It’s probably because when a person is fat, everyone takes it as being a massive (and easily correctable!) character flaw. Makes for a bad first impression.
Because hot female actresses like guys who are in decent shape?
You’re comparing a photo of a woman who is heavily made up and photoshopped, to what appears to be a mugshot.
Can you understand why this isn’t a valid comparison?
A large Episcopalian church and an extremely good one. I am physically attractive as countless women have told me in sexual and non-sexual ways. She has too but there is a whole lot more to it than that. We aren’t looking to be on a magazine cover. I really am more physically attractive than she is (she is not ugly in the least) but there are a whole lot of other factors involved.
I’m not arguing that cultures as a whole don’t have standards for what’s considered attractive (although those standards vary considerably from culture to culture and over time.) I have in fact used the phrase “conventionally attractive”. Of course there’s such a thing as “conventionally attractive.”
I’m arguing that the cultural “standard” of who is and who isn’t attractive is not what individual people ought to go by.
No, it’s not; for two reasons.
One is that physical attractiveness is only one of a large number of factors in overall attractiveness. For that matter, for a large number of people, physical attractiveness is dependent on overall attractiveness. Some of us can be physically turned off by the prettiest person in an instant if they say something sufficiently obnoxious.
The other is that it doesn’t or at least shouldn’t matter in the least, to any individual person trying to decide whether to ask another individual person for a date, whether other people find that person overall attractive. The question is whether the person who’s asking for the date (or, of course, the person deciding whether to accept it) finds that person overall attractive. You’re attracted to skinny young blondes? Fine, use that in your decision making – though, personally, I’d advise you against using that as your only factor. X number of other people are attracted to skinny young blondes? What’s that got to do with it?
One, I’m not ignoring it. I’m assuming that women are also making choices. I agree that some women also buy into the “category” nonsense. I think it’s exactly as unwise of them to do so as I think it’s unwise of men to do so.
Two, I very much doubt that most women would like to be dating Chris Hemsworth. Quite a lot of women would like to look at Chris Hemsworth, sure (whether it’s ‘most’ I have no idea, you’d have to check with about three and three quarters billion people (well, less the small children) to find out, and it hardly seems worth it.) Liking to look at somebody is not the same thing as wanting to bed them in real life. Even wanting to bed them in real life isn’t the same thing as wanting to date them. And a significant percentage of women who like to look at Chris Hemsworth are in love with somebody else – who is to them, as individuals, a preferable person to be with, even if many or even most other people don’t think so. Very few if any happily coupled people would cheerfully ditch their partner in order to take up with Chris Hemsworth, even if he showed up at the door with a dozen roses asking.
No. It’s nothing of the sort. My whole argument is that different people, of any gender, are attracted by different things – both in what they think is physical beauty and in other matters – and that people should try to date people they, as individuals, are attracted to. Not to try to categorize themselves and potential dates according to how much they think other people entirely are attracted to either of them.
How you manage to get out of that a claim that I think that conventionally-average-looking specifically-men should ‘go after’ only conventionally-beautiful specifically-women is beyond me.
Aha! A point of relative agreement!
Nobody, of any gender, is going to find anyone who’s “perfect”; either by conventional standards or by their own individual standards.
Therefore people who’ve convinced themselves they can only be happy if partnered with somebody who’s perfect are doomed to misery.
– begbert2: no. Not everybody.
– RickJay: in order to become famous in those fields, in the modern culture, it’s very helpful to meet current standards of appearance. Doing so is, for most people, a very great deal of work; so I expect it’s easier for people to do so who think that sort of work is important – not to mention that people in those fields are surrounded by others telling them that it’s important. People who think it’s important to spend time working out are, I expect, more likely to marry other people who also think it’s important to spend time working out. If you’re going to spend x hours a day in the gym, the marriage will go a lot smoother if your partner agrees this is a good use of time.
(There are of course plenty of other ways to be fit, although they may not always match with being thin. But I don’t think famous actors and famous musicians very often marry, say, construction workers and nurses and dirt farmers, not because there are no such people who they might want to marry if there were enough proximity for them to realize it, but because that’s not who they mostly hang out with.)
It’s not just looks. That’s part of it. League is just a way of saying do they have a lot of the same plus points. Humour is a huge one, and work, attitude, all sorts of little things.
