Physical attractiveness and intergenerational social mobility | Hacker News Reader

Physical attractiveness and intergenerational social mobility

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

99 pointsPaulHoule136 comments

Being someone who was both conventionally unattractive and conventionally attractive (I had a digestive disorder for years that made me terrifyingly skinny and sickly looking), I can say that the difference is astronomical.

Once I figured out what was wrong with me, fixed my diet and got in shape, the way people treated me in general shifted dramatically towards positive. Rather than starting from a unreceptive low with everyone new, I started with a positive welcoming reception. People would just defacto trust me and assign me positive traits just for being good looking.

It's mind blowing to me how there is so much focus on whatever -ism, but no one talks about "looksism". Regardless of your gender or race, if you look good, people will default treat you well. If you look bad, every encounter is an uphill battle.

> Once I figured out what was wrong with me, fixed my diet and got in shape, the way people treated me in general shifted dramatically towards positive.

It’s called pretty privilege and it’s a real thing.

If you look it up on YouTube you’ll find plenty of good looking women describing what they got out of it, and it’s astonishing.

Evolution is stronger than all of us.

many times i’ve said “fuck evolution” because no matter how hard i try to be an intellectual being, evolution eventually draws me back to my reproduction instincts.

> It's mind blowing to me how there is so much focus on whatever -ism, but no one talks about "looksism". Regardless of your gender or race, if you look good, people will default treat you well. If you look bad, every encounter is an uphill battle.

This is the equivalent of the universal standard in xkcd¹. Situation: We have 13 -isms, but nobody talks about the real ism, so we need to promote it. Situation: We have 14 -isms.

All these isms were reduced to buzzwords and have no meaning anymore.

¹: https://xkcd.com/927/

Can second this. Over the last few years I fixed some hormonal, dietary, and stress issues which resulted in much clearer skin, better hair, and more toned/muscular body; taking me from average to conventionally attractive based on commentary from friends/family.

There is a clear boost in first impressions generally being much more positive, my ideas being regarded more highly, and coworkers/leaders wanting to promote me. I don't think my intellect has changed much over that time.

I will say looking good also has a clear boost on self esteem and boldness which I'm sure at least partially contributes to the social changes.

Yeah that's a whole other dimension to it. The positive feedback loop it creates.

With being unattractive, there is a metaphorical "gut punch" of sorts that you always get when meeting people. Often even from people you know. Imagine just before going on stage to give a presentation, getting yourself psyched up, and someone tells you "Your voice sounds kind of weird". It just entirely kicks you off kilter and it comes through in your talk. Being unattractive you end up getting kicked off kilter a lot. You might not even know it if its all you have ever known.

But when you are good looking? It's almost like it switches and people make themselves vulnerable to see how you evaluate them. It's your word and your actions that matter, not theirs. People just openly pour confidence into your cup.

The whole things is so bizarre logically thinking, it's so primal, so human.

Just to add to that: confidence is often a wonderful substitute (or an enhancer?) for conventional physical attractiveness.

And it can compound sort of. If everyone tends to be nice to you, you go into situations expecting to become friends, which produces a good attitude that people respond to positively. (It can also lead to blind spots of course, but overall I’ll take it).

>I had a digestive disorder for years that made me terrifyingly skinny

Could you elaborate? I have something similar of unknown cause

Yeah sure, I discovered after 27 years of living that dairy makes me passively sick. I am lactose intolerant too, that came about as I got older, but I also have some kind of sensitivity to dairy. It makes me nauseous and kills my appetite while in my system. Lots of cramps and random belly aches too. Not a lot (or any) gas and diarrhea like is commonly associated with lactose intolerance.

I had no idea since I ate a typical American diet my whole life, which is very heavy in dairy. I thought feeling sick and nauseous after eating was normal. I thought not really ever being too hungry was just how I was. I thought having stomach cramps all the time was just human.

