What an unmitigated load of crap this is!
I am an extremely handsome man and it hasn’t done shit for me.
It must be my modesty…
IMO, men are judged on whether they look like the part in life they’re trying to play, as opposed to how attractive they are.
Consider two men who want to be construction supervisors. One looks like Richard Boone. The other, like Woody Allen. The first one will likely have a much easier time getting hired, getting construction workers to follow his orders, etc. Not because he’s more attractive than the Woody Allen guy. But because he looks the part. And I would imagine the Richard Boone guy might have more trouble than Woody being taken seriously in some jobs that people associate with sensitivity and smarts (Concert violinist? Theoretical physicist?)
I’ve had numerous ‘spirited’ discussions with women who contend that a man’s looks don’t matter, while a woman’s do. I would submit that a man’s looks matter in different ways than a woman’s do.
Although I suppose, if the study I quoted above is sound, the overall effect of looks on success is still greater for a woman.
I have not been able to find a cite but I’ve read about a study where the subjects were shown pictures of men and women and asked to describe certain characteristics just by looking at the photos. People who were described as attractive also tended to be perceived as more intelligent, and nicer.
If very attractive men got special perks, I wouldn’t have to spend $3 a year to keep my charter membership status here.
Are you shitting me? That’s unbelievable.
I would say beautiful women have an easier time in most areas of life for the first part of their lives, then they have a harder time once their looks go, because they lose something they have taken for granted. Us average-looking women don’t have the same distance to fall when we get older and greyer and wrinklier, so we have an easier time of it later in life.
I’m sure I heard about a study last year that definitively found that attractive people (men and women) are more likely to get hired and promoted than their less attractive counterparts, irrespective of other factors such as work ethic, skills or smarts. What I don’t recall is where I saw that report. Must go looking…
Beyond that, I’ve heard numerous stories of attractive people getting warnings instead of traffic tickets, getting other people to do their work for them, finding more and better dating opportunities, etc. No doubt some of this can be attributed to urban legend, but when you start to add up the sheer volume of anecdotes, it does seem to point towards a bias in favor of the beautiful people.
In general, I would say attractive women have an easier time in life until they start “loosing their looks”, particularly while still in schooling. They would be teased less, and have automatic invites into more social groups/events. However, if said female tries to enter a male-dominated or “serious” field, she will find herself at a disadvantage.
Just being female generally means that one would need to work a little harder to be taken seriously, and the amount of effort that needs to put into actually getting respect from colleagues increases in direct correlation with increased attractiveness or even “girly”-ness.
Basically, I’d say being attractive would help more in school/college years than in the working world.
Yes, beautiful people have an easier time. Especially if they have a friendly personality to go with their looks.
Of course beautiful women also get dumbfounded men and propositions to deal with as well.
If they want to be taken seriously at their career no, but otherwise hell yes.
I work with a woman who is about 5 foot tall & 110 lb of pure sex. On top of that she has the gall to be smart, nice, funny, and interesting.
I’d say she has about the most sensitive personal security radar I’ve ever seen. Constantly aware of people and situations that normally pass me by without a ripple. I think nothing of paying cash at a gas station at midnight. She wouldn’t even be there at all.
It never occured to me before, but life must be difficult in a lot of ways for an attractive tiny person.
I’ve heard psychologists say that women with large breasts - as in really large breasts - find life harder, partly because of the, you know, extra baggage, but because other people don’t take them as seriously.
i’ve also heard studies where teachers were shown pictures of students along with a brief summary of their interests/activities. The teachers were then asked to describe the student. Identical descriptions but with different pictures yielded different summaries - more attractive children were rated as better behaved, more athletic, smarter, etc.
So there. Ladies, if you want to succeed get breast reduction surgery and a face lift, I suppose.
I am pulling this totally out of thin air, but from my experience, I think you have to discriminate between “attractive” and “sexy”. Some people are just attractive their whole life., from babyhood on: they are simply beautiful, both in their features and in their graceful, friendly body language. Other people blossom into “sexy” when they hit puberty–it’s not their amazingly symmetrical face and winning smile that does it, it’s the particular combination of secondary sex characteristics they develop.
I think these two categories have really different effects on people: the first type, the “attractive” ones, really do benefit from their innate charisma–even as small children, they simply get loved more because they know how to be lovable. People are moved to hug them and pet them and give them gifts because they instinctively positively reinforce this behavior with hugs and smiles of their own. On the other hand, the ones that wake up one day as sex objects often have more trouble: for one thing, women that are sexy but not otherwise attractive tend to be objects of scorn or at least seen as insignificant. Secondly, these sorts of women are often uncomfortable with their own attractiveness: it seems external, imposed, inauthentic. They may feel guilty about the attention they receive. These are also the sort of looks that collapse rather suddenly as they age.
