Contributed by: ElyseRomano on Friday, April 19 2013 @ 09:31 am
Last modified on
I think I speak for all of us when I say that the good old days of the OkTrends blog are sorely missed. We all looked forward to a new post from Christian Rudder on something button-pushing and scandalous, like race or attractivenesss. Like many who mourn the loss of the infamous blog, James Taranto, a writer for WSJ.com, returned to a 2009 OkTrends post to illuminate a present conundrum.
The conundrum[*1] in question was the WSJ's Valentine's Day survey on attraction and the sexes. The OkTrends post offered this bit of obvious advice: an attractive photo is essential to a successful online dating profile. To figure out exactly how much of an edge beautiful people had, OkCupid asked users to rate the attractiveness of members of the opposite sex on a six-point scale (with 0 as the lowest).
A chart shows that the distribution of female attractiveness as rated by men is close to the normal distribution known as the bell curve (or, as Taranto calls it, the "belle curve"). In other words, the average woman's looks are rated "medium," and an equal number of women are rated on either side of that with the numbers declining relatively evenly until they approach zero.
So although current wisdom says that pop culture has created unrealistic expectations of how women should look, OkCupid's findings show that men rate female attractiveness with surprising fairness. The "belle curve" also suggests that female beauty is a natural phenomenon, rather than a social construct.
The results for male beauty, on the other hand, look dramatically different. The average man, according to OkCupid's data, is extremely unattractive. More than a quarter are rated 0, and the majority rate 1 or below. "Women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium," Rudder notes. "Very harsh."
But Taranto finds Rudder's conclusions unconvincing. "For one thing," he writes, "these charts tell us nothing about the behavior of the average-looking woman (or man); the second chart depicts the perceptions and behavior of all women. For another, the ratings are averages of those given by all members of the opposite sex, not those who send messages. A man whose average rating is 1 may score considerably higher among the subset of women who send him messages."
What's most interesting about the charts, says Taranto, is that they seem to clearly show that attraction is based in something other than looks for women. Women's evaluations of male appearance are based not on physical characteristics, but on other valuable traits that are - unlike female beauty - socially constructed.