Playing percentages

[mrissa]

This article talks about a worldwide study of women's views of their own appearance. The part of the survey they pull out for the lead is that only 2% of women from ten different sample countries consider themselves beautiful. I'm not sure that's wrong, though: "beautiful" is a superlative, and not everyone can be superlative. How many women think they're "brilliant," as opposed to "smart" or "bright"? How many women think they're "hilarious," not just "funny" or "witty"? And -- I think this would be the most interesting -- what percentage of other women do they think are beautiful? I think it's most likely that some of the people answering that affirmatively are ranking themselves in the top 25%, some in the top 10%, some in the top .5%, and some that they have good features that they like all right (which could be who knows what percent).

Also, what do men think of all this? If you asked thousands of men to rate their own attractiveness, would similar numbers of them agree to do it in the first place? What would they say? And what percentage of men do they (and we) estimate actually are -- I hate "handsome," it's a Ken-doll word -- extremely attractive?

Anybody want to have a go at answering any of that?

The part that bothers me is not the superlative. It's that only 5% consider themselves pretty (and that'd be a hand up here; I have gotten to the point in my life where I can say that and not flinch) and 9% consider themselves attractive. "Attractive" is a low standard, people. Everybody in women's magazine fluff pieces is at least "attractive." I can see where "I am beautiful!" would be a hard proclamation to make. But "attractive" sounds positively Scandosotan in its restraint. "Attractive" is what your friends tell people they're trying to set you up with, if they don't want to say "has the face of an elderly woodchuck." And we've got only 16% of women "worldwide" (ten countries, not the same thing) ascribing to themselves at least woodchuck standards of attractiveness? That's pathetic.

And it says 63% strongly that "women today are expected to be more attractive than their mother's generation." And if they're my age, they're smoking crack. I mean, seriously. It was socially acceptable for us to go to class in high school and college wearing pajama pants. Ask anybody my mom's age how kosher that was. Ask them, when they were 16 or 20, whether they would have felt comfortable wearing low-rise pants and cropped tops if it meant they were showing the world visible fat rolls. Go ahead, I dare you.

I know that there's a contingent out there that goes with the "every woman is beautiful" theory, and I just don't buy it. I think that the word loses its meaning at that point. I used to make the rash claim that I could find an attractive feature in anybody, until scottjames found a counterexample in our immediate social circle at the time (an individual I liked all right, and of my preferred sex), and I sat there going, "Err...umm...well, he's got nice -- well, no, not really, his eyes are kind of weird-looking. But his hands are...uh, okay, kind of grub-like. Oh dear. Ummm...." I would still maintain that most people have an immediately obvious attractive feature or two. But I don't think that's the same thing as beauty. Is it?

Comments

[sdn.livejournal.com]

"pretty" isn't a word i'd want to use to describe myself, actually! it seems very ephemeral.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yeah, "pretty" is not necessarily a midpoint between "moderately attractive" and "extremely attractive."

I think it is ephemeral. My grandmother was pretty when she was my age, and I don't think she's pretty now. I think she's attractive, but in a different way. Not something a study like that will measure at all.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I would still maintain that most people have an immediately obvious attractive feature or two. But I don't think that's the same thing as beauty. Is it?

I'm with you here. At least, my definition of beauty encompasses the person whose appearance immediately strikes the eye, causing one's appreciative gaze to linger. Not necessarily want to possess--there are different styles of beauty, and some, at least to me, are off-putting--but outstanding. But my radar is always on, and I love observing beauty in people as well as places and the fall of light yada yada.

I also find it's the rare ordinary person who doesn't have at least one attractive feature, and almost always these are very sick folk.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

But isn't bone structure a part of beauty? (Indeed, sometimes it's difficult to see past the cosmestic guk and weird hairstyles of current fashion to perceive the beauty underneath.)

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Not necessarily want to possess--there are different styles of beauty, and some, at least to me, are off-putting--but outstanding.