The whole story is long, but eventually I went from a low lactose diet (knowing I was lactose, I still ate low or no lactose dairy foods - hard cheeses, yogurts, lactose free whatever) to eating no dairy products. Only butter.

I gained 60 pounds in the 8 months following this, I also learned that feeling nauseous all the time also isn't normal and I am capable of eating way more than I thought possible.

I have to imagine the “unattractive sickly stage” is likely related to basic things like monkey brain “hmm that person doesn’t look healthy maybe I should stay away from them”. Or pattern recognition stuff like “don’t see that everyday. What’s going on here?” that could lead to the skepticism and lack of trust and confidence.

Otherwise people generally like looking at pretty things and being surrounded by pretty things. Interior, product, etc design is a thing because people will buy something for how it looks over how well it actually functions. Or all things being equal or close they will pick the “pretty” one. They are attracted to it, drawn to it. Artwork that is appealing to enough people is worth more than artwork that isn’t.

Of course it is the same with people.

you can also say the same thing for traits like skin color. imo part of racist behavior is due to the primal instinct to stay away from whoever looks “different” from you, especially in a way that’s associated with diseases. like if you’re white, a brown person might come off as a little bit “sickly” to you, resulting in less favorable judgments. we know that it’s not necessarily true, but the monkey brain does its thing anyway.

I just open these threads to see if the top comment is “Attractive person here, can confirm”.

The comment is more "formerly unattractive person who is now attractive here, can confirm." People who have never been unattractive can't confirm, because they live in a bubble and just think that's how everyone is treated. You have to have the other perspective to really understand it.

30 rock explained it pretty well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAQoXOLlvT0

A lot of this difference is the result of your own outlook and approach to life.

Used to be fat and wear clothes 2 sizes too big. Lost some weight and started dressing nicer. Suddenly I was behaving more confidently, and the effect snowballs.

Of course, there is some external difference, but a lot of it just goes back to attitude and confidence.

My intuition is that reserve causality is playing a huge role in these numbers which is acknowledged by the authors:

"Why physical attractiveness should matter for intergenerational social mobility is an underexplored research question. Theoretical links between the two are complex, and the possibility of reverse causation cannot be ruled out. Prosperous economic conditions likely allow individuals to improve and maintain their physical attractiveness by investing in relevant services (e.g., quality hairdresser, gym membership, and plastic surgery) and goods (e.g., fashionable clothes and effective cosmetics)."

Cannot be ruled out strikes me as an understatement. I'm not sure what the exact design of the interview was, but even factors like how well-spoken someone is could have a strong influence on perceived physical attractiveness despite being heavily confounded by factors like education and socioeconomic status, which I think challenges the notion of physical attractiveness, as least as it was assessed here, being a truly independent predictor. I also don't think that this study serves as incontrovertible proof in support of the defeatist winging about how purely genetic factors affecting appearance have completely and unfairly hamstrung ugly people. A study that supported that notion wouldn't use an interview, it would just use a picture of people's faces from a standardized lighting and angle which would then be rated and correlated with these other variables.

It seems likely that there’s a common connection here between physical attractiveness and success and some third factor. For example, someone who is a harder worker or a perfectionist likely tries harder in all areas of their lives, of which career and physical appearance are just two outward manifestations. Someone who has a downtrodden mindset is unlikely to meet success in any dimension, which again includes physical appearance and career success.

Interesting that the effect was stronger in males. It looks like the outcomes tracked were education, income, and occupation. I wonder if this is tracking the wrong things; e.g. women can marry into a higher wealth+prestige class without themselves needing to attain education, income, or a job.

Could be evidence of matriarchy.

If women outnumber men in HR departments and at school, being pleasing to a woman's eye would be helpful in advancing through life more so than being pleasing to men.

For quite a while I’ve been making an (admittedly fairly troll-ish) argument at my university’s philosophy classes that the whole “smash the patriarchy” movement might overlook that we actually live in a matriarchy, and this is just what it imperceptibly looks like. The argument was slightly more straightforward to make in the UK when we had a great-grandmother as head of state and a female head of government, however.

