Hetero woman here too, an admirer of individual male components, especially backs, arms, and shoulders. I have a background in art studies if that matters any (it probably doesn’t) but yeah, there’s a lot of beauty in the average male body.
But that’s not – strictly speaking – the question, is it?
The question isn’t whether there’s some beauty in the male body, but whether there’s a little more beauty in the female body. What’s your opinion of the female body?
For every girl that willingly “does the dance”, there’s another one who does so only because she feels she has to for social reasons. Don’t mistake tolerance and acceptance for enjoyment.
A friend, of 56 years, is about as gay as one can get and he told me once that women are just better looking. I was a bit surprised.
I understand what you’re saying, but I have to disagree - personally, I prefer to look at men’s bodies, and touch them - I find other women to be unpleasantly soft, I like some firm muscle underneath the skin. Clearly, opinion is going to play a role here.
Speaking as a woman who was never interested in fashion and such - there actually is enormous pressure on young women to do these things, but it’s subtle and ubiquitous. From toddlerhood young girls are presented with dolls and given the message “make babies”, and more and more there are “toy” make up kits and such for girls to play with, which give the message “this is what you do, how you look, and your role”. When I expressed more desire to play with trucks than barbies, legos rather than baby dolls, there was epic levels of concern about me. That’s how I got sent to charm school not once but twice - I guess you’d call it remedial feminization.
Most girls get on board with the programming early. For those of us who do not growing up can become quite a struggle. I couldn’t win - if I expressed my actual desires it was seen as a possible symptom of mental illness. If I conformed then the expectation was that I had put all that “nonsense” about non-traditional interests behind me and I still didn’t get what I wanted.
At least when I grew up and wanted a truck I could just go out and buy one and as long as I made the payments no one cared!
I’m hoping things are getting better these days.
I think Sam Lowry a couple posts ago (ETA post #17; this thread advanced a *lot *while I was typing) really nailed it. For current culture.
OTOH …
There have certainly been eras in the West where the men dressed like peacocks and the women wore shapeless brown and gray frocks.
So I say that a lot of this is purely cultural. We “know” from legit psych research that men are more visual than women when it comes to initial attraction to their preferred sex. What we *don’t *know is how 17th century European aristocrats (the aforementioned peacocks) would score on the same tests. Nor how their boring frock-wearing women would score.
The disco era (when I was in college) was a mini cultural inversion. Suddenly men had to spend a lot more effort getting groomed and dressed up for dates. A LOT more.
As ridiculous as the outfits look to us today, they clearly demonstrated a deep-seated male interest in looking good for the ladies. To which, I can assure you youngsters, those ladies responded. Massively. And with no small amount of appreciation that finally somebody else was going to all the trouble they’d been raised to go through; all that primping and clothes-horsing don’t come easy. Nor cheap.
I think the hair, face, neck and décolletage on women is aesthetically more pleasing. From the waist down, I don’t think either gender has an advantage, until you get to the feet, where women dominate. I personally don’t find a woman’s breasts more appealing than a man’s chest, quite the opposite…and that’s about where my objectivity runs out and preference takes over. I would not argue that women put more effort into beauty as an overall effect though, it’s what we do and society appreciates it.
Wow, I could not disagree more.
As a straight man viewing women to me, yes, younger women’s bodies are generally more curvy, gracile and aesthetically appealing than a chunkier man’s body. Having said this I do appreciate, and pursue with limited effectiveness as 57 year old man, a muscular male look as an aspirational ideal for myself to obtain.
In this context there is a sea change as women get older, and in some cases seemingly overnight, their bodies and faces change from aesthetically desirable objects of desire to lumpy, sagging sacks. The speed with which this happens as women age out of the maximum attractiveness bell curve is often astounding.
Still and all there’s more to attractiveness than just being pretty. If an older woman can maintain some semblance of muscle tone and trimness they can still be very attractive sexually even if they are not supermodels.
Men are gross. I can’t believe this is even a debate. We’re angular, hairy, and our genitals are ridiculous.
I agree the male genitals have a certain ridiculousness, but I actually like the angularity and hairiness… but then, I’m a very hetero woman and you (presumably) are a hetero male. It makes sense you’d prefer the look of woman and I’d prefer the look of men.
You know, I was just thinking the other day::
A man smelling his wife’s panties seems perfectly fine.
But the mental image of a woman smelling her husband’s underwear makes one want to retch.
Why is that?
A: Men are gross.
It does?
I fail to perceive a difference, so I see nothing that needs to be explained.
Uh… yeah.
Some dude surreptitiously sniffing some random woman’s panties is beyond creepy.
But a man doing it with his wife or GF? Yeah, perfectly fine.
To you.
Both are disgusting to me.
Women do sniff T-shirts and pillowcases and stuff like that, which is somewhere in the same neighborhood, and yet far enough away that I almost snorted my coffee reading this. Thanks.
I agree too. Also, ears. Ears are ridiculous.
Generically speaking, a woman’s reproductive success is more heavily based on her physical appearance than a mans. Appearance is important in a man but so are other non appearance based factors like status, wealth, reputation, etc. as well as signs that he will be a good provider and protector. For women it is mostly just appearance and personality traits that she would be a good mother.
So yes, overall I’d say women are more aesthetically attractive just because appearance plays a bigger role in reproduction for women than for men.
Not only is women’s appearance more of a thing, but men are more hesitant to notice or discuss other men’s appearance, because it’s just not a thing for straight men to do. I’d guess you could go into absolutely any female hair salon with 20 pictures of female models and ask the women in the salon to rank the models from most to least attractive, and you’d get a lively debate going pretty quickly even if they couldn’t agree on the rankings.
But if you went to a random barbershop with 20 pictures of male models and asked the men in the barbershop to rank the male models, then the men would either be hesitant, or confused, or disgusted that you asked. Maybe in barbershops in LA or New York the men might not be as afraid of being seen as gay by noticing male beauty and would happily rank the pictures, but I’d guess in a lot of places, even liberal gay-friendly ones, the debate would not go over well.
But is that inherent from biology or genetics, or because of culture? It seems in a lot of animal species where one sex has to be more showy and attractive to get a mate it’s more often the males, while the females are more muted colors.
Also, for many years women had mainly to use their appearance to attract men, because they had much less opportunities to accumulate status and wealth then men do. Even today there are lots of men are threatened by women with more status and wealth. And a woman’s reputation has always been a big deal in whether a woman is chosen to be a long-term mate, even if it’s not considered for a short-term fling.
So yes, women might be more aesthetically pleasing, but it’s not solely because evolution or God made it that way, but because of cultural demands.
I don’t think most Doper’s find it disgusting. Here