We are all judged/evaluated excessively on the basis of our looks.

Maybe we're all judged excessively compared to some imaginary meritocratic utopia, but the in this world women are judged by their looks much more than men are.

Compared to an imaginary meritocratic utopia? Hardly. Here in the real world ugly men are judged quite harshly, right alongside ugly women. Fat, bald, puny, nerdy, zit-faced, short, weakling, dork, creep, loser... humans are strongly attracted and hardwired to follow the beautiful and shun the ugly. It's beyond naive to think women only judge men based on their brains and men only judge women based on their figure.

My point is that at some point the crusaders on both sides of this should step back and realize that most of us actually have dealt discrimination and harassment to some degree, and I think the best solutions actually don't involve putting women up on pedestals or men in gags and blindfolds.

I think your belief that women are judged more superficially than men is driven more from mass media than scientific fact.

> I think your belief that women are judged more superficially than men is driven more from mass media than scientific fact.

Uh-huh. If you want to start talking about scientific evidence, where's yours?

The phrase "what is beautiful is good", a.k.a. "lookism", was coined by Dion, Bercheid, and Walster in 1972. Of course there are also many studies since both supporting and refuting the theory.

A excerpt from a meta-analysis of the topic by Eagly, Ashore, Marhijani, Longo from 1991;

  Whether physical attractiveness is more important to per-
  ceivers of one sex than the other is not entirely clear. In view of
  Feingold's (1990a) meta-analysis showing that men place greater
  value  on  physical attractiveness  than  women do,  especially
  when romantic attraction  is considered, it is possible to argue
  that physical attractiveness could be a more powerful  dimen-
  sion  in  men's than women's implicit  theories  of personality.
  However, the research we review on the physical attractiveness
  stereotype was not carried out in the context of romantic rela-
  tionships. Moreover, the question addressed in research on the
  physical attractiveness stereotype pertains to the meaning in-
  ferred from attractiveness cues, not the importance of attractive-
  ness. Men and women may differ in the importance they ac-
  cord to attractiveness even though they infer similar meaning
  (e.g., social competence) from attractiveness cues. Particularly
  in  view  of evidence  that  the  content  of gender  stereotypes
  differs little for male and female subjects (e.g., Deaux & Lewis,
  1983,1984; Eagly & Steffen, 1984), we suspect that the physical
  attractiveness stereotype is widely shared in American culture
  and is therefore little affected by variation in subject character-
  istics, including subject sex.

For lighter reading, "Blink" (Gladwell) is salient but not exactly scientific.

All that says is that Feingold 1990a wasn't conclusive. You're trying to prove a positive with a potentially false negative. You're smart enough to know that's a mistake.

Yes, men are judged on their appearance. Yes, 10% of anorexics are men (disproportionately gay men) and all of those people feel real pain. Nobody should dismiss that.

Nor should anyone dismiss the fact that the remaining 90% of anorexics are women. Is that because women are somehow weaker than men? No, it isn't.

I think the seminal 1972 paper was "conclusive", I quoted the meta-analysis specifically because I appreciate that there are also open questions and room for further study. I'm not trying to prove something (my original statement was ambiguous enough I think to defy proof). Rather I'm trying to nudge the discussion a bit toward a path which I personally think will be more successful overall.

The extensive back-and-forth downthread between me and @camgunz I think illustrates the difficulty in having these conversations. Till this very story I've always avoided these discussions for fear of being unfairly characterized, or cast as somehow supporting harassment (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9171403)

My whole point is I don't want to dismiss anyone, least of all 50% of the population! I am curious about better ways to recruit a much larger percentage of the population in actively working against harassment. Part of recruitment is making everyone think there's something they personally could gain from participating. E.g. this isn't about making the world a better place for women, this is about making the world a better place, period.

Part of it is also dampening some of the overreach (like the idea you can't pay an honest complement to a female coworker). Everyone should strongly condemn harassment, but I think many people also have a vehement reaction to anything that smells like prior restraint of personal freedoms, and unfortunately sometimes zealous attempts to "protect" women can feel, indeed are, too much of the later.

