This thread is pretty gross, but this comment?
takes the goddamn cake.
Seriously? When you’re especially attracted to a woman you don’t consider her human?
I wonder what people don’t consider you human, and why.
Edit: I just saw Ashtura’s comment. Okay, maybe the goddamn cake gets shared.
I think the objections to this exercise somewhat silly. The poll simply asks opinions - of men and women - as to standards of physical attractiveness, as well as definition of the word “beautiful.” But go ahead and be offended.
One huge problem I had was the word beautiful. I find many women pretty, attractive, striking, interesting looking, etc. But as I use the word beautiful, it necessarily applies to the relatively small subset of most attractive women. There are not as many different terms to describe male attractiveness. Handsome is about it.
Further, many of us likely differ - at least to some extent - on our personal preferences.
Finally, I imagine there is considerable location bias.
As I move through my Midwestern suburban middle-aged life, I encounter very few people - men OR women - whom I consider drop dead gorgeous. Seriously - days - if not weeks - could go by w/o encountering a single person whose beauty really caught my attention. (Oddly, I was about to say comparing them to models or movie stars, but I’ve known a few of both who photographed better than they appeared - at least to me - IRL.) Even when I visit my kid in LA, go to the beach, or to clubs - the not-so attractive folk greatly outnumber the near-flawless, tho the ration is different.
I could have imagined gong up to 10%, but anything more impresses me as the equivalent of handing out “participation” trophies to everyone.
I voted 11-15% but I am in California.
And yes, despite what others say-women over the age of 50 can be and are beautiful.
The objections are groundless. This poll was in response to another poll that only 4% of women found themselves beautiful. How are we to feel about that information? If indeed, 50% of women are beautiful, then we see a clear crisis of self-image. If on the other hand, only .5% of women are beautiful then there are a small number of narcissists out there. If we find that in fact 4% of women are beautiful and 4% think themselves beautiful, then it means we have realistic assessments of ourselves. Since beauty is so relative, a poll like this is really the only way to get to the bottom of the quandary of how do self-perceptions line up with other perceptions. Obviously, it’s a biased sample, and certainly doesn’t pass any scientific rigor, but the aim of the poll is to see relatively speaking how close this 4% assessment is to the way that other people see them. In our sample, it seems that we largely believe the number to be small, but higher than 4%. This tells us that there is at least a reasonable likelihood that a measurable subset of women are consistently underrating their attractiveness in relation to how others see them.
I would agree with that and the media is to blame. For example, this crazy push for white teeth. Your teeth are not supposed to be white. More like a pale ivory. Yes, not stained, sure.
So they show a woman making the “tissue test” checking to see if her teeth are that white. But generally, your teeth are not that white, unless you have damaged them but overuse of tooth whiteners. So you feel imperfect.
I think I get what you are saying, but, it is not a stretch to understand why the “not human” part is quite offensive.
My interpretation of what you are saying is to circle back to the fact that we see other humans as attractive because they are humans. This is why most people do not find trees particularly physically attractive.
However, sometimes you will notice a person so devastatingly beautiful and perfect looking that your brain kind of just short circuits. You would be perfectly happy to just stare at their face for hours because your happy neurons are going crazy. Note that there is no sexual connotation or romantic interest. In the immediate, there is less interest in this person as a person because your mind is just enveloped in the glorious pleasurable sight. Once again, this is not a sexual desire.
If you have never experienced this, then maybe your brain just isn’t wired that way for visual stimulation (bad word, but I couldn’t think of another). But if it is, it doesn’t mean that you are terrible person. It just is the way it is.
However, I actually feel bad for the people that are that beautiful. Just as Inigo stated (in a way), it can be harder for others to see them as a regular person with all the normal flaws of one.
Why should we assume men’s assessments are more accurate than women’s? If only 4% of women think they are beautiful and most men believe only 0.5% are beautiful, maybe 3.5% of women are narcissistic. Or maybe most men are simply stupid. Either or neither or both of those could be true.
As I said in the other thread, beautiful is not the same thing as attractive. Believing oneself to be “not beautiful” does not imply that one believes they aren’t sexy, attractive, cute, hawt, pretty, or fuckable.
I think the problem with this question is that beauty is contextual. A random woman on the street likely isn’t wearing her best outfit. Her make-up may be minimal, her hair more befitting of errand-running than impressing randos. And she may be doing the resting bitchface thing because–again–she isn’t trying to impress randos. So she may only score a 5. But she may score a 7 or 8 in a different setting when she actually cares about looking good. Personally, I believe that at any moment, less than 10% of women would rate as “beautiful”. But with the right styling, I believe 40-60% of women can attain “beautiful” for a general audience not overly represented by edgelords.
