic hair unless they seek it out, so the default becomes hairless. The rest is rationalization after the fact.
Historically speaking, pubic hair comes & goes: Athenian women singed theirs all off. I'm glad I came of age during a pubic hair period because ingrown hairs are a pain.
I wonder why Everything with analysis is autistic or schizo these days. Or “weird”. It’s like deep or important conversations create outgroups, making brainrot/passivity the ingroup.
I’m glad you held judgment but I wonder why those are the words we use for something that is researched.
I think it's just the reverse euphemism treadmill. The same way awesome now means 'good'
This was so cool. Thank you for doing all the research.
Thanks for all the research report, epistemic transparency, humor and details! In another universe, there's an article like this exploring men and women's baseline sensitivity to feedback (something something evolution and cooperation) that makes lying to each other the evolutionary stable strategy.
This is absolutely fascinating.
I’ve always found hair to be a highly overlooked trait in terms of attraction, both in men and women, so glad to see it getting a little press! Nothing is more attractive to me than thick, curly hair. I wonder if perhaps my preference for this in both sexes is shaped by the fact I’m attracted to men and women, as I often find straight women far more concerned with men’s body type and level of muscularity than I am, and far less concerned with the intellectual / creative element, as well as things like hair 😂Admittedly; tiny sample size, but I’m curious.
I myself could never go for the hairless look down there. I prefer a bush but I'm not opposed to a woman who trims.
omg pls stop this shit nobody cares if what’s her face is sexy no lib i know has a problem with sexy females
you had a couple ladies nobody ever heard of say some complaint and now it’s off to the races
this shit is so fucking stupid
Nice post.
"When I use the word ["curvy"] here I am talking about bodies that have small waists and have one, or several of, wide hips, thick thighs, large breasts, and a generous round bum."
This could be read either as having a small waist in absolute terms (e.g. <x inches) or relative to the other attributes (hips, thighs, breasts, bum).
This makes a difference, because I think the second figure along in the row for "non-curvy" women- the one who is clearly overweight- does intuitively seem curvy (at least in the photo: I'd be happy to accept that maybe that's due to artful posing, and covering part of her waist with her hand).
It seems to make more sense to me to use the second definition, and have curvy be conceptually orthogonal to weight (you can have low/high waist:curves ratios at low or high weights), rather than to either make curvy a euphemism for fat (you can be overweight and non-curvy) or make it stipulatively only refer to people with waists below a certain size (de facto, meaning below a certain body weight).
An odd omission is any discussion of skin colour or tone. While I understand that it wouldn’t be appropriate in a how-to article (because it’s frowned upon or unsafe), I find it hard to imagine it does not influence attractiveness given it’s the first thing one notices about another.
IIRC the OkCupid studies showed pretty large differences between “races”, and while those only loosely correlate to skin colour, I think it shows that it does matter.
I agree it probably does matter. But I think it’s very very difficult to detangle racial preferences from things like
- which race/nation is a primarily consumer of these goods/services or primarily taking this survey
-which race of women is more or less likely to go into sex work and porn
-preference falsification
-whether popular traits are more common in a race. If woman of x race are slimmer, then men are going to reply to them on dating apps more even though, when controlling for slimness they actually prefer y race.
As a result, it felt like too thorny of an issue to wade into without any data I felt like I could really stand behind.
> whether popular traits are more common in a race. If woman of x race are slimmer, then men are going to reply to them on dating apps more even though, when controlling for slimness they actually prefer y race.
this could be accounted for by comparing women of similar weights (which ofc you can't do since you're not doing a formal study or something but would be worth looking into). i suspect a lot of racial preferences women have of men are reducible to height, but i'm not sure.
Gets messy, especially in certain countries and it all being wrapped up in social/status signals.
But on a general level, we know high contrast colouring, and clear/bright skin is more attractive (darker coloured skin can be more obviously ashy or low contrast, and harder to correct with makeup, dye etc).