From my (admittedly limited, heterosexual female) experience, natural beauty isn’t so much important as a pleasant appearance and genuine confidence, combined with social skills. A friend of mine, I think I can say objectively, ticks most of the boxes in the checklist of what our society would call attractive, but she’s introverted, quite shy and not at all interested in fashion, and she usually seems to go under most people’s radar.
I also don’t think that physical attractiveness is necessarily a hindrance to be taken seriously professionally, although I wouldn’t be at all surprised if large breasts were, as AllWalker says. I know two women who are unusually attractive, and are also intelligent, friendly, well-spoken, and supremely confident. While I’ve had a slightly negative reaction to each of them (I’m jealous and assume they look down on me) and I wouldn’t be surprised if many women who are their peers share that, they each seem to get along just fine. One is a PhD student and the other is in law school, and whenever we’ve worked together, people have responded very well to both of them, and better than to me.
I do think their confidence is the defining trait, however, and that’s probably also partly why everyone thinks of them as so attractive.
ETA: Or I could have just left it to MandaJO. These women are both attractive, rather than sexy, according to her distinction, and it certainly helps them in many aspects of life.
Or are they confident because being attractive has allowed them to become so? I don’t think I’m a beauty, but most people do regard me as very attractive. I’m also very confident in most situations - but then, I’ve never had a reason not to be, because people generally react positively to me from the get-go.
That’s not to say I’ve had an easy life, far from it. But I do think the way I look, and the effort I make with my appearance (I’m generally always well-dressed and well-groomed) has given me certain advantages.
This has come up on here before, and I still have to wonder how this is true because we all have different ideas of what we consider attractive. I guess I just don’t buy it.
My ex-girlfriend was beautiful. No joke, a perfect ten smoking hot, top five most beautiful women I have ever seen in my entire life. Tall, thin, brunette. Amazing in bed and a massage therapist. Part-time model. Do not doubt for a second that this woman is everything a man could ask for.
She had it easy for a lot of her life. She was making tens of thousands of dollars modeling as a thirteen year old girl. She always had men lavishing expensive gifts on her. Men she explicitly told she had no interest in: they didn’t care. Come ride on my sailboat, buy yourself $10,000 of clothes on my credit card. Why yes, I’ll be your lawyer pro bono. God you’re hot. Hi, I’m the owner of this restaurant. Dinner’s on me.
So in those respects, yes, she certainly had an easy life.
Being so beautiful, however, meant she was vulnerable to the most fucked up sociopaths. Liars, cheats. Men who will do anything to sleep with her. By the age of 24, when I met her, she had been raped by three different people. Her boss and a random stranger were the first two. The third was a man she dated for nearly a year until she found out that he had been slipping her rufies and fucking her unconscious body nearly every night. I love you, honey. One man, who eventually became the father of her child, was physically and mentally abusive.
It fucked her up. By the time I met her, she could hardly trust anyone. I was amazed at how strong she was, with how she handled it, but still she put everyone around her through constant tests to make sure they were true to their word.
Would I like strangers giving me lots of presents, offering me opportunities I never dreamed of? Of course. But I wouldn’t trade places with her for anything in the world.
I’d agree. I had a manager once who was a blazing, smoking hot female. She acted damn hard-edge - she was decisive, commanding, and didn’t take shit from anyone. I respected her for that, and I felt like she worked extra hard at it because if she hadn’t it would have been too easy for others to write her off as a hot but useless fixture in the workplace.
She still had a more personable, even feminine side she occasionally let show in very metered doses, which made her likable and human without undermining her authority. I think she handled her hotness pretty well, and it seemed like more of a personal challenge for her than it was a blessing. I’m sure in her social life though it had helped her out more than once or twice. 
Yeah, I think the two are so intertwined it’s impossible to tell which is the real root cause. I see many women who, when you look closely, are not that classically beautiful, but project so much confidence that you don’t notice they’re not. But that only goes so far - I don’t know how I could persuade people that I look great, with my dumpy build, thin and frizzy hair, bad skin, and weird face-distorting glasses. 
But does that have anything to do with being beautiful? Lots of people, regardless of looks, tend to be victims of sexual assault/rape. Couldn’t the fact that it happened so much be related to the fact that she projected something (insecurity?) that assailants picked up on? I remember someone saying something like that in another thread about people who are victims of rape/assault multiple times. I, and a lot of people I know, have had bad sexual experiences, but how does one know if it’s because of physical attraction, or just bad luck, or what?
A friend of mine and I were once having a discussion about rape and sexual assault, and he ended up by saying that he would be a lot more nervous/afraid if he were me (I’m also really a tiny female), but somehow I take stuff like that for granted. That is, maybe I have a lot less commonsense than I should…I’d also think nothing of doing that at midnight. Not that I drive…but I tend to hang out alone after midnight a lot.