Tag Archives: Sexual Attraction

1-10 Scale: An Analysis

Last week I wrote about the Archetypical Modern Women. It was my most popular post ever by views and was also one of my most commented posts as well. Most manospherians liked the post, but there was one common criticism that seemed  virtually unanimous: I overrated the woman, she was not a 7. The consensus seemed to be she was a 5, although a couple commented she was a 3 or even lower.

I explained my reasoning in the comments: “she’s thin, young-ish with a moderately cute face. She’s not beautiful, but a youngish, plain sort of pretty with a slim build would fit my definition of a 7.”

I generally don’t use the scale in real life; in fact, I can not remember ever having using it in RL, but there’s a small possibility I have. In normal conversation, the scale is kind of silly; the descriptors of beautiful, cute, unattractive, etc. are usually more than good enough and are more humanizing. (That and a numerical scale sounds sort of spergy, and I have enough problems with that as it is).

On the other hand, I occasionally use it on the blog as it is a simple comparative method; more human descriptor cans be open to interpretation and can have different meanings. While a numerical scale at least gives the illusion of objectivity.

But after the criticism of my assigning the label 7 I wanted to figure this out, my inner data nerd was aroused, so I’m going to analyze this more. I’ll warn you now, this is going to get spergy and is going to be dehumanizingly analytical.

Oh, and before I begin, Truthmosis at RotK has a post up on the scale that I came across while writing this. Check it out.

I’d also like to point out that, to some degree, beauty is subjective, so a numerical scale is not the be-all-end-all of female beauty. There are certain objective metrics of beauty: a 0.7 hip-to-waist ratio, symmetry, and other such indicators of fertility and health, that (almost) all men are naturally drawn towards. These can be a basis for an “objective” 1-10 scale.

But outside of that, there are numerous subjective factors on which men disagree. For example, I really like fair-skinned, light-haired, innocent-looking women (ie. cute women) and detest tattoos and piercings. A tongue piercing disgusts me and is an automatic 3-point drop. So, if I were to rate a woman with a tongue piercing a 5, others who don’t find it disgusting, might rate that woman an 8. Another example: I’ve never figured out why the Captain likes Jennifer Aniston or many men like Angelina Jolie; never seen the appeal.

Anyway, with that caveat out of the way, here we go.

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The first thing to do when creating a scale is decide the system the scale will use. The two major ones are the bell curve and the decile system. Men as a whole tend to use a bell curve system (on a 5-point scale), but I’ve tended to think in a decile system.

In a normal bell curve system (and looks would be normally distributed) a scale would be related to standard deviation. In standard deviation, 68% of all women would fall within one standard deviation from the mean, while 95% of all women would fall within two, and 99% would fall within three.

In a 1-10 scale 5 would be the mean. Most like we’d use 2 sigma (SD:2.5) above the mean to signify a 10 and 2 sigma below to signify a 0. 1 sigma would make far too many 10s, and 3 sigmas would mean only 2% of woman are above a 7+.

A 2 sigma scale would mean means that about 2% of woman would be 10s and 2% would be 0s. About 14% would be 7.5-9.5s and another 14% of woman would be 0.5-2.5s. The vast majority of woman (68%) would be 2.5s-7.5s.

We could also use a 2 sigma to signify 1s and 9s (SD:2). On this scale 2% of woman would be 9+ and another 2% would be below <1. 14% of woman would be 7-9 and another 14% of woman would be 1-3. The large majority of woman (68%) would be 3-7s.

If I were to use a bell curve, the latter is likely the one I would use because no one uses 0 on the 1-10 looks scale and many think (and I agree) that there are no 10s. Limits could easily be put at .1 and 9.9 without negatively effecting the rest of the scale. Not to mention the use of whole numbers rather than decminals greatly simplifies the scale.

So, if we’re scaling women’s looks on a 1-10 (Mean:5, SD:2) we can use a stanine scale to find the proportion of woman at each number.

On the other hand, if we use a decile system 10% of women would be 1s, 10% would be 10s, etc.