Except there's no data for that. I do however recall stats that "physically attractive" men are generally treated favorably by other men and despite decades of feminist activism we still have men disproportionately (relative to the general population) represented in key decision makers (unless you consider "head of HR" equivalent to a C-level position). There's certainly a "look" to many high income career paths and being conventionally attractive (though not necessarily "pretty" - high earners in business rarely look like models) is a factor.

If the effect is stronger for men than for women this could also support the more established notion that there are more social expectations on women to "look the part", i.e. wear makeup and "the right clothing" (which covers a much wider gamut than what is expected from men, which depending on white collar career path is either a casual suit or t-shirt and jeans/khakis). Attractiveness alone is not a guarantee for higher status and may in some cases even have the opposite effect by drawing unwanted sexual attention from male superiors or coworkers.

Structural sexism

Maybe the proper thing to track is household income, household net worth.

Men pursue, women are pursued. If at 15, you’re a male locked in with a thought process that you aren’t attractive or confident, you will miss alot of opportunities. You gotta be in it to win it, as they say.

Women can reinvent, often take different relationship roles, and some guys are into women with low self esteem.

It's almost as if hypergamy is real. Shocking.

I would look seriously into how that attractiveness was evaluated, and the measurement might be more accurate for men:

1. Criteria for men and women are very different: tall vs. thin is key. If the profiles list height but not BMI, that would lead to discrepancies.

2. Heterosexual women are more likely to agree on which men is attractive then the reverse (which is a classic problem in dating apps: then attention of fewer women is also more focused)

3. Make-up: unattractive men don’t have that many commonly used options to be more attractive (growing a beard, painful surgery), while women are more willing to spend half an hour to change that. It levels the playing field making the original measure less relevant.

4. When the data was collected:

> assessed when individuals are around 15 years old

My memory of biology class is faint, but I believe that men change less after 15 than women do.

In general, that’s an area that was understudied 25 years ago. I’m happy to read so many references, but couldn’t find my old sociology professor. He was struggling with the impact of height on one’s professional career. He published a lot using a sample of alumni from the other university where he taught (to control for education). Strangely, the impact of height became weaker over the decades… He had so many theories (computers, mostly)—only to realize (after two publications) that it was because the cohort was increasingly feminine. So, he published in succession that:

1. height was key;

2. the gender gap was more than explained by how women were shorter (that paper was not popular);

3. height mattered a lot less for women, therefore the gender gap thing was still a problem, but athleticism was (he had an athletics grade). (That’s how I learned that `log_salary~height*gender`, `log_salary~height+gender` and `log_salary~height:gender` meant completely different things.)

3 bis. strike that: athletics mattered for both, but less than expected; BMI was key for both but mostly women. (That was the example other professors used to teach us about the scissor effect in regression: BMI and height are related.)

4. Height and BMI were proxies for attractiveness that mattered for both but had to be measured differently. He had several sets of photos, one typically earlier and without and another later with make-up… More importantly, students were 23-24 at that point.

But all that became obsolete when most students ended up studying and finding jobs abroad and that effect dominated everything. That professor moved to study accents.

> (That’s how I learned that `log_salary~height*gender`, `log_salary~height+gender` and `log_salary~height:gender` meant completely different things.)

Interaction terms ftw :-)

I would postulate that every analysis becomes more accurate if you consider the interactions ... but at the same time it makes interpreting (and presenting) the results more complicated.

Anecdotally, as a 6’0” moderately-attractive dude in SF: I’ve laughed at the statistically unlikely number of founders/CEOs/upper management who are not only taller than me, but also are not subtle when they use their imposing height in conversation to get everyone else to just go along with whatever BS they are spouting. Bonus giggles if they are part of the hoard with thick hair and a square jaw.