"Possess" may be the wrong word for the gradation that seems important to me in this - but that may just be a gut reaction against it being a word I wish to apply to any person ever. There are certainly kinds of beauty that make me wish to know more of a person, though, and other kinds which I am fine to admire from the distance at which they are brought to my attention but not in the least drawn to be closer to; however, ask me to quantify this without examples and I would rapidly lose coherence.

I also find it's the rare ordinary person who doesn't have at least one attractive feature, and almost always these are very sick folk.

I agree with that, but on reflection I think there are at least two additional categories of people on whom possibly attractive features are invisible to me; vide, people who are too young - not necessarily just in terms of physical age - for it to be apt for me to be attracted to them, and people with whom I have a professional relationship.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I guess when I use the word "attractive," I don't connect it directly with "I am attracted to this person." So I could say that some child is good-looking without wanting to do inappropriate things to/with him/her. I have the same deal with women: I can evaluate female attractiveness without really interacting much with it. I can recommend women friends as "cute" or "purty" or whatever to friends who are attracted to women, but it's not something I have much emotional investment in.

That's interesting that you've got (developed? or just naturally have?) that kind of professional remove. Must be useful. I have to insert that sort of thing mentally. It doesn't come naturally.

For me, one of the key moments of what it's like to have siblings was the realization that while markgritter and seagrit's youngest brother Matt had grown up to be a not-unattractive person and in fact bears rather close resemblance to the markgritter I married, I didn't have to insert the mental remove. My brain just wasn't evaluating him in adult-male terms, even though I treat him as an adult person and he's clearly male and I both like and love him very much. That aspect of things had just gone off like a switch. And my brain said, "Oh, is that what having a brother is like!" I know that's not the whole of it, but it's a part I hadn't experienced directly before. Before that, all little-brother figures had been too young to be evaluated as adults.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The later comments in the article were aimed at overturning the idea that beauty has to be ungreyed, unlined, and skinny, I think.

You could add a section to your updates! Webreadings, TV series commentary, and legions of suitors rebuffed!

[blzblack.livejournal.com]

I think "beautiful" is a far cry from "beauty." Beautiful is full of beauty--a feature I associate with supermodels and generally find dull to look at, anyway. I like flawed beauty, myself. You, for instance, have beauty--a plain beauty--not striking or distinctive or overwhelming but pleasing to the eye in a way that is not bland as I find beautiful. Beautiful is excess and sugary.

For guys, beauty really is in the eye of the beholder--even within a family. The girls my brother liked were okay, but there was usually something I thought that substracted from their looks. I mean, here was a guy who attracted and could have had nearly any girl in three states, but he'd pick a really scrawny one or a cute one with huuuuge teeth. I brought home one girl from college I was absolutely gaga over, and both he and my father thought she was rather plain (as opposed to a plain beauty), which rather shocked me. Things can change even over time. I dated one girl that I swore to myself two years earlier she was a type I'd never date--her being odd in a frumpy sort of way, always dressing herself unflatteringly--a vow I'd forgotten until I'd started dating her, smitten by her up-close features and quirks.

The expectation of women that they must be attractive is in the mind of the woman who believes it and/or in the advertisements that try to sell this expectation. Guys are notorious for their inability to spot the new hairstyle or the new whatnot. A little reasonable care for appearance and health is all that's necessary. Even worse for this expectation is that, for many guys I suspect, what they fall in love with is the mind. It's easy to catch a guy's eye but harder to catch the mind. I imagine it's the same for most women, too.

T

[blzblack.livejournal.com]

"Does it turn out that falling for someone's mind tends to lead one to fall for their looks as a corollary, too?"

Definitely. As mentioned above, I learned my lesson. I try to keep an open mind. Sometimes the mind is quickly captured, sometimes over time. On the other hand, if you're had any experience with certain types, you can guess that they'd have a hard time in relationship with you--like straight-laced types that go for the let's-see-what-happens guys. I have no idea why they'd want to torture themselves that way.