I think it's really important to mediate against this, and some strategies I've adopted; make sure we're not casting this as men vs women, to cut out the man bashing (because most men are awesome husbands, fathers, and coworkers), and perhaps the hardest, trust men enough to not feel like we have to restrain them, but rather recruit them to help battle harassment.

Such a complex and delicate topic, so rife for misunderstanding and personal attacks.... I'm probably going to check out of this particular story now. Maybe one day I will work up the courage to blog on it.

> ...room for further study.

And if people's belief was based on that study then you might not be wasting your time trying to cast doubt on it. As things stand, it isn't, so you are.

Without actual evidence you can't hope to sway opinion because there's SO much evidence that indicates to the contrary. How do you explain that anorexia and bulimia are massively swung towards people who target male sexual partners? How do you explain the massive difference in the amount of time and money spent on clothes and grooming? How do you explain the fact that ugly/pretty couples are massively swung towards m/f rather than f/m. It's data. The hypothesis needs to fit the data. Yours doesn't.

> Rather I'm trying to nudge the discussion a bit toward a path which I personally think will be more successful overall.

Hang on... so you're trying to divert people away from, y'know, an idea that fits the evidence, so you can change the narrative to what you personally think would be "more successful"? And we should let you do that based on, what, blind faith that you know best? Have I got that right? If so, dude, you're way off the reservation on this.

> My whole point is I don't want to dismiss anyone, least of all 50% of the population!

Assume you don't see the irony there. By trying to protect men you're denying women, because the evidence overwhelmingly points to this being a problem that affects women. How you can you deal with a problem when you deny the evidence for it? It's like #NotAllMen all over again.

Dude, I'm sure your pain is real. I sympathise, I really do. Everyone has shit to deal with. Doesn't make you right.

Denying the facts makes it harder to solve the underlying problem, not easier.

> I'm probably going to check out of this particular story now

Uh-huh.

Is there a link with a collection of all of the comments?

I scrolled through more of the tweets.

* Edit: The comment I was replying to a few posts up was edited, which affected what it looked like I was trying to say, so I deleted my reply.

--------------------------------------------

Your parent comment doesn't make any sense regarding the Sasha Grey remark. I assume you're talking about

>"You look amazing in that bathing suit, like a rock star." -Vic Gundotra, to me, when I was a junior engineer at Google. In Maui.

I agree that may be an inappropriate remark depending on the context, but "yep I/Google evaluate women on the basis of their looks" is complete hyperbole.

Yes that is the comment I was referring to. I am a guy and so I'm not necessarily the best judge of whether that comment would make women feel uncomfortable. But imagine you're sitting there with a bunch of female executives and they are talking about some actor's muscular shoulders and you realize that many of the higher-up males do have muscular shoulders and that they clearly really like that.

How will that make you feel if you don't have muscular shoulders. You might feel pressure to go to the gym more, or that your prospects at the company are limited in a way compared to if you did have them. You might even feel a bit insulted if your shoulders were clearly far from muscular, and this is a characteristic that you could actually change by working out. Looks in general are much more a lottery/luck kind of thing.

So while looks are definitely part of life and most people are average looking, the expectations that women face regarding looks are different than those faced by men. This just means that they have more pressure to look a certain way and to be judged positively or harshly on the basis of their looks.

>How will that make you feel if you don't have muscular shoulders. You might feel pressure to go to the gym more, or that your prospects at the company are limited in a way compared to if you did have them. You might even feel a bit insulted if your shoulders were clearly far from muscular.

I would not feel insulted (I'm not attractive at all, but someone talking about an actor's physical traits would not bother me), but I suppose someone else might. If this is an "after work drinking" occasion, things like that are par for the course. If the comments aren't directed towards you in any way I think it's kind of ridiculous to feel offended or harassed. The bathing suit comment is different because it was directed only at her, though I think that's just more an inappropriate remark that would make one feel uncomfortable, not evidence that "I represent Google and I judge women based on their looks."

Insulted is not the feeling I'm concerned about. Generally people only feel insulted by something that is personal.

It's only relevant because women are typically judged on the basis of their looks. I'm not saying that comment is alone indicting, but in the context of the other comments it appears that Vic is more of a man's man who has fairly traditional ideas of men, women, beauty, and workplace conduct.

Everybody is judged on the basis of their looks. Men too.