I once went to a working men’s club over Christmas with my mother and her husband and they tried to set me up with an acquaintance of theirs.
He was very overweight, slightly smelly, and spent our entire conversation telling me about being unemployed and how hard it was to do anything in life. He hated everyone and everything and he was incapable of laughing at anything at all. He hated everyone in the world but not in an amusing way. He stuck in my memory as this huge joy-sink, and it might have been a bad day but that was a really fucking bad day. I’m having to paraphrase due to time but there was something like “oh, you remember this song?” “Yes, one of my best friends committed suicide to it.”
He was probably hugely depressed, which I have sympathy with as a human being, but in way that it would be difficult for a stranger to even form a friendship with him. And he had nothing else going for him.
I was 22, and in some respects not desirable - I had a little kid - but I was quite pretty and slim, and at that point I was studying for a PhD. And I can be quite funny in person and am generally good at chatting to people. If we’d been paired by some weird algorithm computer we’d have had a horrible relationship. We had nothing in common in terms of, well, anything.
I don’t think any reasonable observer would have thought we were in the same league. Or say that leagues don’t exist.
I did not resent him asking me out, and he did not resent me saying no.
Leagues exist.
SciFiSam:
One individual person did not want to go out with another individual person, and this proves that leagues exist?
Doesn’t prove it to me.
And I note that you don’t begin and end by saying, say, ‘I think I’m a seven and he was only a one and that’s why I didn’t want to go with him.’ You said, in effect, ‘he depressed me and we had nothing in common and so I didn’t want to go with him.’ Which are a couple of perfectly good reasons; not that you needed any reason.
Try this: suppose you lived in a society in which the overall society decided that he was a highly desirable person (maybe that society prized weight because in that society heavy weight indicated prosperity, and despite being unemployed the person was extremely rich; and no, that’s not an utterly unrealistic possibility, plenty of women in the course of history have been pressured to marry rich men regardless of anything else about them): would you then have wanted to date him?
For that matter, suppose that you weren’t conventionally pretty and slim. Suppose you were sick, for instance, and the medication you were taking to keep you alive had made you bloat up like a balloon, and given you splotches all over your face. And you’d just lost your job, and were feeling pretty depressed yourself. Would that make you any more likely to want to date the person you described? And, if not, do you think that having been brought down in “category” would mean that you ought to do so anyway?
League, schmeague.
Lots of people with different levels of attractiveness are perfectly happy couples. My go-to such pairing in the celeb world are Christina Hendricks and Geoffrey Arend.
Plus all the classic rock stars marrying supermodels.
The main real issue are the idgits who only seek out people that are “out of their league.” Being generally open minded in all directions is clearly going to work out better.
We weren’t talking about “everybody”, we were talking about “husbands of all the famous female actresses and musicians I find attractive or who are famously beautiful”. Presumably the attractive and famously beautiful female actresses and musicians in question were in a position to be a little picky - and probably were used to a slim and fit lifestyle.
On the greater topic of the thread, I’m not sure it’s at all sensible to pretend that there’s not such a thing as an accepted standard of beauty - there’s massive quantities of evidence that there are, indeed, “leagues”, if you want to describe accepted standards of beauty in those terms. Does this mean it’s impossible for a person in a lower “league” to be loved? Certainly not. Does this mean that it’s impossible for a person to love a person who’s in a lower “league” then they are? Again, certainly not. But pretty people exist and it’s silly to say otherwise.
Please see my post #125.
Has the congregation met you yet? :dubious:
Did i read this dude directly? Did he just say that "who you want to want to bed isn’t the same thing as who you want to be in a relationship with?
Um, ok. Did he just rebuf his own argument?. The OP is conflicted. If there is at least SOME society wide standard of beauty, how do YOU resolve thia conflict? Are you gonna suggest thay neither side “msrriage material” "and “good sex potential” shares any cluster of traits?
And if people should not let the standards of physical attractiveness used by the world around them help shape their understanding of what they find physically attractive, what in the ever bloody fuck are they supposed to use? I cannot even comprehend how to wrap my brain around that.
Are you saying that sexual attraction doesn’t play a central role in intimate partnered relationships? “Enjoy looking at” “Enjoy fucking” and “Enjoy sharing a life together with” are three distinct, disparate categories? Do you think there are couples out there that have all three organically? I cant parse your argument.
