Why are some bad traits physically attractive?

Is there a scientific reason why certain physical features are widely considered attractive despite not being beneficial for the person?
Here’s some examples.

**Thin arms are considered more attractive on women **across many different cultures, but thin arms are weak arms. It would actually be a survival advantage to have bigger and stronger arms for things like self defense, carrying things, and carrying babies.

Subcutaneous fat on men is seen as unattractive all around the world. Eventhough fat under the skin can cushion organs and bones from blows. Most (non obese) men also lack any fat around the sides of the hips. Because of this lack of fat, anything that bumps the side of my hip is painful.

Pale skin and lighter skin is still seen as more attractive around many parts of the world including Africa and the Caribbean. Pale skin has less melanin and makes you more likely to have sunburn, premature aging, and skin cancer. Also, most people with dark skin are NOT vitamin D deficient even when living in higher latitudes.

Hairless skin is seen as more attractive in women and sometimes men, especially in Western Cultures. Pubic hair hair actually protects the skin around the private areas from friction. Armpit hair protects you from armpit chafing. Body hair and beard hair slows down beads of sweat so that they have a chance to evaporate before dripping off your body. Any sweat that drips off your body before evaporating is wasted water. Body hair also keeps you warm in the cold if you have enough of it.

Scarred and callused skin is seen as ugly even though it’s the bodies way of toughening the skin against further damage.

Straight hair is seen as more attractive around the world. Curly hair is actually more effective at blocking sunlight, especially when the light is directly above the head. Kinky hair is also less likely to form knots, less likely to become lice infested, and is better at soaking up sweat.

In general 3 things are considered attractive. Signs of good genes such as facial symmetry, signs of fertility such as wide hips, and signs of wealth such as pale skin. Most of the items on your list are signs that the person works outside or does not have leisure time to groom themselves. These are not signs of wealth.

You are making very broad, very sweeping generalizations that I do not think hold up to scrutiny.

(ETA just one example out of all of your that aren’t universals–scars being “ugly.” Scarification has been a part of human body decoration for a very long time (judging by possible interpretations of some cave paintings.) Here are many examples. (I had to tack “Africa” on to filter out the modern Western instances that are a thing now.))

What puddleglum says.

Most of the things you mention are cultural signals, that you are high-status enough to have access to resources such that you don’t have to work. In China, long fingernails were a signal that you did not need to work with your hands - because you were rich.

My skin isn’t damaged, because I am so rich that I don’t have to work. Wouldn’t you like to marry me, and share in my wealth? IYSWIM.

Regards,
Shodan

Various factors are important to determining attractiveness.

Health, fertility, fidelity, status and wealth, how good they’d be as a partner and parent, etc.

Obesity is associated with poverty and low class. It used to be a status symbol. In the 19th century when the poor ate crude food and worked all day while the rich had a varied diet and sedentary lifestyles, obesity was attractive. It was a proxy for wealth. Supposedly people tailored their clothes to look more fat back then.

Now thinness is a proxy for having surplus time, wealth and energy (losing weight and keeping it off is hard. It is kind of like peacock feathers or owning a luxury car in that regard, a way to signify you have surplus resources).

Same with thin arms.

Pale skin is attractive because the poorer people work in fields all day. It is a proxy for wealth and status also.

Unsure about pubic hair or curly hair.

Part of the hair issue could be that blacks have kinkier hair, and straight hair is more associated with whiteness. When racial discrimination was more severe, blacks getting their hair straightened was more common. That is just speculation, but maybe curly or kinky hair is associated with oppressed minorities. That or like puddleglum says, associated with a lack of time or effort to hygiene.

So that would also be a proxy for wealth and status. Wealth and status are important for procreation and survival.

Basically, the answer to your question is ‘those traits imply wealth and status’

Or she’d just die of starvation; in premodern history at least. Big, strong arms are also energy hungry arms; muscle needs plenty of energy to sustain itself. Women are smaller & slighter than men so they are more likely to survive pregnancy without dying of starvation in an environment where food is scarce.

For women at least it’s because women are less hairy than men, and exaggerating gender features makes people and animals more attractive. It’s the same way men’s fashion is often designed to make the shoulders look wider, and women’s fashion is often designed to make the neck look more slender.

It’s a common phenomenon throughout the animal kingdom. I recall reading of an experiment where the scientists took a picture of a female lizard from a species of palm-sized lizards in which the females are larger than the males, and blew the picture up until “she” was the size of a small car. The male lizards neglected their actual females to stand around and gawk at the giant female lizard picture.

Status. In our society high status people don’t risk themselves or do hard physical work, so they don’t usually have scars and callouses.

Hair appearance is almost certainly mostly an example of sexual selection. That is, enough people in the past thought some unusual hair color texture was sexy enough that it proliferated. You’ll note that hair color and texture varies wildly compared to most other human features.

Step one: prove that these standards of beauty are not only universal, but have been consistent throughout enough historical time to have had an effect on human evolution. Just off the top of my head, I feel quite confident in saying that thinness absolutely fails to live up to this standard, and I’d be willing to bet quite a bit of money that most - if not all - of the others do too.

Evolutionary pressure needs to be in place for dozens to hundreds of generations to have an effect on a population the size of humanity.

There’s also the peacock theory. The idea is that an animal displays an extravagant characteristic (like a peacock’s tail) which serves no useful purpose and may actually handicap the animal. Its purpose is to demonstrate that the animal has so many good genetic characteristics that it can thrive despite the obvious handicap of this bad characteristic.

