The Guardian, a British publication, has made an earth-shattering discovery:
“Women’s faces are rated as more attractive than men’s, even by other women, but the perceived gap declines with age and all but vanishes by the time people reach their 80s, researchers have said.”
To restate this in a single sentence: All but the most elderly women are, on average, more visually appealing than most men.
This generalization will simultaneously upset a certain kind of feminist, the sex-starved zealots from the manosphere, as well as the sexless “gender-neutral” crowd.
But it’s true. This is something I discerned decades ago. It was the early 1980s. I was an adolescent boy who was just starting to “notice” girls and women. I was at the grocery store, and I spotted the seductively attractive woman on that month’s cover of Cosmopolitan.
There was a seductively attractive woman on the cover of Cosmopolitan every month, I observed. Often these women were clad in revealing attire. These were images that the average heterosexual man would find very attractive.
Cosmopolitan, though, isn’t a girly magazine aimed at horny men. The target market of Cosmopolitan has always been heterosexual women.
But at the same time, the covers of Cosmopolitan were always adorned with photos of attractive women.
What gives? I wondered.
Gradually, I understood. Even heterosexual women would rather look at images of other women than at just about any man.
(Here’s another piece of magazine trivia from long ago. In the mid-1970s, they came out with Playgirl, a magazine that was supposed to be the women’s equivalent of Playboy. The magazine attracted almost no female readership (though some women did consider it a novelty/joke). The only demographic who read Playgirl in significant numbers were gay men.)
The most recent People magazine “Sexiest Man Alive” selectees were Jonathan Bailey and John Krasinski.
Neither one of them is much to look at. Sure, you could make the case that both Bailey and Krasinski are “less ugly” than I am. But I can’t think of a reason why any human eye would linger on either of these two men for a second longer than necessary.
This is one reason why, as a thoroughly average-looking man, I have never been particularly sensitive about my looks. I may not be much to look at. But neither is that other guy.
-ET