An interesting idea, but I’d have to bow out. I honestly can’t tell which guys are good looking and which ones aren’t.
Seriously?
Look, I’m not gay or anything but I wouldn’t have any particular difficulty saying if I found another man attractive or not.
In fact we had an interesting and fun conversation at work once where everyone commented on what members of the same sex (or of the opposite sex if they were gay…it got confusing) and in different work teams they found attractive.
It was really interesting and surprising to see who people found attractive and why, it was often very much not what you would expect. I think both men and women have stereotypical ideas of what should be attractive rather than what is attractive to an individual person.
Needless to say we all looked at each other in a different light after that particular conversation… 
I’ve seen People magazine covers, and had female friends confess crushes to me; I’ve pretty much come to realize that I have no clue who’s attractive and who isn’t. It sounds like you thought you knew, but when put to the test, turned out to be wrong. So are we really disagreeing here?
For that matter, I can’t tell what women will catch the eye of other guys. When the Hollywood hype machine churns out the next starlet du jour, sometimes they just don’t do a thing for me.
I’ve got enough trouble with my own crushes to try and decipher anyone else’s.
Well I knew who I found attractive, I was surprised at some other peoples choices. Some of the people in the conversation demurred until they realised they weren’t going to be mocked for taking part and they sometimes initially gave reasons like yours saying they couldn’t tell.
But if you say you really can’t tell then I’m not going to argue, you know you better than I know you.
I thought ‘No Homo’ was the universal pass.
That’s what I call a jackpot.
A long ago former girlfriend of mine absolutely refused to believe me when I said this. As a perpetual know-it-all, it stung me slightly that this was an area of life where I had no clue.
For a while after that I tried to make an effort to figure out what made a man good looking. I can sometimes tell now, but all I’m really doing is a crude comparison of their facial characteristics to the faces of male models or movie stars, who I assume must be good looking. Even by this method, I find that my best guess about whether a man is someone that women would find handsome is wrong probably more than 50% of the time.
Ahh, there’s your problem - you’re trying to guess what women would find attractive. Don’t bother - it makes no sense to us men. For every 1 woman who says they find Tom Cruise unattractive, there are 3 that find Hugh Laurie attractive. Something tells me they’re not basing attractiveness on looks alone.
But have you ever been to you?
Hah, I think Tom Cruise is definitely not attractive, but Hugh Laurie on the other hand… He’s a sexy man.
It’s really not all that common a caveat as heterosexual men socializing with other men in real life rarely, if ever, comment on the “looks” and relative hotness or lack thereof of other men to their male friends.
This is something gay men and straight women might do. It would be very unusual for straight men to make this a topic of conversation between themselves without being prompted by a woman, or possibly a gay man.
My parents used to give each other head-ups when “a nice landscape” walked by or a movie involving a known crush was on. Neither felt the need to inform the other of their straightness, though.
He was just subverting the phrase, I think.
I can distinguish different levels of male attractiveness between say Danny deVito and George Clooney or Hugh Grant, so I can see it most of the time. That said, sometimes my wife will mention one of our mutual male friends as being really attractive and it can surprise me. OK, maybe I see it only some of the time…
Well…the first thing you have to abandon is the idea that all women find the same thing attractive. So if you thing you are wrong 50% of the time you are probably right on the money. You could just as easily find women who see the other 50% as attractive…
From this and what a few other guys have said, it sounds like when you say “I can’t tell if a guy is good looking” what you mean is “I cant tell if other people who would be sexually attracted to men find a particular man good looking”. Is that about right?
That would make a lot more sense to me. Like I have no interest in women sexually but I can certainly tell which ones I would consider beautiful.
Interesting. My husband and I will often comment on who we find attractive when we are out with our group of friends and we all just enjoy the outwardly beautiful people.
I vote for Abe Vigoda.
I’m not straight, but I still know when a woman looks like 50 miles of bad road.
And because you’re not culturally inhibited from thinking that, you do. Guys saying they are essentially looks-blind when looking at other men, and that this and this are identical to them are either in denial about their social conditioning stopping them from making such an assessment, or simply unaware of it.
In fairness Antinor01 has a point though, talking about attractive when referring to your non-preferred gender is a bit of a misnomer. As a gay guy I can’t say a woman is attractive to me, because she isn’t, there’s no attraction. However I know what features are considered attractive for most people who dig women, although tastes vary considerably. So on that basis I can look at a woman and think she is attractive in a general sense, even though I don’t personally want to get on her.
If it makes it any easier, next time someone asks you if you think a man is attractive, replace the word ‘attractive’ with ‘someone that people inclined towards men would generally think is good looking’.