Falling for the mind can go against a person in the other direction, too. Some attractive-looking people attain a hideous beauty if they're cruel or make assumptions about people they don't know, etc.

Girls in love are obvious to girls. Not so obvious to guys, though.

Trent

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Funny, I have the opposite connotations. To me, "pretty" is the bland Barbie doll, while "beautiful" can encompass irregular but pleasantly arresting features. But then I don't match Mrissa either, because I don't mind "attractive": I'd probably use it to mean something like "definitely good to look at, and not necessarily stereotypedly sugar-spun pretty". In fact, that might be the word I'd use for you, Mrissa. Which all goes to show the inexactitude of words.

Another problem: I can't speak for others, but my looks change from day to day - and I think it's really my looks, not just my opinion of them. Also, I photograph badly at least 60-75% of the time (the pictures on my website, obviously, are from the good minority. So I don't know if I'd say I was attractive. I'm rarely actually painful to look at, but at least in photos, I range from "Ugh" to "Wow". So how could I answer in one word?

[sdn.livejournal.com]

and let's not forget that what one person considers beautiful, someone else considers plastic, or ugly, or whatever.

so much of what the media considers beauty has more to do with how someone is in front of a camera. there really are people who can transform. (i don't mean through makeup or surgery or airbrushing!)

it is also instructive to ask people to describe you (as i did here (http://www.sharyn.org/describe.html) -- i know i got much more of a sense of what i looked and was like overall than i would have from seeing a photo (it's hard to be objective about a photo of yourself), and i hope other people who see the page do, too.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

and let's not forget that what one person considers beautiful, someone else considers plastic, or ugly, or whatever.

Heavens, yes. timprov's mom is fascinated with what people find attractive and why, so for awhile she was asking us which actors or actresses we thought were good-looking. And I was woefully, woefully short on answers, because I am primarily drawn to geeks, and Hollywood is not.

As for describing oneself -- I was saying to dd_b that I don't even have a basic idea of how tall people would say I am, adjectivally speaking, much less anything more than that. I just don't know what people see when they look at me. Even something like height descriptors has ranged across the board -- I've been described as short and as tall, and I don't think I'm either. (I'm 5'6". The average American female is 5'4".) So when I meet a random stranger, I really have no idea what they think they're seeing on anything more subjective. Maybe it'd be worth asking the way you did. Hmm.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I once had people describe my voice-- I hadn't asked them to, but someone on an internet group asked the others who had met me to do so, because he said that no one really knows what their own voice sounds like-- and it was fascinating to read their responses. I always hated hearing my voice recorded, since it sounds to me like some squeaky little animated chipmunk, but to my relief, nobody used the dreaded word "squeaky," let alone "chipmunk."

Ah, here we go:

"If you met her and heard her speak you might ASSUME she was
well-educated, down-to-earth Jewish girl with a working class
background. If she dressed up she would look (and sound) like she's
lived in New York (a transplant), definitely a member of the New York
literary and arts circles." Etc.

And:

"To me, Rachel sounds like a West Coast Jewish (but NOT
Valley) combination of Sexy Librarian and Intrepid Girl
Reporter from an old movie. Not an annoying, rescue-prone
girl reporter like vintage Lois Lane (Dana Delaney redeemed
the character in the recent SUPERMAN cartoons, but the
original was pretty annoying), but a hardboiled (yet
refined) one like Rosalind Russell in HIS GIRL FRIDAY or the
wisecracking female lead in MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM."

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

I've got nothing insightful to say about most of this. I'm sort of just thinking and scratching my head.

But I did see a documentary long ago that digitally mapped facial features of both "average-looking" people and "beautiful" people, and found that what people had in common on the prettier end of the spectrum was that they were much closer to an average of facial dimensions for the human species. ("Women want mediocre men and men are trying to be as mediocre as possible" --Margaret Mead: not a stunning indictment on the male of the species, but more illustrates the point that the middle ground is often the ideal in considering survival/reproduction/etc.)

