You'd be surprised. Male attractiveness is simply NOT TALKED ABOUT much, especially around older people. But my mother, who is quite reserved, once blurted out that in his early years father looked 'like a young god'. And yeah, I've seen a black&white photo. He looked pretty much like Clark Kent. Square jaw, glasses, swole from muscles... except he wore a linen shirt instead of a suit. He always enjoyed labor. I wouldn't get this description if I just asked about him.

Many women don't feel comfortable openly saying they find some men attractive. That doesn't mean they don't care about it a lot.

Women having sexual preferences and predilections is not at all the same thing as men getting a ton of social pressure from all quarters to look and act a certain way.

A very attractive female actress once said "I dress for women. I undress for men." For that and other reasons, I'm not convinced that male sexual preferences really drive the female tendency to try hard to look good and dress well, even though that's the supposed justification. Society gives women a lot of silly ideas about what men want and I think most women don't really bother to ask men if any of that actually holds water or not.

When I was relatively young and married I bought a new coat and got all mad when my husband failed to notice my new coat at all and, thus, failed to compliment me on it. I have to wonder how much women go around demanding that men tell them they like and approve of X, Y and Z rather than checking to find out if he even really, truly cares about X, Y or Z at all.

During my long, drawn out divorce at a time when I did not expect to be in a position to make a relationship really work long-term, I just began asking men point blank what they liked about me. The answers were surprisingly varied and completely destroyed a lot of preconceived notions I had about what made me "attractive."

It was very eye-opening and life-changing for me. It also made me enormously skeptical of a lot of "standard wisdom" related to such topics.

> "I dress for women. I undress for men."

A good demonstration of this can be showcased pretty heavily in the difference between how women are dressed in women's magazines vs. in magazines targeting men - whatever their state of undress.

Many years ago, I read some article about some guy who was seeing two women and the two women found out about each other. Neither woman dumped him. Neither woman gave him an ultimatum of "It's me or her!"

No, both of them began dressing completely differently and the brunet dyed her hair blonde and the blonde dyed her hair red.

They both had this internal script that said "The way you win a man is with looks, by god!" and neither of them ever bothered to ask the man in question "So, what would it take to get you to myself? Is that even possible? Why are even seeing two women in the first place?"

He didn't care how either of them dressed. He continued to see both of them and was quietly amused by their completely ineffectual attempts to "win" him and get him to themselves.

I mean, in competing for him instead of being willing to walk, they're basically validating his choice, and then putting him on a pedestal where they're making it clear to him they see him as higher value than other men they might find. I'd imagine it made him even more inclined to keep seeing both of them.

They behaved exactly as red pill proponents say. According to that line of thinking, a man popular with ladies is more attractive and they are more happy sharing a high status man than having a lesser man all for themselves.

Of course, this is just an anecdote and cases like this are more likely to stick in our memory. You be the judge.

Your experience, described this way, makes me wonder: to what extent are fashion and notions of sex appeal mostly unrealistic competitions, trapped in their own inertia, unhinged from actual human desire, just like those in the article.

I think there is a huge societal weight that is hard to escape because most sexual liaisons are also social relationships.

We date. We get married. The people we are romantically attached to in a public way get judged by others and that judgement impacts us.

The only way to separate your actual sexual preferences from your desire for social approval is to get involved secretly, out of the public eye. And that's inherently problematic.

How do you arrange such secrecy? Will it come back to bite you later? Can you successfully transition from secret love affair to public association with this person?

The plot for the movie Legally Blonde is rooted in family interference in Elle's boyfriend's love life. She's gorgeous and they are in love but she's not what his family wants for him.

There are countless other such examples in both fiction and the real world. Hollywood even coined a term for marriages intended to cover up socially disapproved preferences for LGBTQ stars during a certain era: the lavender marriage.

The world often interferes significantly with whom we can marry, which means it interferes significantly with whom we can openly be sexually involved with.

It's a quite difficult thing to escape, even for people who simply cannot make those expectations work for them (like gay men being forced to marry women and pretend to like sex with women, a still fairly common occurrence in the world). If your sexual orientation and preferences make those social expectations not overly onerous, the path of least resistance is to just go along to get along, at least publicly and superficially to some degree.

But I suspect it still does enormous harm in ways that go largely unrecognized.

I'm sure they are unhinged to some extent. But I've also come to realise over the years that a lot of it comes down to different priorities.

