Ugly should read average. And most movies, TV and theater has no interest in the normal depiction of humanity. People don’t speak in blank verse, after all, except in Shakespeare.
Girls in NY were split into beautiful children and character kids, the main distinction being that beautiful children were all blondes.
Which is a problem.
One thing I notice is that online content tends to have more ordinary looking people. Sure, there are the channels that seem to just be about hot people, but those are generally treated as inauthentic and pandering, rather than the norm.
Granted, this is more true of men than women, same as it is on TV. But it still seems that people are far more accepting of their Internet content not requiring beautiful people. And there’s already a history of Internet content influencing TV, due to being its cheaper competition.
Combine that with the availability of content from other regions that aren’t as pushy on beauty as Hollywood, and the push for representation, and I suspect things are changing in this department.
I’m trying to remember what Elaine said in Seinfeld - that something like only 30% of the population was “datable”! 
On a semi-serious note, there is this website:
It’s anonymous and seems to be based on pretty legitimate statistics. I have no affiliation, nor any way of assessing the actual factual validity of their figures. But they pass my basic smell test.
It’s kind of amazing to put reasonable bounds on your various factors and see just how quickly a metro area containing 4 million people of your preferred sex turns into 100 candidates. And that’s before you’ve met anyone.
Interesting. I got down to about 4 1/2% of the population with no restriction at all on most of the categories. Might have something to do with ruling out the people who want to have children on the grounds that hey, I’m 71. I’d be willing to grandmother your grandkids but if you want to have (more) children I’d recommend taking up with somebody younger. I’d have answered that question differently at 30.
They also asked about a number of things I don’t care about (I have never measured anybody’s penis) and didn’t ask about a number of things that I do (are you willing to live away from cities? wash your share of the dishes? be kind to the cats? and I don’t care what religion you are but I do care in what fashion you’re that religion – can you cheerfully come to everybody’s celebrations and mixed ones and atheist versions and not sneer at anybody? and if you have little or no income, why is that?)
For sure the questions they ask are the ones for which statistics are readily available. Lots of personal preferences and character items don’t have good publicly available statistics.
I also think they don’t do cross-correlations at all, so if you say e.g., moderately high earning AND college educated, they simply multiple the fraction of high earners in that gender’s general population by the fraction of college-educated in that gender’s general population. Which will narrow the field too much since those two items are fairly well correlated in the real world.
Like you, I am far past child-making/ -bearing / -rearing age. So the “right” answer to that restriction is “I don’t care; check all the boxes”. Ditto penis size or whatever other questions you don’t care about. That give the correct calculation, i.e. no filtering on this topic.
During the time I was dating my now-wife I put her info in there as a lark. Turns out by their reckoning there’s a couple hundred of her across the whole USA. I guess I was lucky to stumble on one of that highly select cadre that was a) local, b) I liked a lot, and c) liked me too. Hard to believe our first anniversary is already behind us.
Wasn’t it more than just not seeing her actual physical appearance? ISTR (it’s been a decade or more since I last saw it) that when he was hypnotized/enchanted, he saw people’s inner beauty. So Gwyneth Paltrow’s looks for the character were a reflection of what a beautiful person she was inside. He originally saw the obese Hawaiian character as looking like Ron Darling (handsome Hawaiian athlete), and if I remember right, the reverse was true- he saw physically gorgeous people as ugly if they were ugly on the inside.
I agree that they could have done a lot to make him more sympathetic- he was an asshole at the beginning of the movie, and an asshole who’d learned one lesson at the end.
As far as the OP’s question goes; I think the “lookism” comes with the movies as fantasy or as an escape idea. I mean, who wants to see a movie about fat, ugly people who do everyday stuff. That’s most people’s lives. People want to go to the movie to live out a fantasy, whether that’s with superheroes (who wants an ugly superhero?), outer space, or just a romantic comedy with pretty people having a picture-perfect romance and relationship.