The former is more useful for statistical calculation, the latter is easier to use for everyday talk. It is a lot easier to calculate: she’s a 10 because she’s in the top 10% of people, she’s a nine because she’s in the 80-90% range, etc. than it is to calculate: she’s a 9 because she’s 2 SD above the mean and is in the top 4% of woman.

In more practical immediate effect, the former will result in a lot of 4-6s and few 1s and 9s, while the latter will result in an even distribution of all types of woman.

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Knowing this, how can we systematize the calculation of where an individual woman falls on this scale. That”s likely impossible because beauty is to some degree subjective, but we can give it a shot. This analysis will focus on adult women of child-bearing age because menopausal women are no longer sexually attractive.

In the US 32% of women aged 20-39 are obese. If we used the decile system, that would mean the obese take up all of 1s through 3s. If we used the bell curve, the obese take up 1-3 and most of the 4s as well.

But obesity is not the only indicator of unattractiveness, some women just have the bad luck to be born with a deformity of an extremely unattractive face. If, for simplicities sake, we estimated that 8% of women are simply born deformedly ugly (not unattractive or plain, just ugly), that means that on both scales 1-4s are made up of the deformed and fat.

So, simply not being obese or deformed would immediately make a woman a 5 in either scale.

Back to weight, in addition to the the obese are the overweight. 64% of adult women are either obese (BMI >= 30) (36%) or overweight (BMI of 25-29.9) (28%), so we’ll assume the 28% overweight rate hold for women 20-39. So, we now have 60% of women aged 20-39 who are overweight or fat, but let’s remove 5 percentage points because the BMI does sometimes classify fit people with muscle as being overweight. So about 55% of child-bearing age woman are unattractive due to be overweight or obese.

I can not find any numbers on the percentage of woman that are unattractive due to face alone, so I’ll have to make up some assumptions. Let’s assume, for the sake of ease, that 10% of women who are not fat, have faces that are unattractive enough, that a moderately fat woman with a decent face would rate higher on a scale.

With that assumption we now come to 65% of women are either fat or as unattractive as a fat woman.

(Check out this BMI visualizer to understand what is meant by overweight and obese).

In a decile scale that means that a woman who is not fat or equally unattractive is automatically a 7; in a normal distribution scale a woman who is not fat or equally unattractive is automatically a 6.

This gives us a starting base.

I do not have the time or ability to start messing around with the ins and outs of symmetry, eye size, distance between the eyes and mouth, and all the other micro-variations that distinguish beauty. Suffice to say though that most men can tell objective beauty of these micro-variations fairly easily.

So, we can assume they’d mostly agree.

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Based on this here’s a 1-10 scale we can use based on the decile system.

1-4: Obese and/or deformedly ugly
5: Fat or ugly
6: Chubby with a cute face or unattractive
7: Plain, not fat
8: Somewhat attractive
9: Slim and pretty
10: Curvy and beautiful

Here’s on based upon normal distribution:

1-4: Obese and/or deformedly ugly
5: Fat, chubby with an unattractive face, or ugly
6: Plain, not fat or chubby with a cute face
7: Slim and pretty
8: Curvy and beautiful
9: The best of the best (very rare)
10: Does not exist

The normal distribution lumps the middling and moderately attractive categories together but allows for the distinguishment of the really beautiful from the beautiful, while the decile scale allows for more distinguishment from the middling, but lumps all the beautiful together under 10.  The decile system leaves more distinguishment in those of middling beauty, but lumps the good looking into 2 categories.

From the impression I get from people write on the manosphere, they seem to use the normal distribution system. If we go back to Truthmosis’ discussion of the topic we can see that his scale more or less matches the normal distribution, as does his picture scale.

So, I guess I should start using the normal distribution scale to match up with others around here.

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Anyway, back to the women who started this discussion:

As we can see, she’d probably be plain, not fat. So, my initial impression of her as a 7 on the decile system was correct. If we used a normal distribution she’d be a 6.