Ask a number of men what their dream women would be like, and odds are you'll get more descriptions of women we'll sleep with, than will want to stay with long term. Sometimes we'll even known this and still opt for the short term payoff, even if we "in theory" want the long term payoff, because impulse control is hard.

On a tangentially related note, I've noticed that many heterosexual men imagine the comedian Felix Kjellberg (AKA Pewdiepie) must be the height of attractiveness for women, while few heterosexual women find him particularly attractive. I found this very confusing, but after a few discussions with heterosexual female friends of mine we've come to the conclusion that the kind of playfulness and disinhibition this persona consists of is looks like vivaciousness in a woman but immaturity in a man. I imagine some similar dynamics must be in play there.

Do you mean personality wise?

Physically, I just googled and found he won a most beautiful faces award this year and consistently ranked on the same list. Never heard of TC Candler but their youtube lists have millions of views. I doubt he’s actually objectively #1 but clearly they don’t think he’s unattractive.

There’s a lot of variance in female taste, so you frequently see comments along the lines of “[Objectively attractive celebrity X] is not attractive AT ALL”. And the comment is true, for that woman.

But it’s very risky to generalize based on a small sample, especially if it’s all from your personal bubble. I guarantee that if Pewdiepie wasn’t famous and you put his photos on Tinder they would do well. He’s lean, young, 5’10”, has good skin and a reasonable fashion sense, and there’s nothing obviously wrong with his face. That alone more or less puts him in the 90% percentile.

https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/pewdiepie-most-handsome-20...

>He’s lean, young, 5’10”, has good skin and a reasonable fashion sense, and there’s nothing obviously wrong with his face. That alone more or less puts him in the 90% percentile.

Well yes, not to mention that he's a completely self-made multimillionaire with a charming accent. He's certainly what I imagine going for were I attracted to men. Having anyone who is into men say they're not interested is noteworthy, such a large percentage of even a fairly small sample size was definitely pointing to something unusual.

Have you talked to women about attraction? It’s extremely common to hear them say “ugh celebrity x is not at all attractive”.

No woman universally finds all celebrities attractive. Okcupid had an excellent blog series on attractiveness ratings by gender. When rating women, men used more or less a normal distribution.

Whereas the default female rating was “unattractive”, and only a tiny fraction are rated extremely attractive. And from my own experience the variance is high: different women find different types of men attractive.

Check out okcupid’s graphs here, see the chart female messaging and male attractiveness: https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/okcupid/yourlooksandyo...

I don’t follow pewdiepie and I certainly wouldn’t claim he’s the most attractive man in the world or anything. I’m pushing back against the idea that he’s unattractive or against the idea that some women saying he’s unattractive means he doesn’t also have a ton of women who find him attractive.

My point wasn't really about absolute numbers so much as how consistently men overestimate his attractiveness to women. I'm not saying he's the only one or would be considered more unattractive than the average man, just that it's surprising how poorly we understand what the opposite gender finds attractive.

If you doubt that is an objective observation, it would be quite easy to test and I'd certainly be interested in the results. One possible protocol would be to select several celebrities, make pairs of them at random, and ask your friends both which of the pair they find more attractive and which of a different set of pairs they imagine the other gender would find more attractive.

That’s fair, I suspect you might be right that if you to make some sort of index of “male overestimates of universal attractiveness of a celebrity to women” he might be high on it because he’s so popular with men on an emotional level.

If you are heterosexual, "opposites attract." What is attractive for a woman will almost by definition not be attractive to a woman.

As a heterosexual female, Matt Bomer is the height of peak male attractiveness. I'd say Charlize Theron would be tops for females. Pewdiepie - ha. I actually find him repulsive, but you are right it's the personality - too loud, too awkward, too ... zany. I think I'd find that offputting in a female as well.

Interesting, Theron is certainly an example of someone whose attractiveness I've mostly heard affirmed by people not sexually attracted to women - there seem to be a fair number of people who possess what we might call beauty without much in the way of sex appeal. What's strange is how unconsciously we'll imagine that someone is highly desired without ever encountering a reality check.

Agree. She has all the metrics (symmetry, blonde, tall, in shape) and yet she does nothing for me at all. She activates the sense in me of "That is like my mom: Female but not a sex object".

As I get older the more I come to terms with the most attractive women being those who Hollywood never tried to push on me: slightly thick, introverted, and grumpy.

ha! I think we're a love match but sorry not on the market :)

I dunno, if he wasn't such a prick I'm sure he'd be considered attractive enough. Not everyone's cup of tea, but then, who is?