Never trust any article written outside of the states.. Especially if his name happens to be Jonathon...
Does anyone feel like this is a completely stupid way to rate hotness? And that based on principles alone, this should be patently false? Think about it. Here's my reasoning if you've got time to read it. POINT 1: For men, attractiveness is due to a number of factors: money, power, fame at the top, then athleticism, and finally furthest down the list, facial "looks". This is explained evolutionarily as a Darwinian assessment women make about the stability and protection a male can offer them in their striving to support a family. For women, however, attractiveness is unfortunately due to one main factor: looks. Sure they can have power and be sugarmommas too, but it's completely different for them. Moneygrubbing men look the other way to date rich women that they don't find physically attractive. Women don't even consider poor looks to be poor looks if the guy is rich and fit. My classic example is Roger Federer, who I find to have a very ugly face and one of the worst noses ever. Yet just about every woman out there will debate with you that he is cute and handsome. I know it's all subjective, but any one of you guys out there can probably find a celebrity you think is rich but ugly, and ask the women you know whether he is good-looking or not (not attractive, but good-looking). You'll see that many of them will find the guy to be attractive and be incapable of making the distinction that his fame and money are the reason for it. POINT 2: If you accept Darwinian principles and acknowledge the way attraction is divied out between the sexes above, then the next conclusion should be that pretty women marry more powerful, wealthy men, while uglier women marry poorer men and men in generally lower classes. I bet all of you can think of the situation where a woman "married up" because she was good looking, but for men this phenomenon is more rare. POINT 3: Undisputable fact: upper class families have fewer children, and lower class families have more. This is the point that Idiocracy makes to claim that the world is getting dumber (which I don't agree with by the way), by saying that lower classes being dumber have more kids and thus perpetuate the "dumb genes". Well it works even better for "attractiveness genes". But unlike intelligence, physical attraction for women is something that actually has a very concrete genetic basis. For intelligence, they can prove the genetic heritability but cannot demonstrate that intelligence cannot be conditioned over generations which I believe it can be. History simply does not support the idea of intelligence being weeded out of society. CONCLUSION: Uglier women are having more kids, and uglier babies are resulting. How does the population adjust to this? By adjusting its perception of beauty of course. But by any finite standard, it's my belief that the world is getting uglier. I recently took a trip back to my dad's home town (in rural Quebec) and was absolutely amazed how much prettier the country girls were than the ones in the city (Montreal). Of course this could be due to a billion factors, but one of the things I wonder about is whether or not evolution has not proceeded at more accelerated rates in urban areas, while the slower less pressured environments have allowed the blood to run stronger.
One last thing: it's almost impossible to gauge beauty over the generations because you would have to get pictures of women with no make-up, and with verifiably no "work" done on them, i e surgically. Without out a doubt, women's synthetic ways of appearing attractive have improved over the years. How do you separate that from actual facial structure definitions of beauty? It's almost impossible.
I actually notice the two trends diverging, quite readily. Walking around a public marketplace today, not really paying attention, I had the feeling I was surrounded by attractive women. And I was. But then I made the mistake of taking into account all my surroundings. In fact, there were several attractive women, but they made up at most 20% of the women in the store. The rest were all severely overweight - obese, wearing baggy clothes, (willfully?) fading into the background. The same seemed to be true of men; about 1/5 looked to take care of themselves at all, and the rest ported hapless guts around like baby carriers. So, it may be that people are more attractive today than yesteryear (per capita), but it may also be that we've just eliminated the average in society. Yesteryear's average-looking person today probably gets discouraged early on in life (media ideals of beauty certainly don't help) and chows down on so much cheap food to compensate, resigned to (and therefore sealing) his/her fate. Only the beautiful people are left to be truly beautiful. Granted, this observation was made in Houston, purported to be one of the fattest cities in the world, but maybe we're just ahead of the curve?
one of the funniest articles/studies I've read in a long time. Made funnier by its objective pretense. p.s. if this study is true, canadian women better recognize and start evolving.
