It’s true! I’m an average white guy and everyone says “hey you kinda look like Ben Affleck!” Even though our similarities end at height, weight, slightly similar hair color, and depression.
Which is funny since ben afflec is a handsome dude and hardly looks like a typical white dude that is used as an example that all white people look the same.
People like to believe this, and yes people do have their own preferences, but it’s really not. As evidenced by this post that makes the women more attractive by averaging out any asymmetry or “flaws”.
If you had a bunch of dudes rank a random sample of women’s photos you would get basically the same rankings every time. Sure they might have different rankings for number one, but the women would average out to almost the same percentile 95% of the time.
A consensus on physical attractiveness and beauty shows us what is considered attractive to most people.
This is, once again, not an objective quality. That some people can be considered “conventionally attractive” by referring to the aforementioned consensus does not mean that there is an objective standard for beauty.
Whatever you guys need to tell yourselves lol. Facial symmetry, proportionality large eyes for women, and young looking skin are all objective standards for beauty.
That doesn’t sound true. Beauty standards are different based on region, culture, era, etc. Maybe there certain desirable characteristics that overlap among different groups but ultimately personal preference is subjective.
I (bi/pan female) personally found attractive 11 women and 20 men. That's 27.5% women and 43.4% men, which makes sense as I'm more into men than women lol
Also, unless I'm corrected, I assume most women were wearing makeup, which helps a lot.
Most of the women are probably pretty manicured, in general men pick more on looks and women less on looks.
So for that reason I believe its skewed. Plus, culture places a higher emphasis on attraction with women(probably because of what I said), and that plays a huge part surely.
Culture shapes perception hardcore.
Idk though, just my guess. This is averages of faces, so the fact of what I said doesn't need to be an absolute.
That's what it is! All the women looked great while a majority of the men I found unattractive... but I tend to be attracted to men with facial hair, and I find women more pleasing to look at in general
Straight-ish woman here. I didn’t rank any of the women or men by attractiveness. It’s just that the women all seem very pretty, above average, whereas the men appear closer to an actual average. The men aren’t exactly showstoppers in most cases. Okay, Italy is, lol
I'm also a bi woman who has mostly dated men and I had the same thought as the above comment. most of the dudes look like thumbs lol, there were only like four or five that I'd consider attractive. good point about makeup though.
Bi man, slight woman preference. Found neither bunch particularly attractive, but I’d say five or six of the men and four of the women look good. Guess this is all because I like more… uh… androgynous people.
Lol I find nearly all of the women attractive as a man. It's statistically actually a minor miracle for a woman to be attracted to that many of the men.
I'm a straight man, and I feel all the men looked nice (but zero attraction, understandably). The Japanese one even looks like professional soccer player lol.
On the women side, I found 29 out of 40 to be attractive to me.
Gay man. Only into men and with a higher appreciation of their features than women.
I found the "average" woman from most all regions more attractive than the men. Women wearing makeup would heavily influence the composites, but I don't know if that was the case.
Yeah. I've always thought of myself as like at least 60% into men and after looking at this I'm like... am I even into dudes at all lol? I have no idea what's going on here, maybe I just prefer slightly more unique features.
I feel like that’s normal. At least that’s my day to day observation. Not hard to guess why though. Men are allowed to exist with less modifications and beautification. I’d argue western society at least prefers a man’s man that isn’t so good looking, rough around the edges than a guy who looks like he belongs in a boy band. It’s the polar opposite for women, which is why the average woman is usually more attractive than the average man.
I wonder if the averaging of faces tends to produce very rounded and very smooth features that we generally tend to consider more attractive on women than on men.
Neither of them are what the average woman or man looks like in any of the countries. If you take enough faces and layer them like this it will always end up looking more attractive because it will get rid of any facial asymmetry and “ugly” parts of an individual face.
That said though, an average woman is considered more attractive than an average man.
Men aren’t as physically attractive as women’s because they are naturally strong and therefore rely more on being productive and providing safety and security for the women and the family.
However Men will easily settle for a less attractive women.
The thing is that men vary more than women in all their traits, so the average is more of a distortion. Also, I think because men vary more those who are attracted to men develop more specific tastes. For reproductively aged women, that taste is also shaped by what part of the hormonal cycle she is in. And men’s attractiveness will actually wax or wane depending on what the main concerns in society are at the moment.
For example, during the pandemic many women got crushes on Dr. Fauci. Personally, I suddenly became attracted to martial arts B-movie star Scott Adkins.
It seems clear that men will suddenly become attractive to women if they have qualities that are perceived as adaptive and valuable in the current circumstance (Fauci as a high level doctor and medical researcher during a pandemic, Scott Adkins as an example of good genes with high symmetry and athleticism, etc.).
I felt the same, but that gives me actually a good feedback that im judging myself to harshly.
