If you believe my assertion that we spend more time looking at attractive people than unattractive people, we’re more likely to see attractive people doing anything that they don’t do constantly (that is statistically independent of their attractiveness).
If I spend 80% of the time I look at people focusing on the upper 50% of attractiveness and 20% of the time focusing on the lower 50%, then I’m more likely to see the more attractive ones doing a particular thing, even if all people do it with the same regularity. Because poeple don’t sign all the time, I’m more likely to miss the unattractive ones doing it, because I don’t look at them much.
The interesting thing is that two people don’t have to have the same standard of attractiveness to agree that deaf people are more attractive. We could have diametrically opposed standards, but as long as you spend more time looking at people attractive to you, and I to me, we’ll both come to the conclusion that deaf people are more likely to be physically attractive.
That still doesn’t explain why — to some people — the average deaf person appears more attractive than the average hearing person. We look at hearing people too.
When’s the last time you saw anyone sign in real life? I don’t think I ever have. All of the sign language I’ve seen has been in movies and television shows, and the people in media are generally more attractive than people in real life. Kind of like how people without a lot of real-world experience with racial groups might picture them as more attractive based on a few media-influenced examples. I have heard the same “they’re all so attractive” platitude leveled at Native Americans, always by people who have never met a Native American or been around a lot of them. When you’re around a group of people more often they seem less like some exotic flavor and more like people. But the deaf, by their very nature, don’t mingle much with the general population.
Also I’ve heard that deaf people are far less likely to have facial wrinkles or hanging jowls when they get older because they haven’t used their mouths as much. But never having met a deaf old person who’s always been that way I don’t know if that’s really true.
Is there some newsworthy development going on with deaf people or something?
Anyway, I never thought about it before, but now that you mention it, my friends are heckvua lot more attractive than, say, my coworkers or classmates or whatever. Not sure why, but it might have to do with the fact that the Deaf culture is a lot less inhibited about pointing out physical abnormalities (“hey, putting on weight?” or “wow, your shirt’s sure wrinkled!” or “nice zit.”) and thus can be more conscientious in covering up such? shrug or it could just be the media effect as davenportavenger pointed out.
There have been protests for the last week at Gallaudet over the selection of Jane Fernandes. It’s been in the news a lot in DC. I see students from Gallaudet fairly often, and they don’t look much more attactive than your average college student.
At my niece’s college graduation ceremony last May. And it continued my observation that a disproportionately large number of sign language interpretors (hearing, of course) are overweight women. Why, I don’t know.