Most of the things we are attracted to--the features we consider beautiful--do seem to equate to good health and "good" genetics.

Putting it all together with cultural expectations and self-image... (shakes head) Too hard.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I have read that men tend to rate themselves as above average in terms of looks, and women tend to rate themselves as average. If you then show their photos to other people and have them rated, you find that the men are overestimating their attractiveness and the women are underestimating theirs.

This fits in with my own experience, which is that men do tend to be confident that they're at least reasonably attractive, whereas women seem to think that they're just passable. But to my eyes, there are far more attractive women than attractive men, probably because women tend to at least glance at a mirror before they go out, while a lot of men self-evidently don't.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I try to wash regularly, and brush my teeth. I nearly always comb my hair before going out. I even trim my beard periodically (several times a year).

The base difference is that I don't think any attractiveness I have has that much to do with how I *look*. I try to avoid things that would actively put people off, and beyond that I try to be comfortable and practical.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I've heard that before, women saying that they see far more attractive women than attractive men. I disagree pretty thoroughly. It could be that Minneapolis has more attractive men per capita than most cities (well, let's go with yes on that one, but I recognize that as a personal quirk or more likely a sum of personal quirks), but I doubt it, because I still saw more attractive men than women in the Bay Area.

Is it because I'm personally attracted to men and only recognize female attractiveness at more of a remove? Maybe. But I think it's a matter of what one values in appearance. I would reverse the "women tend to at least glance at a mirror before they go out, while a lot of men self-evidently don't" and say "women tend to get froofy and fussy, while a lot of men self-evidently don't."

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure *I* know what I mean by the various words indicating female attractiveness. And every single one of them is contra-indicated in wide areas -- "cute" is demeaning, "attractive" is what you say if you can't say anything better so it means looks like a woodchuck, "beautiful" is excessive, "hot" is too personal, etc.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Hmmm....nothing really insightful to say. All I can say is that my standards of beauty are a bit different than most people's, I think. I tend to like somewhat "meatier" women, not actually obese, but with meat on their bones. Skinny toothpick anorexic women do not attract me at all.

I also find real intelligence to be very sexy. If a woman can discourse knowledgeably on a subject, even one I don't know much about, then my interest is piqued. (Note that if the subject is fashion or pop culture, this does not usually apply.)

Oh, and if a woman has an engaging personality, a sympathetic demeanor, and a genuine concern and caring for other people, it's also majorly attractive. Bonus points if she also has a wacky sense of humor. :-)

[(Anonymous)]

I have to say that I have always been confused as to what beautiful means. I remember when I was younger I had read Gone with the Wind and my friend and I were going to watch the movie. I was so excited because I was finally going to find out what the most beautiful woman in several counties would look like and I was so disappointed. I can truly say that I have never met a person that I would, in my head, apply the word beautiful to and I have only ever met one or two people in my life who I could call ugly. The fact that people obsess over it so much really puzzles me.

Heathah

Feeling good vs looking good

[kchew.livejournal.com]

I think that many women will say that they "feel" beautiful at certain times but not others. They won't commit to a statement of constant, unchanging beauty but will say things like "I got dressed up last night to go out and I felt stunning." Perhaps this is because they are victims of the beauty myth, or maybe they just don't want to appear vain and understate their actual feelings about themselves.

For myself, I know that I wouldn't describe myself as beautiful, but would say that I have had my moments... :)

The fifties generation had to get up before their husbands to make sure that their makeup was on right. My husband saw me in labour. You're right: that part of the survey is definitely on crack.

Re: Feeling good vs looking good

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I had a go-round about feeling pretty vs. being pretty several times. "I feel pretty when I'm around you." "You are pretty." "Okay, I'm glad you think so, but I feel pretty when I'm around you." "But you are...." Etc.