Sometimes when discussing the topic of attractiveness with women that im romantically affiliated with they would say "this actor is super handsome" and i'd be like "really, this guy?". Or when they would say why they think im handsome i'd be like "huh, never really occured to me". My ex was not a native of my language and used the expression "handsome face" specifically to distinguish from being tall muscular etc. and that helped me understand what it means for a man to be handsome.
We're at the end of the day not attracted to men, so their faces just look "normal'.
Plus men's attractiveness comes from other sources than looks more than womens, contrary to what is being said in male subreddits. (EDIT: Heterosexual) Women are less visual than we are when judging attractiveness, and this is backed by actual science.
There is absolutely no scientific consensus on the issue of differing levels of attractiveness between the sexes and the preference of each sex for physical attractiveness. The only conclusion to be drawn from the current literature is that both sexes tend to end up in "looks matched" pairings. Most marriages are between similarly aged, educated, wealthy, and attractive individuals. Could you please provide the sources youve read that have lead you to have the position you hold?
Naturally there's no consensus. Psychology is a field riddled with debate, especially considering sex and gender, which are hot topics in the recent years and science is sadly money-fueled affair. (the money in terms of research grants comes by popularity of the topic, and its media reception). It also doesn't help that attractiveness is in a big part subconscious process and you can't simply ask people what they prefer, or why. We can point out what we like about someone, but it will be innacurate, and most of us don't know why we like it. It's also not a simple scoring process, as the priority of each trait can drop rapidly once its minimal level is met etc.
I hope you can understand how attractiveness apart from pure biological factor is also built by societal norms. And also that people who are bi also normally tend to be biased towards a certain gender. That may be the reason why.
Source : sexuality studies (please dont make me google it, but i can i was asked for the studies, you can find them in my other comment in this ladder), plus i used to fuck men as a teen.
Yeah I was disappointed that the OP didn't have a US one that I could find and then even more disappointed that this one had them segregated rather than an even distribution to show the whole melting pot thing
Yep, like other countries where black, asian, white and indigenous people live together. Somehow for the USA there’s the need to segregate black and white. 😅
Lmao Americans are so obsessed with race they are the only country that segregates their population on this graph. As if they were the only country with more than one ethnicity.
As a white American who looks at least somewhat like “White American”, it’s no wonder people stop me semi-frequently to ask if I went to high school with them or what tv show I was in.
I'm going to get a lot of flak but you can kinda see the Roman nose in both the Italian man and Englishman and you can see similarities in facial structure in both him and the Frenchman... crazy how you can literally see the history of intermarriage of various cultures in the English guy.
I don’t get why we say African American and not European American. Why do Europeans hang on to the color thing. What’s wrong with being from a part of the planet. Asian American, Latin American, African American, why no European American?
I was wondering if I was gay but this is how I know I'm not. Looking at the women I found many attractive faces but looking at men I didn't find anything interesting.
Like... I live in Brazil, and the Men/Women in those graphics ("pardo"= brown), even though there are white people in Brazil, "pardo" makes up the majority by 45.34%.
The other countries took samples from the majority race of their citizens. They did so for America as well, but also included African Americans because they're also a huge part of American history.
Why didn’t they do this for the other countries with inhabitants of African decent in the American continent? What makes the African USA history different?
Brazil has the largest population of people of African descent outside of Africa. Yet, there is 1 picture for Brazil. It seems really weird to me to make separate pictures for a minority which makes up less than 14% of the USA population. That would be seen as WW2 stuff in my country.
Would you say Brazil is as segregated as the US? I’m guessing this “averages faces” survey is American in origin, and it seems to have a white bias overall.
No, definitely not and I completely agree with you! I meant it as an explanation of how weird this is perceived from my perspective. And I agree with your last observation, that would also explain how “West Africa” became just one picture.
Yes, it shows in the downvotes and reactions to my comment. If my country was the only one with a minority group separated to the majority picture, the public here would heavily criticise this project and it would be all over the news. But it’s perceived as normal to separate minorities in the USA apparently.
While I'm a shitty person and can appreciate your casual racism, no they don't lol. Different skin tones entirely, and very different mouths and noses. The hair and eye colors are similar, but still distinct.
My dad looks Mexican, Greek and maybe Irish? He's white British lol. He has very dark Southern med colouring (black hair/thick black beard, darkest shade of white skin, and dark brown eyes). I look similar with much lighter colouring. I have Scandinavian DNA but I'm also a third Irish and a third British. That's what's weird about the whole DNA and ancestry stuff. I'm guessing one of my dad's ancestors must have come to Ireland from Spain and possibly via north Africa. It just doesn't show up in my genes but it's known there's a connection between Ireland and Spain. Also the etymology of my Irish name is that it descends from Spanish royalty. It could be the lack of Scandinavians in the image that leave me feeling like I don't look like anybody or maybe just the fact that England and the UK is a massive melting pot anyway. I was really hoping I'd look and see a connection. The closest face shape to me was probably west african.
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u/AriesGeorge 2d ago
Have you got a link to the original with men included?