Some features are selected not because they are an advantage but because they are a disadvantage. If you have survived with these disadvantages, that means you are a great survivor (like with the peacocks tail).

One example of this is testosterone. It is a disadvantage for the immune system to have high testosterone, so people who survive with it have better immune systems.

"Straight hair is seen as more attractive around the world. Curly hair is actually more effective at blocking sunlight, especially when the light is directly above the head. Kinky hair is also less likely to form knots, less likely to become lice infested, and is better at soaking up sweat. "

Kinky hair doesn’t keep a person from getting lice and it doesn’t keep a person from getting sweaty ! I dated Black men and they had gotten just as sweaty as people with straight hair and I hope you know that all Black men don’t like to play basket ball !

Note that this feature became inverted in Western society when most of the lower classes began working indoors in factories. Then tanned skin became attractive, because only the rich had the luxury to take vacations, espectially to places with lots of sunshine. In fact, we can date exactly when this happened: in 1923, Coco Chanel went on vacation to the Riviera and came back with a sunburn/tan. Suddenly all the other socialites had to do something similar and tanning became the thing to do.

While not all the features I listed are not universally attractive, they are extremely wide spread across multiple cultures. At the time of starting this thread, I didn’t have enough time to show studies that show how widespread preferences for these features are.

As for thinness, preferences for heavy or thinner women vary widely around the world; that is why I only said thin arms.

Reminds me of the reaction of a hefty subset of males to pictures (or live encounters) of women with those ridiculous 48HHHH fake breasts.

They’re weird and mutant and deformed and monstrous. But you just can’t stop staring.

Thin arms …

If thin is the alternative to obese, in todays world, thin is in. Lots of men prefer a toned muscular look in their women versus an underfed scrawny look. But strongly prefer underfed scrawny look to fat and flabby.

So which thin do you mean?
On a larger scale, what do men value in women?

In some cases it’s the practical virtues: would she be a good mother to my kids, would she be useful to help me pull the plow? Is she healthy & sturdy & sensible?

In other cases it’s the impractical virtues. What do you get for the man who has everything? A pet woman. One who’s high-strung, expensive, gaudy, and difficult. But very, very envy-inducing in other males. She’s a fashion accessory and nothing more.

Your overall confusion stems from thinking that humans are primarily driven by base urges of biological fitness. Not so. Or at least not exclusively so.

Social fitness is far, far more important than biological fitness. We live and compete and thrive in human society a lot more than we live and compete and thrive in nature. And this has been true for millennia.

Almost all those thing are, modern, European values (though have some basis in biology, e.g. avoiding potential mates with scars could certainly be advantageous, evolutionary speaking). Different cultures and different eras would have completely different ideas. The complication is that by colonialism and mass media “European values” are now completely dominant even in areas of the world that have traditionally had completely different ones. E.g.:

And of course as witnessed by animals like the Fiddler Crab. What is attractive to mates has no relation at all to survival (except for the fact it makes you attractive to mates):
Fiddler crab - Wikipedia

Thin arms are considered attractive? I know I’ve got problems finding long-sleeved clothing due to sizers not sizing up arm width, but I’d thought that was plain stupidity. The few times I’ve heard anybody remark on the thinness of a woman’s arms it’s been to say “ugh, like matchsticks”. Maybe it’s a cultural difference?

With the switch from farming to mine & factory work being the more common marker of lower class manual labour, having a tan became a sign of not having to work. Status signifiers can shift.

I think the OP is essentially self-answering:
Why are these traits, which look purely negative to me, prevalent in the population and apparently preferentially attractive?
Answer: Either my guess about purely negative was wrong, or my guess about preferentially attractive.

That said, of course there are plenty of examples of features in nature which are ornamental. They basically advertise: “Hey I’m healthy enough and strong enough to support this impractical feature!” and that’s their only function. In humans we don’t have anything like that, but I think boobs and maybe penises (?) are bigger than they need to be, and serve an ornamental role.

No, these traits are not ugly to me. As a man, I actually think smooth and hairless skin looks better on women and the rest of the traits are neutral to me.

Also boobs are not purely ornamental, the fat adds protection and cushioning to the mammary glands inside of them. Also a larger penis (probably) helps ensure the semen reaches the cervix.

Straight versus curly hair is definitely not a universal preference.

The entire 1980s is my cite

OK, but I never suggested you thought they were ugly, I was arguing against the assertions in the OP, that these traits are both 1) bad and 2) physically attractive. The answer is that the assertions 1 or 2, or both, are wrong in each case.

For example, white skin is not trivially “bad”, since it aids with vitamin D production, and can be a better advertisement of health than dark skin (which can hide certain signs of ageing or disease). Plus the aforementioned cultural advantage.

Of course I’m not saying boobs are purely ornamental. Obviously they can be used to feed babies. Perhaps it was clumsy wording.

The point is, human boobs are much, much bigger than they need to be to fulfill most of their functions. It’s unlikely that the small advantage of a little blunt force protection for the mammary glands makes up for the significant disadvantage in comfort and ease of movement.

For the penis, I think it’s a bit more debatable to what extent sexual selection has resulted in its current shape and size, but it’s not just a matter of getting the sperm to the target; other species make do with just a more powerful ejaculation muscle.