Someone ranking her a 5 is implying she’s ugly, which I do not think this picture supports. Whoever ranked her as a 3 is just dead wrong; she’s neither obese nor deformedly ugly.

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A few last notes:

I knew the obesity crisis was bad, but I was surprised that 64% of adult women and 74% of adult men are overweight. That’s just plain nuts.

Also, only about 40% of women would be attractive enough to be worth even considering marrying (not even including other factors). So, if you’re looking to marry, make sure you’re in the top 40% of men or you’re going to end up with someone fat or unattractive.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my spergy little analysis.

The Two Male Sexual Appetites

In males there are two competing sexual appetites for the “hot” and for the “cute”. The difference is well illustrated by these two pictures from Rollo’s:

This is the same girl before and after her pornography make-up. You can tell which picture is hot and which is cute without me telling you.

These two appetites both elicit different types of attraction. The attraction to hot is entirely sexual, the attraction to cute is both sexual and emotional.

My triggered sexual response to the hot picture is primarily consumptive. There is no emotional elicited by the picture, just primal lust. I desire to fuck her; to use her like a piece of meat for my pleasure. The desired sex would be rough, bestial, and uncaring. When finished with her she would be kicked out. The desire is one of violation.

That is what hot elicits, the desire to consume sexual pleasure without regard for sexual object being consumed.

My triggered sexual response to the cute picture is different; there is an emotional component to the attraction. The desire is not just for sex, but for companionship as well. The desire is not just make love to her, but hold her close and caress her. The desired sex would be gentle and loving, finishing with drifting asleep, arms around her. The desire is one of protectiveness.

This is what cute elicits, the desire hold, to protect, and to love.

The hot woman becomes a sexual object to the man, the cute woman exists to him as a subject.

Having said this, hot provides a more powerful and urgent sexual attraction. The visceral desire to consume is stronger and more immediate, but it lacks depth. Finishing masturbation would immediately end any use for the hot picture, but one’s gaze may linger for a while on the cute picture even after completion.

The sexual attraction of hot is also a lot easier to trigger, all it requires is a decent body, make-up, and decent posing. All four of the Rollo’s post-make-up pictures triggered some consumptive response, as did most of the pictures at from the site he got it from. But only the cute one above triggered the cute response, and only a few of the dozens of pictures from the site he got these pictures from did.

Cute, pretty, and beautiful are a lot harder to pull off than hot is.

Yes, there is a difference between the four. Hot elicits a purely consumptive sexual desire. Cute is the type of attractiveness that elicits the protective desire in a man (it may be sexual or asexual, depending on the context). Pretty refers to common attractiveness, while beauty refers to a transcendental attractiveness.

Of these, hot is easy to create; a woman simply needs paint herself up and lose a few pounds. Cute is hard to create and fades harder with age (at least until a woman becomes grandmotherly where cute can return in an asexual form), but can be helped along by adopting a pleasant demeanor. Pretty is not overly difficult as long a women didn’t lose the genetic lottery or ruin herself by getting fat, going butch, etc. Beauty is the rarest and near impossible to create; a woman is born with it or she isn’t, but she can destroy it even if born with it.

It hardly needs to be said that different men have different preferences for the level of hot and cute they prefer, likely linked to their desire for sex versus their desire for companionship.

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This distinction is why women in pornography are usually hot, but are often not cute (or beautiful for that matter). Most pornography feeds on the consumptive desire, cute is not necessary, and can even be harmful to the “experience”. If the protective desire awakens the man may wonder how he can watch the “star” treated like a piece of meat, he may feel guilt or uneasiness; this is a boner-killer.

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This distinction is not something I made up, feminists have been abusing the madonna-whore dichotomy for their own ideological purposes for decades. The madonna would be cute, the whore would be hot.

