At the very least, they might have been likely to be less confused. Black women would be comparing themselves with other black women of similar ancestry; mediterranean women with other mediterranean women; polish women with polish women. Washington Irving was famously surprised to discover that those Spanish beauties had what to his English eye looked like serious moustaches: the ladies in question hadn’t been told that having thin, soft, black hair on arms, legs and face was unacceptable and therefore didn’t bother remove it.
More generally, a woman from “back in the day” would be comparing herself only to the women in her immediate community. So if just about every woman in the community has missing teeth, a weak chin, stringy hair, and a wide behind, those won’t be markers of ugliness, at the very least. Everyone, including men, will see them as “normal”.
Most women are unattractive? Wow, that’s… a… actually I don’t even know what to say about that view except I vehemently disagree and sucks to be you.
ROTFLMAO at “most women are unattractive”.
And we are supposed to believe it’s women who have unrealistic and unhealthy standards of beauty?
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I think all of us tend to be our own worst critic, especially when it comes to appearances. And, the word “beautiful” ISTM tends to be at the top of the scale in terms of meaning for something that is pleasurable to look at. So, it is not surprising that people are hard on themselves when judging their looks against such a high bar.
This is my personal opinion:
Given that far fewer than 30% of women are currently alive, and that IMHO corpses aren’t particularly attractive, I’ll grant that, yeah, most women are unattractive in their current state.
A poll for the men, if you are interested.
Regards,
Shodan
I mean, I think the person who posted that is probably in the minority. I’ve always found this interesting, because my feeling has always been that the vast majority of people wildly underestimate their own physical attractiveness. I’m a heterosexual male. If I consider only women within a certain “age-appropriate” band - very approximately 15 years above and below my own age - and only women that are currently alive and not decaying, thanks Thudlow Boink - I’d say at least 80% or more are physically attractive enough that I’d go on a first date with them if they asked and if I were single. My wife says she thinks the same percentage is true of men from her perspective.
And yet far less than 80% of people consider themselves physically attractive, which means there’s a ton of people of every gender walking around under-rating themselves. It’s kind of odd and a little sad if you think about it for a minute.
I’d actually say that both of them were plenty good looking AND strikingly featured, especially in their heyday.
But yeah, I definitely agree about the only on TV part; we actually had a standard comment when we were in college- it was basically if a girl was “as pretty/prettier than someone we’d see on TV”- that meant a girl who was a complete stand-out in terms of physical looks. They were very scarce, as you can imagine.
[quote=Thudlow Boink]
It wasn’t the best word choice- I should have said “most women are not attractive” instead of “unattractive”.
I didn’t say the other half of the statement about “30% of women being attractive” though- it’s more of a normal distribution in my mind- the vast majority of women (and men) are in the middle- not someone I’d look at and think that they’re good looking, but I wouldn’t look at them and think they are ugly either. Attractive is on the left-side down-slope, and beautiful is the right-hand tail. It’s not a binary thing.
And no, 80% of people aren’t good looking enough for a first date if I was single. Maybe I’m pickier than most, but that seems like an absurdly low bar.
Where is this “far less than 80%” statistic coming from?
A person can consider themselves attractive and still hold the opinion they aren’t beautiful. Just like someone can think they are physically fit and while recognizing they aren’t a world-class athlete.
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We only have to go back 200-ish years until women didn’t even have mirrors. I can’t imagine it was easy to compare your own features with others if you were only able to glimpse them in reflection in a pond, for instance…
Most young women are attractive. Many middle-aged women are attractive. On YouTube you can find videos of a “hot” Raquel Welch at age 73. (She may still be hot at age 78, but the 2013 interview was the most recent I found on YouTube.)
I think your feel good-definition forgets about tastes. Blonde can look good to some, dark to anothers. Curves have their fans and so does a toned figure etc. So I do think we all have something that can be appreciated, without this making the concept meaningless; beauty doesn’t need to be a competition in order to have meaning.
So my definition would go: We are all potentially beautiful to someone - but not to everyone. Which is fine.
And yes, I feel it’s the beauty industry/society that makes us believe there is only one type of beauty to aspire to, which causes other types of beauty that fall outside of this stereotype to be undervalued and women to feel unnecessarily bad about themselves.
On the subject of what “beautiful” means- are we talking about the before or after pictures?
I mean, if a woman has a big hairy unibrow, but carefully tweezes it into pefectly shaped delicate arches (or whatever she likes in the eyebrow department), is she counting herself as beautiful because she looks good with constant effort? If you’re prone to acne but it goes away if you use special daily lotion, do you have a good complexion? Or are you only “beautiful” if it’s your base state?
I’m having trouble finding a link for the 2014 study, but Here’s the 2004 study Dove commissioned. The finding about whether women identify as beautiful appears to be based on this methodology:
(Note that 60% is an “overwhelming majority”).
They go on to say that 40% of women “strongly agree” with feeling discomfort at describing themselves as beautiful, and that the “vast majority” of women consider themselves of average attractiveness, with 13% considering themselves less attractive than average and 16% considering themselves more attractive than average.
So basically, given a list of words, “beautiful” isn’t most womens’ go-to word to describe their appearance. Some women feel uncomfortable describing themselves with that word. And they turn that into “only 4% of women think they are beautiful.”
It’s kind of astonishing that a multinational corporation trying to sell beauty products would distort the results of their research, but there you go.
Actually that’s not too far off from what a normal distribution might look like w.r.t. beauty- 68.4% of people fall within 1 standard deviation and 31.6% falls outside of one standard deviation.
If we were to split that 31.6% into “attractive” and “unattractive”, you’re looking at 15.8% in those categories, which is not far off.