Being a young male myself, you would probably think that my view is skewed by sexual attraction but, I’m a non-sexual (asexual). I’ve never experienced any attraction to men or women.
However, I can tell whether someone is generally considered aesthetically attractive, and in an overwhelming majority of cases, it always seems to be women.
In my lifetime, I have only seen one attractive guy who was fairly ‘androgynous’. He had dark brown hair with well groomed wavy locks (a lot shorter than most womens but longer than most mens), lovely straight teeth with a cute smile and was dressed in blue jeans, brown leather ankle boots and a plain long sleeved t-shirt.
Leaving out curves, butts or breasts, are women generally more desirable from ‘eye candy’ perspective either from grooming and dressing or are women just more good looking?
Arguably. The human ideal of beauty tends to be an averaged version of people’s appearances; when people of both genders are averaged, the result looks more feminine than masculine. Also IIRC a majority of both genders consider women better looking.
While neither of those factoids are “objective standards” in the sense you’d get from a physics question, they are probably as close as you’ll get for a basically subjective question like this.
I’ve also heard it posited, though I don’t know how true it is, that men are more concerned about physical appearance than women are. If true, this would suggest that humanity’s consensus about what constitutes “aesthetically pleasing” would be skewed towards the standard held by the majority of men.
And if you look at art through out history, especially during the renaissance era, it tends to be focused mainly on women. Which makes sense since it was mainly men painting them.
Depictions of women certainly sell more magazines, and not just “men’s” magazines. Whether it’s directed at young, old, male or female a magazine cover generally seems to feature an attractive woman (there are exceptions of course).
It seems the general consensus of marketers and advertisers (the evil scum) is that chicks sell. To everyone. I don’t know if this extrapolates to “women being more aesthetically attractive”, but I suspect there is a connection.
Women certainly work harder at it - consider that from a young age girls, then women, are encouraged to enhance and care for their appearance in a way men are not.
Also consider that, just as men evolved to be stronger and taller than women, women may well have evolved to appear more attractive since being good looking enough to attract positive male attention was likely one (of several) survival traits for the species.
Hetero woman here and I think womens’ bodies are far more beautiful to look at and, probably even to touch in a non sexual way, if that makes any sense. They’re soft and curvy which to me seems like it would be kind of universally more pleasing on a strictly *aesthetic *level. Men are far more attractive (to me) on a sexual level; I want to touch and be touched by them but it’s all about the sum of their parts; the individual components, say a man’s pecs compared to a woman’s breasts, aren’t as pleasing to the eye.
You might be asexual but still skewed towards being straight in aesthetic attraction, because speaking as a straight woman I see lots of aesthetically attractive men.
Also, it depends on what we mean by attractive. There are some magical people who look beautiful no matter the time of day or circumstance, but those are in the small minority. Many of the beautiful women you see out have spent lots of time getting ready for the day to look beautiful. They might catch your eye at a restaurant, but then pass right by you the next day at CVS without you noticing since they hadn’t bothered to fix their hair and makeup and are in ratty sweats instead of nice clothes. And there is also lots of maintenance time working out, dieting, hair coloring touch-ups, skin care regimens, and so on. Also shopping for the clothes and shoes that make them look their best.
If we add up the time and money that women take to look good compared to men, I’m guessing for women it’s more. And I’d guess that if men started spending equal time and money to look good, you might not think that women and men were equally attractive, but you’d notice more good-looking men.
Renaissance paintings might be more often of women, but the sculptures seem to be often of men. Same with ancient Greek and Roman sculptures that the renaissance era was inspired by. And the men were often naked, to better show off the physiology.
Semi-piggybacking off of this, whenever I’ve had conversations with females about watching porn, I have heard, more often than not, that they prefer lesbian scenes even more than straight-sex scenes.
I’ve partially attributed this to the fact that they can pretend they are both parties in this case, but I think part of it is that women are just better looking while naked than a guy is, and it’s easier/better to look at. YMMV, but it seems to gel with the thread topic.
I don’t know that ‘encouraged’ is the right word. My observation of the young girls in my family and among their friends has been that they can’t wait to start putting on make up, doing their hair and wearing attention-getting clothing and accessories. Even at a young age girls know that more attractive is better.
That’s not just because women are inherently more attractive. There are male models who are ridiculously attractive and look like they were made in a lab by horny Tumblr users. They are working models with careers, but they aren’t supermodels because the fashion industry is one of the industries where women have more opportunities. Women’s fashion is much more varied, so there are more fashion shows, and more needs for models, and so more opportunities to rise through the ranks. One of the most famous fashion shows every year is the Victoria’s Secret fashion show, and it uses a lot of supermodels, but there’s not as much an equivalent for men’s underwear fashion show. There are runway shows for men’s underwear, but without as much pageantry, and they would never be shown on TV other than maybe on Logo, definitely not on CBS during primetime.
Also, female models have more opportunities to work on campaigns not dealing with fashion. If someone is needed in a 30 second ad and want to make a product seem sexy, a female model will probably be hired, unless the target audience is women or gay men.
Also, beauty is prized in women much more than in men, and both women and men are more culturally trained to prize it in women, but only women are trained to prize it in men (generally speaking). There are tons of models on instagram, but with female models there will be straight and gay women and men following them, but with male models it’s mainly straight women and gay men.
Beauty is a cultural construct. There are some things that stay constant, but there are differences in what is seen as beautiful in America today, compared to America 200 years ago, compared to France 400 years ago, compared to Ancient Greece, and so on. You could say that women are more aesthetically attractive than men, but it’s more because of cultural standards and different cultural expectations between the genders, not because women have evolved to be more beautiful than men.
I think it also might be partly because a lot of porn is aimed at men and what men find arousing and on the man’s pleasure. For one thing in general porn actresses seem to be cast because they look hot, while porn actors more need to just have a big dick that can perform on demand. And a straight scene that might seem hot to a man might seem awkward or gross to the woman, or she just feels sorry for the pretty actress dealing with the gross actor who’s only remarkable because of his big dick. Even if a lesbian scene is made with a male viewer being the intended audience, it at least deals a little bit more with female pleasure.
I don’t think so. Women’s appearance is more of a “thing”, which is why it sells to women.
Women aren’t just interested in looking at attractive women. Women are more interested in talking about other women’s attractiveness or lack thereof than they are of men’s. Because, again, women attractiveness is a “thing”, i.e. a big deal in our culture.
Male clothing is not generally designed to show off individual male physiques-it is designed to show a general male physique, and the emphasis is on the cut and the color of the fabric and not how it makes the male body look. There are few(if any) male supermodels because a clothing store dummy works just as well for that purpose.
Female here, and IMO, they are. It takes an extra level of attractiveness for a guy to be considered eye candy, vs a woman. (And we’re soft and lovable.