Of course, they are correct that men desire the mutually exclusive dichotomy of the madonna or the whore, but they mistakenly think it’s some sort of socially enforced control. It is not, rather it is rooted in biology and darwinian strategy. It is similar to the cads and dads dichotomy. There are two different biological strategies for women, just as there are for men. A madonna (and a dad) pursues a reproductive strategy of high investment in a limited number of biologically non-diverse young (quality), while a whore (and a cad) pursues a reproductive strategy of low investment in a larger number of biologically diverse off-spring (quantity).

A man looking for sex wants a whore, someone hot, who will put out and be fertile. A dad looking for companionship wants a madonna, someone cute, who will reserve herself only for him so he can invest in her and their children.

Feminists rage against this, because they want to be hot, act like a whore, and pursue the quantity strategy while young, but be treated like madonnas pursuing the quality strategy when it becomes convenient to them.

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For men, this is mostly a theoretical post. You already know that the hot babe at the bar and the cute girl next door elicit different sexual responses in you, this just explains it. There’s not much practical to be drawn.

For the women who may happen to read this though, there is a lesson.

When you go out socially, how are you acting, dressing, etc. to achieve the type of relationship you desire?

If you are looking for companionship, slathering on lots of make-up and trying to look hot is counter-productive. You will get a response, but it won’t be the protective response, it will be the consumptive response. Men will desire you but only to use you sexually. Even the type of man looking for companionship will put you in the meat category, rather than the companion category.

It may be easier to be hot than to make yourself cute, pretty, or beautiful, and you will get stronger immediate responses for being hot, but you will not be getting anything deep from it. Put in the extra work and be cute and beautiful (or at least pretty if you weren’t naturally blessed) if you are looking for more than sex.

If on the other hand, you are looking for naught but sex, cake on that make-up and send this guy an e-mail.

Evolutionary Psychology, Politics, and Bad Science

Came across a Slate XX article from last week on evolutionary psychology.

The article essentially boils down to: evolutionary psychology research that supports my preconceived biases is good, evolutionary psychology that argues against my ideology is bad.

The article starts with the author complaining about evo-psych, leading into this:

There’s nothing inherently wrong with evolutionary psychology—our thoughts and behaviors have been shaped by millions of years of hominid evolutionary history, and it’s worth studying how natural selection acted on traits that we still express today. But too often, evolutionary psychology is a force for social conservatism.

The reason evolutionary psychology is usually a force for social conservatism, is because social conservatism is the inherited wisdom of thousands of years of adaptation by human society to biological reality.

Evolutionary psychology will inherently be socially conservative, because (true*) social conservatism is inherently about man controlling its biological nature so society can function. (Religious conservatives will refer to man’s “fallen nature” and political philosophers will refer to the “state of nature”, which are the same thing for all practical purposes).

Left-liberalism (from which most of feminism springs) is not about managing the biology of man, it is about using reason and/or morality to overcome the “state of nature” for the benefit of all.

Left-liberalism usually derives from either (or a combination of) Rousseau’s amoral, self-interested, animal-like state of nature or from Marxian ideology where human nature does not exist as a fundamental concept, but comes from social relations and man’s relations to his work. (Conservatives usually work off Hobbes’ violent and warlike state of nature; libertarians and classical liberals generally work off Locke’s  anarchic, fully free state of nature and of war.)

From the Rousseauian state of nature, men come together in cooperation and submit to the general will as designed through a social contract for mutual benefit. By uniting under the social contract a man can be ennobled, and his corruption comes only through failures of the social contract. By bettering the social contract, man may be further ennobled. Under a human nature based on social relations, the improvement of social and economic conditions will lead to an improvement in human nature and behaviour.

Left-liberal thought is essentially about the perfectibility of man through changing social conditions so he can better himself beyond the limitations of human nature.

In social conservative thought man cannot be perfected and will always be controlled by his human nature. His nature can only be constrained by social instructions, but never altered.

This is the essential and primary difference between the two ideologies.

This is political theory 101. If our education system even remotely resembled a traditional classical liberal education, the author would know this.

If she knew this, she would not be arguing against evolutionary psychology (when it supports social conservatism) or for it (when it supports feminist ideology). She would know that her ideology is one where social and economic relations are shaped through cooperation (the general will ) to create a society based on the common good, overcoming the limitations of man in a state of nature.

