>Their attractiveness also dwindlew with time

First, young boys are certainly competitive with each other. Bullying is largely about social status, and social status is the main predictor for mate choice.

Second, male attractiveness does not follow the same pattern. Yes, sperm quality does degrade with age, but that decline is nowhere near as sharp as the decline in a woman's reproductive health. Not only will their eggs run out, but their chance of surviving childbirth drops sharply with age. Remember, we're not talking about western societies with modern medicine, but evolutionary imperatives which would have developed prior to any sort of antibiotics, pain killers, C-sections, etc.

Third, male attractiveness is strongly correlated with access to status and resources. Which young men almost universally don't have. (although young men may show traits which indicate potential future access to status and resources: intelligence, drive, assertiveness, popularity, etc.) However, an older man (30s-40s) still has very healthy sperm, and may have proven access to status and resources, which is nearly universally considered attractive.

So, I don't think it's fair to claim that male attractiveness declines over time an sort of the same way as female attractiveness. (Once again, from a strictly evolutionary perspective.)

All of them?

For an intro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_attractiveness

For reference, the parent asked what studies support the grandparent's claim. I believe the comment has been deleted by HN algorithm and frankly it makes no sense to me - at least in this case.

The parent comment has been downvoted/flagged to death by users, at which point HN will no longer show it.

So no "HN algorithm", just users flagging.

You can set the "showdead" flag in your profile and you will see dead posts, including this one (grayed).

Males aren't sexually selected for attractiveness. They are selected for their ability to provide for a mother and baby. So, human male's desirability increases with time, peaking at some point where their peak wealth crosses their inability to procreate.

this can also be seen through the fact that females are four times more sensitive than males to economic status cues when rating opposite sex attractiveness [1]

[1] - Guanlin Wang, Minxuan Cao, Justina Sauciuvenaite, Ruth Bissland, Megan Hacker, Catherine Hambly, Lobke M. Vaanholt, Chaoqun Niu, Mark D. Faries, & John R. Speakman (2018). Different impacts of resources on opposite sex ratings of physical attractiveness by males and females. Evolution and Human Behavior, 39(2), 220-225. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...

My old boss used to say he would just hold up a picture of his paycheck on Tinder if his wife ever dumped him. Unfortunately it would also show the child support deduction.

I think the difference is that men are more physically violent. Boys fight and throw punches. This doesn't translate well to Instagram. If teenage boys spend more time online and not in person, then they have less opportunities for physical violence and abuse towards each other. However, it's different with teenage girls. There's more emotional abuse and pressure to look a certain way. Instagram and social media are a very efficient way for this type of abuse to take place, so it prospers there with young girls.

just to add a source of the attractiveness declining less steeply:

Maestripieri, Dario et al. "A greater decline in female facial attractiveness during middle age reflects women’s loss of reproductive value". Frontiers in Psychology 5. (2014): 179. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.0017...

I read that there is pressure on boys to appear nonthreatening for as long as possible. They benefit when the growth spurt from aw cute to damn hot is quick.

That's really interesting. I've always observed anecdotally that female preferences change drastically between very young women and older. Specifically, teen magazines aimed at young girls always seem to have very feminine, boyish, non-threatening males. My observation has been that this preference is dropped pretty sharply as women get a little bit older.

I never knew (and still, don't know) to what degree this trait is actually universal. (ie, perhaps it's just a weird quirk of teen magazines in the last 30 years) Do you have links to that study or anything like it? I'd like to check it out.