Good effort, but you fail to take into consideration many aspects: 1. There are plenty of extremely unattractive women who do not go through the trouble of starting a family, no one will put up with them anyways (or give them a chance). 2. Plenty of beautiful women grow up with idealistic notions of love and will not settle for a marriage without affection. This often designates them to the middle or upper middle class, not necessarily the upper class where they probably won't receive the attention they feel they deserve from their very-successful husbands. In America you see plenty of attractive, working, middle class couples (attractive for American standards). I don't think internet people adequately understand the draw of compatibility and affection over "striking it big". How many cities are there like Dubai and Moscow where you see hideous but successful men with gorgeous women? I mean the sheer ratio of that in the grand scheme of things is minute. 3. Canada itself is a secluded place with population spread out over a very large landmass and a rich history. Hockey prides itself more on the good 'ol values more than baseball and you don't necessarily see the local population urbanizing. It's more of the immigrants from places like North India and Somalia who pack the cities. And from my experience, Vancouver has the classiest/prettiest girls in North America outside of Cali. And remember, this study was done in Europe, a place where the women are a couple of echelons above those in America. In terms of facial structure, feminity, body longevity (American girls who aren't very active go downhill fast due to inferior genetics), ethnic cross breeding and a variety of other factors. Excellent article, and yes, beauty is very measurable.
I think a lot of guys tell themselves beautiful women only go for the most successful men out there, because of the high ratio of men in news with bombshells. This makes the rejection that much easier for them and they go through a self fulfilling prophecy - I have no chance with these girls not because of who I am, but because I don't make enough money. But going out, meeting these girls and having intimate conversations reveal the majority have no interest in this.
I'll join the bs chorus on this one. And, add a "so what?" To our eyes, perhaps women from thousands of years ago wouldn't be too hot, but they're all dead anyway. For our forebears they were good enough, so what does it matter? Do we even appreciate the higher quality now or just take it for granted?
Have you seen music videos lately? Isn't the p*rn industry one of the least affected by the economy? We appreciate it...oh, we appreciate it ladies... But seriously, I think a lot of what most people consider beauty is something we can control. Women can't give themselves high cheek bones and men can't give themselves a strong jawline but most of us can get in decent shape. We can protect our skin reducing age and blemishes. We can keep up with our hair/body hair/facial hair. We can all have dental work done to get a "hollywood" smile. I think plenty of people can go from ugly to average or average to beautiful if they really wanted to.
"In a study released last week, Markus Jokela, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, found beautiful women had up to 16% more children than their plainer counterparts. He used data gathered in America, in which 1,244 women and 997 men were followed through four decades of life. Their attractiveness was assessed from photographs taken during the study, which also collected data on the number of children they had" One, what are the factors to be deemed a beautiful woman according to these scientists? Two, are photographs valid evidence to support their claim? Would a man find a woman beautiful more for the woman's other features rather than her photogenic quality? Three, what about the borderline women, which way were they cast? What were the actually sample split of beautiful and not beautiful women? Four, what are the couples' sociological backgrounds (Race, economy, religion, education) which may also have effected their childbearing? Is this study any more "scientific" than 5 drunk guys at a high school reunion rating chicks in their old yearbook and counting how many children these chicks had? Well, at least the 5 drunk guys don't claim to be scientific. Anyone who claims to know the measurability of beauty doesn't grasp the innate problem with its very definition. Measurements merely serve to provide data to back up an opinion of beauty. For every ideal measurement one comes up with, countless others will provide a different set of measurements.
Not by any objective standpoint. It's only measurable within a social context. They did studies in a remote Polynesian tribe several decades ago. The natives were shown body figures females and asked to rate them. Invariably, the fatter, less European looking ones were top rated. This was so strange to the Europeans giving the test, that they had to chuckle. Remember what the idea of beauty was in the 70's? totally different. Put it this way, if beauty was objective, we'd all more or less be one race because of natural selection (pre-media revolution). I'm a little wary of this study, because the question is not asked: did people change to fit the "norm" idea of beauty or did the notion of beauty change to fit what what people looked like.