The beautiful women we see in the media are always glammed up. They also have the benefit of good lighting and professional photoediting. So it shouldn’t be any wonder why both men and women think beauty is a rare thing. Our opinions are very much calibrated to the unnatural celebrity outlier rather than the natural woman on the street.
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Really? THAT’S the part of my post you took issue with? That I find fewer than 1% of women are possessed of physical characteristics that transcend them beyond humanity just weirds you right out, but finding 60% of humanity to be completely reprehensible, that’s just fine. God damn you never fail to confound me.
Also: what Hermitian said.
I’d just like to say I have no idea what percentage of women are beautiful. Firstly I don’t really know what the word means, and secondly I haven’t seen a large enough number of women to feel like I’ve taken a representative sample of ‘all women’.
I will say, of the mere thousands/tens of thousands/hundreds of thousands of (different) women I’ve seen in passing in my entire life, the following apply.
If beautiful means that I my attention was dragged to them instantly and I could not look away due to how stunningly attractive they are, then I’ve never met a beautiful woman.
If beautiful means that the women are pleasing to look at, then most women qualify, I think.
If beautiful means that I’m not actively repelled by their appearance, then virtually all women qualify.
Again, assuming that the paltry sum of women I’ve seen in my life is representative, which it’s not.
As a side note, if I use my personal reactions as a way to judge appearance (which seems like a remarkably UNscientific approach to take), then ‘beauty’ has a lot less to do with how they ‘naturally’ look and a lot more to do with cosmetic alterations they’ve made. For example I’m irrationally repelled by piercings or tattoos, so that’s an easy way to reduce your beauty in my eyes - but who cares what I think, anyway?
Beauty is obviously in the eye of the beholder. After wading through the tedious off topic editorializations and other discussion, I voted but the answer would probably change a year from now.
4% sounds about right.
In his defense, he didn’t say that he equates beautiful and attractive. To me, they’re not the same thing. “Beautiful” indicates someone who should be on a magazine cover. Those are not the same women that I find most attractive. I much prefer “cute.”
FTR, I do understand the objection to this thread. However, this statement is not at all something to get worked up over. Hell, my wife was once approached by a college-aged women and asked, “Oh my god, Are you even real!??” It’s not uncommon to say people are so pretty they can’t be human, or can’t be real. It’s just metaphor.
The general objectification encouraged by this thread, I’m not going to defend.
I think most (99%) of all women are attractive or at least potentially attractive. Of that 99%, I think perhaps 5% are what I would call “beautiful”.
Yup. This is vile.
Sigh.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with this thread topic and it isn’t objectifying anyone. Being “beautiful” is one of countless attributes that someone can possess. You could ask the same thing about how many men or women could get into an elite university, be on the Olympic Track and Field team, have a glowing personality that attracts everyone or anything else. The answer to all of those is never higher than the single digits. That is what makes everyone different.
You are just looking at a Bell Curve that could apply to anything. It doesn’t make one person better than another. I would rather go out with a cute girl that is really cool and has varied interests than a beauty queen that spends way too much time on her appearance but being beautiful has its place too if that is something that you prioritize for whatever reason. It won’t last but God Bless you if you can ride that wave for a while. I have gone out with true beauties and it gets old if they focus on that attribute too much. The real unicorn is finding one that is also smart, kind and has a good personality as well but good luck with that.
All of this applies equally to men but that wasn’t the question. I am fairly good looking but I never made it a priority to push that attribute. I am smarter than I am good looking so I focus on that instead. Any compliments I get on my looks are just a bonus. I hide the fact that I am terrible at sports but a whole lot of realy ugly, very dumb people make a whole lot more money than I do because they can tackle or throw a ball around. To each their own and I am thankful people have varied skills. The world would be very boring if everyone was the same.
I don’t like the thread. I don’t like it because it’s asking us to objectively classify women by trying to pigeon-hole them all into an arbitrary and meaningless category based solely upon outer appearance.
This is exactly what the Gillette commercial was reminding us not to do. I liked the Gillette commercial.
This thread sucks: we can do better than this.
If I say “only one”, would someone go ahead and forward that answer to my wife for me?
You are dead wrong. The concept here is that woman have already objectively classified themselves and pigeon-holed themselves into an arbitrary and meaningless category based solely upon outer appearance and one that the OP is trying to show is wrong.
The point is, more women are beautiful that think they are, since women have been ridiculously forced into this weird Hollywood/Vogue idea of “beauty”.
It is exactly the opposite of what you are thinking.