How do people fall all over themselves to please extremely attractive women? I’ve heard this claim many times, but never seen any evidence. Maybe I don’t know good-enough looking people? I’m fairly average myself and I have some friends who are eights or nines, but maybe you have to be in the top .001% to get these perks? Although I feel like at that point, what is considered attractive becomes very subjective . . . we all know that a reasonably good-looking, well-groomed girl is more attractive than a morbidly obese bald woman with missing teeth and open sores, but picking between Meghan Fox and Natalie Portman will present more mixed results.
Anyways, what are these perks in life that good-looking women get, and how good-looking must you be to to get these perks? Is it like a huge jump when you get into the top 1%, or do the perks more gradually increase as you become attractive? The only thing I’ve ever seen is hot girls being more likely to be hit on in bars, or get into relationship with men who are “catches.”
This “hot blonde” I used to know was regularly able to talk her way out of speeding tickets. She claimed it was because of her good looks and she may be right, but she was a master bullshit specialist as well.
I am male but I have had lots of hot female friends over the years. Most of what I have seen is pretty subtle except in New Orleans but it may happen elsewhere too. During Mardi Gras, hot girls get the best beads handed to them (to those not initiated in the culture, this is better than raw cash). It is much harder for males or ugly girls to get them. In particular, the all black (or black-face) Zulu parade gives out the coveted hand decorated coconuts and it is 1000x more difficult to get one of those if you aren’t an attractive female as opposed to any other group. I was a bartender in New Orleans and I gave free drinks to attractive and classy females. It was encouraged as a matter of fact as a form of social conditioning. Trashy females, no matter how physically attractive didn’t get anything at that establishment because we didn’t want them so it wasn’t exclusively about looks. I also had lots of trouble winning any sort of bar contest even when me or the group I was in was the clear winner because some hot female always took the prize. It wasn’t flirting and no one was falling all over themselves just to bang them though. It was just good business practice.
Reality and contest TV is really the same thing if you think about it.
I suppose this is what used to be called Feminine Wiles. Case in point: Major Houlihan on MASH,* who wasn’t above flirting shamelessly to get special consideration from male brass. Which of course didn’t stop her being a firebreathing bitch to every male *or *female officer of equal or lesser rank.
Looks by themselves aren’t enough. You have to work it.
I wouldn’t call my sister “hot” (shudder) but back in her day she was not only attractive, but a master flirt and, like Livardo’s friend, a bullshit artist.
One time when she changed jobs she was complaining about having to learn new software and no one would help her. “I’m not trying to be mean,” I said. “But whenever something like that happened, didn’t you just bat your eyes, put on your best Texas drawl, and every man within 20 feet would come running?”
I can beat that record by about double despite being a 36 year old male so that may just be confirmation bias. I can talk my way out of just about any situation though so maybe the hot blond is just good at talking to the police and knowing the laws relevant to her state perfectly. Good looks, especially for females, don’t hurt but they don’t have to be the primary reason why someone doesn’t get in trouble very often.
When I was a bartender in New Orleans my boss explained it to me this way (he was very much gay BTW). He said that well liquor, the cheap stuff, costs practically nothing when bought in bulk and we couldn’t lose money on it so our job was to make people happy. Attractive female tourists love getting special attention and it also flatters their boyfriends or husbands when you fake interest and envy over her so that is what we did as did everywhere else in the city. We gave them free drinks and little surprises as a business model but it wasn’t just about looks by any measure. No bitch was ever going to get anything no matter how attractive she was and it was all at our discretion and not scripted. The mild flirting was usually faked although I was also sincere if I gave a real compliment. Those groups were always replaced within a few hours and then you move on to the next one. It is fun for all involved but it is just a game. The stuff we gave away was trivial in actual costs though. Giving away free clothing to a hot female that just walks into a store is a completely different matter and a suspect story.
I’m not questioning your moral integrity or anything, jjimm, but I have to say . . . really? People were walking into lamposts? I live in the sticks now, but when I lived in DC, I saw extremely good-looking women everyday, and very beautiful women about once a week. I just cannot imagine the Helen-esque properties of such a woman, who would cause people to literally trip over themselves . . . not even people who are movie-star beautiful, because they are often dolled up when we see them, and they are out and about on the town they are just ordinary beautiful people. Maybe Angelina Jolie, but that is more because she is more striking and has an unusual combination of features, than that she is classically “beautiful,” IMHO.
The halo effect is a big perk. Being assumed to have a good personality, despite evidence to the contrary, can get you quite far if you know how to work it.
Spectacular cleavage will cause men to walk into lampposts if the conditions are right. I’ve seen men get sent into a brief trance because of it, and it is certainly possible that if a lamppost was near by that one could walk into it.
It happened to me on one Halloween night working at a liquor store. A gorgeous customer walked in wearing a costume that had her love puppies begging to jump out of her tiny outfit. I think she was supposed to be a fight stewardess, but she did not have enough clothes where one could be too sure. Anyway…
She had to ask me about three times to ring her up because I briefly forgot what I was doing. That was a good night.
This is just a guess here but I’m also going to assume it’s a hell of a lot easier for hot women to get jobs as secretaries, receptionists, “Human Resources” drones who basically do nothing, and various other kinds of office assistants.
I wouldn’t describe myself as “extremely attractive”, more like “modestly attractive”, but I’ve occasionally been given a free soda or tea (I don’t drink) by a server or offered free fries at a fast food place. This isn’t at all common, it happens maybe once or twice a year, and it may not always be because the guy thinks I’m good looking. One waiter told me he wasn’t going to charge me for my tea because he liked the science-fiction novel I was reading, which I might not believe except he said his girlfriend had introduced him to that particular author. (I guess he could have been angling for a really geeky threesome, but I doubt it.)
In college I had a couple of friends who were extremely good looking (one resembled Beyonce, the other a bustier version of Gwyneth Paltrow), but since we were at a women’s college in a small town I didn’t have much opportunity to see men showering my friends with free goodies. If we went out or attended on-campus mixers I certainly saw guys showering these girls with attention, but I never observed or heard of either of them being treated like a movie star or anything.