This makes me feel more demoralized towards men, not less. I can never achieve this level of beauty without shelling out thousands in plastic surgery. And I expect that men enjoy that this saddens women because they think it means we will lower our standards. But it just lends to the credit that men will always be shallow, and if he’s pursuing you despite not being thin, blonde, white with large breasts, that’s he just looking for sex or settling until he access to his preference (or because he never will have access to her). This isn’t a compliment to any woman with an ounce of self esteem.
> I expect that men enjoy that this saddens women because they think it means we will lower our standards. But it just lends to the credit that men will always be shallow
Imagining that one's outgroup has a bad opinion and then using that bad opinion to update further against them has got to be one of the worst sins of thought possible. You could convince yourself of literally anything this way.
i mean the opinion isn't imagined she's taking issue with the opinion this author has laboriously attempted to prove (so either you disagree w the author or you have to accept this person's premise for their judgment)
Nowhere in the piece do I see a claim that, "men enjoy that [unattainable beauty standards] sadden women". Can you quote it for me?
oh I thought by the "bad opinion" you were referring to the beauty standards, not relishing that they make women sad. the person you're replying to's point still stands even if you were referring to the latter though since the opinion that's bothering them (the central focus on their comment) are those around the beauty standards not the imagined relishing
I don't know if it helps at all, but I think it might be worth looking at this all in context. This is people talking about their highest preferences - and then taking the averages as a rule.
For the first part - there are always ideals that are unattainable by most. Most men would be more attractive to more people with larger hands. Or taller or with broad shoulders. Taking aside attractiveness, most people would rather have professional athletes on their local basketball team. That doesn't mean they don't love and appreciate their local teammates even though they will never be even close to as good as the worst player in the NBA.
To the second part, averages absolutely obscure a lot of outliers. Something OP explicitly mentions several times is those outliers. Even the most popular favorites weren't 100%.
OP is talking about a level of maximizing attractiveness that is part of the world only in extremely isolated parts of the world and in fantasy online.
I can assure you, out here in the world people absolutely love and are attracted to a variety of people. They show it too. It's everywhere if you look.
I'm sure you have a celebrity you go absolutely crazy for or think are incredibly attractive. When you are dating, are you constantly mentally comparing your dates to him? If you find someone and fall in love with them, will you feel like you are settling if they don't have every exact feature you think is ideal? Neither do most men.
If you find the men who are, ditch them.
I found this article fascinating, but also mostly irrelevant to most people's lives honestly.
This wasn't really meant to be useful. I stand by 'Get Sexier' as containing all the useful information it needs.
It's just meant to be interesting.
You don’t encompass any of what you’re suggesting women to do and you’re married. So if you’re proof that women don’t need a fraction of what’s in this article then what use is it?
Is Aria proof that NO woman needs it? Because a data point of 1 only really means that SOME women don't need it. You can of course feel free to not care, but then you're setting your pool of men to also mostly be those that don't care. Some women won't find that an acceptable trade, and that's fine too.
I wouldn't stress about it too much. A thin, white, blond woman with large breasts is just one of the more common preferences, it's not universal. It's definitely not my own preference or the preference of many men I know.
As to men being shallow, well, yes, but I think everyone already knew that, and I also think it's basically the same as women's preferences. You could easily find the statistically most common preference among women, and I think it would probably be something like a six foot tall white man with a full head of hair. What percentage of men on earth is that? Or even men in America? I don't know exactly, but I'd expect it's roughly similar to the percentage of thin, white, blond women with large breasts. So it seems to me that we're basically in the exact same situation.
What you are forgetting is that men have a difficult-to-achieve ideal, but they also have a very wide range for what they find appealing. A man who goes after a chubby flat-chested woman is not making do until someone better comes along, he is usually genuinely interested in her. There have been plenty of hot women who have been cheated on or passed over for a more dowdy one, because while men prefer hotter women all things being equal, all things are not equal and hotness is not the most important factor a lot of the time.
You would (presumably) prefer a man with perfect health and lots of money in an ideal world, right? But that doesn't mean you are settling until you find the richest healthiest man, you can love a guy who is just normal. You're not going to immediately run out on a guy with acid reflux when someone without it comes along, even though it is obviously never going to be rated as a feature of masculine sexiness.