Know this: evolutionary psychology will always support (true*) social conservatism, because social conservatism is simply the attempt to control the state of nature so society can function.

To the liberal or leftist, this should not matter. Whatever evolutionary psychology will say, it can neither support nor discredit left-liberalism, because left-liberal ideology exists independently of human nature. It exists as an ideology of social relationships overcoming the limitations of human nature (or it simply rejects human nature, and therefore evolutionary psychology outright).

The only way evolutionary psychology can matter, at all, to left-liberal ideology is if it eliminates the possibility that changing social relations can possibly be used to improve mankind’s lot. If this occurs, the entirety of liberal-leftism will be intellectually unsustainable and void of any claim to truth.

In other words, the only way evolutionary psychology can have any impact on the truth claims of left-liberalism is to entirely overthrow it.

By even considering evolutionary psychology’s impact on the truth of ideology, the author is fundamentally undermining her own.

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Researchers identify a pattern of behavior, usually some stereotypical sex difference (in part because it’s easy to measure whether men and women score differently on a standardized test), construct a scenario in which that behavior would have been adaptive in the distant past, and say the behavior is therefore evolutionarily selected and encoded in our genes.

It’s tricky to disprove the notion that some human trait is the result of evolution. The logic is circular: if some trait exists, it must not have been fatal to our ancestors and it may have helped them reproduce. To critique a claim of evolutionary privilege, you have to show that the trait has no genetic component and therefore can’t be inherited, or demonstrate that the trait is instilled by culture, not necessarily biology.

Partially correct: it’s impossible to disprove the notion that some human trait is the result of evolution (if it’s genetic in origin).

To show that a trait is not a result of evolution requires that the trait is not genetically based.

If a behaviour is genetic in origin (and is not a random mutation or transcription error, such as Down’s Syndrome, or exceedingly rare/recessive, such as Tay–Sachs) it must have not have been fatal to humans prior to reproduction and, in highest likelihood, either is beneficial to reproduction or is linked to a trait that is beneficial to reproduction.

Any genetic trait is a product of evolution and therefore, evolution must have produced said genetic trait. Any genetic trait evolution produces must have been adaptive; the explanatory reason of why it is adaptive may not be correct, but it is impossible that the trait was not adaptive (or at least not harmful).

It may be somewhat circular, but, if you hold to Darwinian evolution, it is logically necessary. The only way to not accept evolutionary psychology is to deny Darwinian evolution.

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You’re supposed to want someone stronger, smarter, and richer than you. Someone who would sire healthy offspring and protect them from saber-toothed cats on the Pleistocene Epoch savanna.

Not “are supposed to”: “do”.

Evolution (and evolutionary psychology) is not prescriptive, it is descriptive of the large statistical trends of human society.

Just because evolutionary psychology says that something evolved in most humans does not mean you have to follow it (although, you statistically will) and it does not mean it applies in every case (some individuals will always be genetically aberrant and display behaviours and traits outside of what is statistically normal).

This is the kind of logic used by fourth-tier intellects arguing creationism in Youtube comments (IF EVALUTIAN IS RONG, Y U NOT SUPPORT HITLER AND SURVIAL OF TEH FITIST!?! HIPOCRIT!!!… durr). How a middle-brow publication like Slate allows this kind of stupidity through is beyond me. If it was somebody from the Discovery Institute arguing like this, he’d be laughed out of the room.

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The first few paragraphs of her post are complaints about what she believes to be “bad” science in evolutionary psychology. So, what does she list as the study that redeems evolutionary psychology:

And that’s why my favorite paper of the week is “Stepping Out of the Caveman’s Shadow: Nations’ Gender Gap Predicts Degree of Sex Differentiation in Mate Preferences.” Marcel Zentner and Klaudia Mitura of the University of York, U.K., asked more than 3,000 people in 10 countries what they valued in a mate. On a four-point scale, people rated the importance of various qualities: chastity, ambition, financial prospects, good looks, etc.—all identified by Buss and his likeminded peers as being qualities that only men or only women are evolutionarily predisposed to seek out.

