I realize this may be a shallow thread. Deal with it.
When looking at the population of whichever gender you find yourself attracted to, how do you think the attractiveness of that population is distributed, on the 0 to 10 scale we are all familiar with?
I’m not really interested in how you measure your scale from 0 to 10, more so in what the distribution is, but feel free to tell us anyway.
Do you think there’s just as many 3s as there are 10s and 5s? That’s a uniform distribution.
Or do you think the vast majority of people are a 5, which shrinking numbers of people working their way down to the exceptionally ugly or hot, with very few people being a 0 or a 10? That’s a normal distribution.
Or do you find most people attractive, with most everyone in the 8-9-10 range, and the number of people in each bucket shrinking as you approach zero? That’s a left skew.
Or do you find most people pretty ugly, with most everyone in the 0-1-2 range, and the number of people people in each bucket growing smaller as you approach that perfect 10? that’s a right skew.
My apologies to the bisexuals - the poll was getting enough options as it is.
I’m leaving my response out for the first few posts to try and keep from biasing the results.
I’m guessing the OP is asking how we view our own 1-10 scale. Mine is a normal distribution, so a 10 is a rare and beautiful person, not just in the top 10%.
I wasn’t trying to get into whether you force your scale to be normal or uniform, or if your personal scale ends up that way, but think is an interesting way to think about it.
You could have a consistent scale and still have it be left (or right skewed). For me for example, I’d say the median person is probably above a 5, basically because ugly people can get REALLY ugly, but attractive people can only get so much prettier than an average woman.
I think that about 80% of all women can be attractive, however :
they need to be aged 18-35, and they need a BMI under ~23.
If they fall into those criteria, they are attractive. From this, it’s pretty easy to calculate the distribution - it obviously varies from country to country.
In the USA, given the majority of adults have BMI over 25, and the population is rapidly aging, it’s fairly clear that “hot” mates are extremely rare.
But to use the formula I gave, you merely need to know the % of the population between 18 and 35, the BMI distribution for that age group, and then multiply by 0.8.
For me, it’s actually bimodal with a dip in the middle; looking at a potential mate, I usually find them “attractive” or “unattractive”, and very rarely think “so-so”
I think for a me and a bunch of people a U shaped distribution would be a better fit, i don’t think people describe others as being average or so-so very often but as ugly or pretty, making a fat dip in the middle
A lot of what I find attractive or unattractive isn’t so much the person but how they style themselves: clothes, hair, makeup. I’m not super fond of some of the current styles among my age group, so I think that shifts my distribution down, but I think that can also change pretty quickly.
I have a feeling that if the population were kept in some sort of Matrix-like nutrient-pod, the distribution would be quite evenly spread. But people do so much harm to their attractiveness - bad clothing, diet, make-up, creasing their faces with a lifetime of bad attitude or misery into a needless mask - that I’m going with Seinfeld’s aforementioned estimate.
OkCupid did a study where they had men rate women and vice versa (I can’t look up the study now). The distribution of how men ranked women was a bell curve. It was low at the bottom and top end of the scale and most in the middle. But the way the women ranked men was not like that at all. Most of the rankings were at the low end and just a few at the high end. It was triangle distribution with the top-left sloping down to the bottom right.
Their conclusion was that men were fairer when determining attractiveness while women had a narrow requirement for what was attractive and everything else was unattractive.
Hmm. For me, as I’m going about my day, most men just don’t even register. I notice them, but I don’t evaluate their attractiveness. They just are. Unless they’re ridiculously hot. Then I might notice. (More likely if I’m ovulating.) Of course, I’ve been married a long time, and maybe I’m just not used to looking anymore, but I wonder if something like that is going on here?
Oddly, I’m more likely to notice really beautiful women than really handsome men, despite having no attraction to the former. Wonder what that’s about.