Speaking of superheroes, one thing that I’ve wondered about is all superheroes seem to be fit, and the male ones at least are muscular. But Spider-Man’s, say, strength isn’t a result of working out: It’s a result of radioactive spider venom in his blood. Why should radioactive spider-venom strength have any correlation at all with the size of merely human muscles? Wouldn’t he be just as strong if he were still scrawny, like he was before the bite? I mean, hey, spiders don’t have any muscle at all showing outside their bones.
All true. But this is more about dramatic conventions than about logic.
The famed opening credit in original Star Trek had the ship zoom past the camera on the way into deep space. The scene fell flat until they added a “woosh” noise as the ship went by. Ships in space don’t make wooshing noises going by. But humans conditioned to fast-moving terrestrial vehicles expected to hear a “woosh”. So they added one and now the scene worked.
If e.g. Spiderman is going to perform feats of insane strength while looking believable to an unthinking audience, he must look muscular. Given the amount of magic in any superhero’s schtick, they could perform herculean feats just as well while looking like Peewee Herman crossed with Tiny Tim.
Besides, the tie-in toys sell better if he’s buff. And that’s really the point of all these shows: selling toys.
The in-comics explanation (which should apply to most heroes) is that Peter got buff because swinging through the city by his arms for hours and such is a workout, and even with super-strength a lot of stuff he does (catching subway cars) is strenuous enough to cause hypertrophy. Indeed, his accelerated healing means he builds muscle faster than a normal person. That doesn’t explain Toby Maguire woke up with abs, though.
The Kevin Smith/Nicolas Cage version of Superman was not going to be buff, as Clark Kent have never been physically stressed by anything enough to spur hypertrophy.
A friend of mine who works in the industry-- started out as an actress, but does other things now-- said they ask you to list all the languages you speak, any instruments you play, and any other special skills you have-- and you can list really anything, because you never know what might come up. People list stuff like juggling, karate, and fencing. She said a guy she knew listed “drive stick shift,” and ended up getting cast as a double for an actor who had to drive a vintage sports car, and couldn’t drive stick.
Im 12%!! Im a manslut I guess. Really my biggest restriction was no women over 5’9" and extremes on weight and age
They should narrow it down more with qs like "partner doesn’t like cats’ ‘partner wants only men over 6 feet’
I had no restrictions on their income, religion, politics, education
The thing about lookism in dating, for me, anyway, is that there are always exceptions. I may have a preference for something or other in the abstract but there might be a guy out there rocking that thing I normally dislike. So why put out so many limitations when you could be excluding someone great?
I mean this is all theoretical since I’ve been married forever.
The lowest I can get is just over 150,000 (or about 0.047%), and I’m being particularly picky when I do that. With just dealbreakers, it’s more like 54,000,000, which is 16.8% of the population.
Oh…Im a dummy. Its ‘picky’…ok let me narrow it down…ok now im down to 2.79
I know that, for The Pursuit of Happyness, there are at least six different ways I can think off offhand that they could have done the Rubik’s Cube scenes, but Will Smith insisted on learning how to solve it himself, so they could do the scenes the “natural” way. So I guess that “can solve a Rubik’s Cube” would be yet another skill that one could list on that form.
Though of course, by that time, Smith was a big enough name that whether he could or not was irrelevant to whether he got the part.
I can take that two ways. One is that you object to writers writing characters to look a certain way. I get that, but I don’t see how you can limit creativity, and looks are often a plot point or character trait.
Or maybe you worry about the kids. Actors of all ages are very good at separating the character from themselves. I remember Roger Ebert being very good at say “the Brad Pitt character” did this, not Brad Pitt. The show my daughter was on didn’t have beautiful children - everyone was pretty normal looking. No one minded, they were working.
This seems relevant to me, as I would imagine those able to pursue professional acting are likely to be more attractive than the general population.
On point is this scene from Licorice Pizza where a seasoned child actor is advising someone who wants to break into the business (which leads to a very funny scene with a casting agent).