Actually, it is pure racism.
That’s it?
If you mean me, I am neither a dude nor the OP.
No; that’s not at all what I meant. Of course many couples out there have all three, and I think that having all three is ideal; though some asexuals may want otherwise intimate partnered relationships, and many people have times during their lives when they don’t want and/or can’t have sex and IMO a good relationship will continue nonetheless.
What I’m saying is that it’s possible to like looking at somebody you don’t want to either actually have sex with or live with; and it’s possible to want to have sex with somebody you don’t want to live with.
Do you really want to marry everybody whose looks you find sexually attractive?
Of course they do. “Good sex potential” is, for at least the overwhelming majority of people, one of the components of “good marriage material.”
It’s just not the only one.
I don’t see any conflict. You go by what you, yourself, as an individual, want in a partner (and so, of course, does whoever you’re asking to join you.)
Are you saying that you, yourself, have no idea what your own desires are, and have to wait for the society pages to tell you who you’re turned on by? I’m having trouble wrapping my brain around that.
– I expect most people’s desires are partly influenced by the standards of those around them. But they’re obviously not controlled primarily by those standards, as very many people have at least some desires that go counter to whatever the societal standards are of their place and time.
To me, what is distasteful about the idea of “leagues” is that it’s literally a term ripped from competitive sports, and it implies that the goal of dating/pair-bonding is to “win” by securing the highest-value partner you can given your resource pool. And everything about that is stupid.
There’s a certain type of person that approaches dating with two goals: 1) to get their rocks off and 2) to maximize their social capital. So they want a partner that they are attracted to and that other people will see as a “credit” to their social worth. When they are young, they pursue people they think will massively raise their social capital, and strike out, so they later have an epiphany that they need to “settle”, but still think in terms of trying to do the best they can in their league so that their friends and colleagues will be impressed.
The younger you are, the more common this sort of thinking is. The vast majority of people grow out of it. However, those that don’t tend to be pretty unhappy because they really don’t get relationships. They don’t get caring, or seeing your partner as a partner–as family. They prioritize picking the partner that will impress others, and that means not prioritizing compatibility. I strongly, strongly associate people who talk about “Leagues” with this mindset.
It’s important to be attracted to your partner. But that’s not the same as saying “Your partner should, first and foremost, be the absolutely most attractive person who could reasonably find you to be the absolutely most attractive person they could match with”. Rejecting someone you are attracted to and potentially compatible with because you think your “league” qualifies you for someone more attractive would be dumb.
Cool. How many of their husbands are professors? How many are great at survival skills?
Now, look up images of the husbands of a bunch of world-class female academics. How many of those husbands are attractive? How many are great at survival skills?
Now, look up images of the husbands of a bunch of female survivalists. How many of those husbands are attractive? How many are academics?
It’s not about leagues. It’s about common experiences and interests. Folks who live in a Hollywood world that places a premium on a certain appearance profile are likely to interact with, and be attracted to, others within that milieu. Folks who live in an academic world that places a premium on a certain intellectual bent are likely to interact with, and be attracted to, others within that milieu. And so on.
I never said it was definitive proof. I was just talking about some of my own personal experience.
And yes, it was because he was depressing, but that’s part of what put me out of his league at the time - it’s never just about looks, which is why I didn’t just talk about looks. That’s why old rock stars manage to date and marry beautiful young women - they have tons of other things going for them, wealth, success, charisma, confidence, before you even get to their actual personalities. Funny men often pull well out of what most people would consider to be their league (doesn’t seem to happen for funny women).
For your last paragraph, I don’t have to suppose anything - I’m now older, disabled, unemployed due to disability, and I do even get eczema on my face, so that’s actually a pretty close description! And yes, that does mean I have to change my expectations of who I can date. I still wouldn’t date that bloke because being able to chat to someone and have a laugh is so important, but sure, I have changed my expectations (though I don’t want a serious relationship anyway). You re-evaluate what’s really important to you; the dealbreakers change.
It would be a very weird world where a pretty, healthy, 22-year-old PhD student had all the same dating options as someone twice her age with no job and a visible disability. That’s just not how the world works. If you admit that this is true then you admit that “leagues” exist.
You missed half the post, I guess.