Wonderful. A self-selected internet survey based on self-identified preferences somehow overturns all the carefully designed studies using brain scans, monitoring of biological functions, priming, and so on that support the conclusions of evolutionary psychology. That’s some good science.

The researchers used a World Economic Forum measure of gender equality to rank the 10 countries as (a) relatively gender-equal, (b) backwards but improving, or (c) screamingly sexist (my  terms, not theirs). And the results were clear: The more egalitarian the country, the less likely men and women were to value traditional qualities that Buss and co. believe to be innate. In Germany, women said they’d very much like a man who is a good housekeeper. In Finland, men were more likely than women to prefer a mate a bit smarter than themselves. In the United States, women ranked chastity as more important than men did. At the other end of the scale, in Turkey and South Korea, women wanted mates with good financial prospects and men valued good cooks.

Essentially, the survey finds that when asked about sensitive and potentially controversial topics over the internet, a self-selected group of people will give strangers the socially-approved answer. Thank you Slate for pointing out this stunning observation.

In case your sarcasm detector is malfunctioning, the study is complete and utter crap and drawing any conclusions about evolutionary biology from it is idiotic.

As the manosphere says repeatedly and consistently, look at what people do, not what they say.

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So, in conclusion, this article is mostly bunk. It’s a mishmash of a person’s ignorance of her own ideological underpinnings, wishful thinking, fourth-rate logic, and a person determining “good” science based on her own ideological biases.

In other words, it’s typical feminism.

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* I say true social conservatism, because a fair amount of what we call social conservatism now, is simply the repackaged liberalism of the last century. Actual social conservatives would generally be called paleo-conservatives. ie: Being against gay marriage, but believing in marriage for love does not a social conservative make, it only makes a liberal who doesn’t like homosexual marriage; to be a social conservative requires a traditional view of marriage as an economic, sexual, and (possibly) religious relationship based around the creation and raising of children.

Lightning Round – 2012/08/15

This week I learned that the best way to get page views is to piss people off. I also learned a lot of people will engage in a 2 Minute Hate without actually reading what they hate.

Part II of the Art of Manliness’s side hustle series. Part I.

Matt speaks truth about what males find attractive.
Related: An example of what men do not want.
Related: Dalrock explains the typical path of the type of women men should not want.

Comment of the Week: “Because you know it has to be REALLY BAD out there, when a single Christian man feels a nudge in his spirit, saying, “Yes, it’s okay to listen to Tom Leykis”. Because if the church doesn’t tell the truth, the stones will cry out.”

Athol on Red Pill women.
Related: 25 Politically Incorrect Ways to Make a Man Your Boyfriend. Can mostly be summed up as be a decent person, don’t be a bitch. Is that guide really necessary?

Check your privilege.

Forney mans up. It is only proper.
Related: A story (possibly apocryphal) of a women who grows up too late.

Interesting if true. I wonder why females have a slightly higher IQ now.
In other research: women enjoy making their husbands miserable.

That is some hilarious satire on Christianity.
More satire, this time on socialism.

Some people should really sue the public school system.

Big Brother is growing.
Related: Anarcho-tyranny explained.
Related: Some bait for conspiracy theorists.
Related: The US is a company store.

I don’t know what to say to this example of defending the indefensible.

The new American Dream is a job.
Related: Man finds outC he has 653 competitors for a single job.
Could Canada join America in the housing bust?

Environmentalism is simply a front for anti-humanism.

Really? You mean the rich don’t want to support the guy encouraging class war?

The government can’t create an engaged employee. Bureaucratic works destroys engagement.
Related: Government economics.

I’ve said it before: the media are the enemy.

Utah is the most pleasant state in which to live. Maybe the old ways are best.

Sharing is not caring.

(H/T: InstaPundit, Save Capitalism, SDA, Clarissa, Empath Negative)