It’s all in the eye of the beholder.
I find most people (of both sexes) to be unattractive. The current trend towards obesity has rendered the majority of the people I see pretty damn ugly in my book. And, don’t get me started on tattoos.
But, if you take an athletic woman and an athletic man, I’d pick the woman (because I’m male), but I can certainly appreciate a guy with a great body. I have no problem saying that I think that’s a sexy look.
I think so. I’m sure this is exaggerated by cultural norms.
I think it’s partly true but obscured by the fact that women try harder, and that there is a smaller range in which men’s looks are considered “acceptable” (for instance, in high-powered positions, men are limited to a suit of some acceptable color, whereas women can wear a suit/pantsuit or a dress and have a wider variety of acceptable colors.)
Even though I’m generally liberal, I don’t usually go for cultural relativism, but I do in this case. It’s impossible to tell objectively unless these facts were removed. That said, it could be that women, as a reproductive strategy, rely more on outward signs of fertility and health that can be easily observed, whereas men rely partly on this but also rely on social signals such as status and countenance (although certainly women with better social skills and status generally also rank better in attractiveness as well.) If this is true, then men that have status and charm/confidence may not be aesthetically pleasing but would still somehow be attractive.
IIRC, women are more likely to be bisexual or homosexual than men, so maybe women are overall more attractive to both genders than men are.
I realize this takes us a bit away from the “aesthetic” angle of this thread’s debate, but I think one reason that women may be considered more attractive than men is simply because the standard for women is much simpler and clear-cut than it is for men. It’s not a fair standard, and quite harsh, but at least it’s simple.
Have a pretty face and a pretty figure and that already accounts for about 90% of the attractiveness quotient, and then a nice personality accounts for about the remaining 10%.
Whereas for men the standard is far more complex. Sure, taller height is pretty much universally considered more attractive in men than shortness, but beyond that it gets incredibly complex. Much of the “attractiveness” in men is in **non-tangible **terms. Confidence? Wealth? Status? Background? Style? Fashion? Humor? Personality? Worldview? Accent? Ambition? Etc. etc.
This is also why cats and dogs are more popular as house pets than iguanas and hedgehogs.
Are they more likely to be so, or are the penalties for them considerably lighter than for men? There are any number of cultures that impose death on male homosexuals but barely acknowledge that female ones exist and impose little or no penalty on them.
If there was no penalty, legal or social, for being a male homosexual I think we’d see many more men admitting to such inclinations.
Are you being sarcastic with those examples? Because for me it’s kind of the other way around with those two. Michelangelo’s David is incredible-looking, Botticelli’s Venus looks kind of silly naked.
Yeah, classical and classical-inspired sculpture and painting is one of the few arenas where naked men don’t look silly. If they still had any cultural impact they’d set impossibly high standards for men as well as women (even if those standards would be oddly lower for women in those time periods where painting heavier women was popular, forcing women to only be fit, unblemished, and well proportioned with a nice face rather than fit, unblemished, well-proportioned, with a nice face, and thin, the former of which is easier to achieve for women than the goal for men IMO which would be fit, somewhat unblemished, working out daily from youth, and having a natural body type which both enables muscle-building and doesn’t make the muscles look unnatural.)
I can concur with the first statement, (to a degree, but I prefer live women :)) but as for the second statement, I would say, “I WISH I looked that silly when I’m naked.”
Are you sure about this?
I honestly thought I read that slightly more men are bisexual and homosexual. I may be wrong, and whatever I read about it was years ago.
Anyways, lesbian porn seems to be pretty popular.
Yes, as evidence look at magazines targeted at men and you’ll find them full of pictures of beautiful women. Not impressed you say? Well women’s magazines will also be full of pictures of beautiful women.
Original meaning or current one?
The original meaning was “someone who models catwalk, stills and moving ads rather than only one of the three”; I can come up with a few but I’m afraid I tend to remember their looks better than their names (names, I only remember one, but I have a similar problem with the ladies). The current one is “someone who does modeling work and also something else”, which would include for example any actor who does ads (and those tend to have a better acting career than actresses who do ads).
That’s a specific group and even a specific time. My 8yo niece is reading soapy romances that when I was a minor were adressed to teenagers. She’s more girly than any girl in my family or her mother’s has been for the previous four generations, but she’s also being bombarded with clothing, accesories and rooooooomance any time her eyes are open.
And the physical traits are less universally-defined. Everybody talks about pecs, pecs, pecs, and occasionally abs. Us leg-women are apparently nonexistent outside of the Basque Country (the calendar of the firemen of Bilbao actually shows legs!).
Someone mentioned “more bisexual women”. I remember seeing mentions last month of a study where the excitation of the subjects when looking at different pictures was measured and it said that “women were more likely to get excited by both sexes”, and thinking “ok, but had they chosen good looking dudes or model-looking dudes? Because I don’t find most models attractive… then again, often the poses used in stills make them look constipated.” Plus there’s this little detail that not all excitation is sexual excitation: being excited can be used as a start for sexy times, but the source of the excitation doesn’t need to be sexual in nature.
In my experience, women talk more about male butts than pecs and abs.
One of the reasons I’m more likely to play a woman in a video game is this. It’s not sexual attraction, which I kinda think is weird with a character I completely control, but just aesthetics.
That said, I can easily think of aesthetically pleasing men. It just seems harder to do and fit the standards of beauty of our culture.
I do, however, think it’s cultural.