No wonder they are forcing everyone to RTO

I am 6'2", very rarely not the tallest or close to the tallest people in groups I frequent - until I got invited to a c-suite meeting of the financial services executives for company I was at the time working for - I was a virtually midget in that room - first time in my life I was the 'short guy'; I found it quite humorous, and not a coincidence.

Same company, one of the smartest, friendliest and hardest working guys I knew was short (maybe 5'6" and completely bald) - he deserved to be a VP or higher imo, but never made it very far up the chain and left - also not a coincidence.

My guess would be that men aren't selective as women. Therefore, for the handful of men that most women find generally attractive the effect is a lot easier to measure.

Yes men can have unrealistic standards at times but if you ever go to your local strip club and see the low attractiveness of your average striper you will notice men can be a lot more "accepting".

> physical attractiveness, assessed when individuals are around 15 years old

This is weird for a bunch of reasons, the most objective being that appearance changes a lot around that age range. Seems like an odd experimental choice.

Anecdotally, it was at around 15 (maybe a little before) that me and my friends became more interested in physical fitness/doubled down on sports/etc. which led to more female attention. So yeah, maybe a little more of a bake-in period would have been good.

I suspect it’s the lamppost effect: the data was here, so they used that rather than a more relevant observation that would have cost a lot more money.

As it’s a health-related database, I suspect it’s a photo taken to control for acne, but that’s just speculation.

But definitely agree that it’s probably skewing the results a lot.

Not sure how late puberty can shift, but that seems like a confounding factor (time of start of puberty compared with time of photo).

It's only weird if you are conflating physical beauty and sexual attractiveness. And symmetry tends to be a pretty universal physical indicator of beauty and doesn't change much from 15 onward.

Physical beauty is often an attractor of lust, but someone with no sexual hormones or sexual desire could still assess or another's beauty without a sexual component, an asexual person could, someone not sexually attracted to a given gender could still assess physical attractiveness of someone of that gender (a straight woman assessing a girl's beauty), etc.

My wife had a roommate when she was younger who lost over 100 pounds over the course of two years. The woman went from being just average-looking to quite conventionally beautiful. It was almost comical to see her completely confused by the new behavior of men in her presence. This happened in her mid-twenties, so she had already spent a quarter of her life being unattractive before she was suddenly deemed marketable in the dating market.

The unfortunate thing is that she did not learn about the insincerity of men who are in the pursuit of sex when she was younger (because she was not really pursued ever) and so she was quite blindsided by it in her twenties and got into some relationships which were not particularly healthy.

But she managed alright and now in her late thirties she seems to be quite well adjusted and happy (but still single). Her career has also done quite well.

She sometimes jokes with us that had she known the advantages of beauty she would have shed the weight decades earlier. But she was from a very liberal and accommodating family that always told her that people will be judged on the content of her character and not their appearances ... and it took some time to realize the world is not that way.

I would be cautious about confirmation bias here. Why is a random paper published in a low tier journal getting any attention? Is it especially well written? Is the data especially novel? No. This is an old data set, and a quick Google reveals multiple papers that use the attractiveness data from the AddHealth study with titles like "Gender and the returns to attractiveness" and "Physical attractiveness and the accumulation of social and human capital in adolescence and young adulthood: assets and distractions."

I'm not qualified enough to say whether this paper or good or bad, but I do think that this is a prime example of "clickbait social science" where papers that confirm people's existing prejudices, regardless of quality, suddenly get a lot of attention. The conclusions may or may not be correct, but I don't think this one paper is really slam dunk in either direction.

Maybe the authors were just attractive so we’re taking them seriously based on our implicit biases.

Have you noticed that obese, unattractive women are often quite hostile and angry? These women are mistreated at a far higher rate than others, and become jaded and angry and expect each encounter to be a fight.

This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I think I would far rather be any type of minority (black, native american, arab, Muslim, female) then to be ugly or fat even if I was a white male. I think there is a far stronger bias against fat people or unattractive people than there is against other groups.

Fat is not an inalienable trait though. It’s not something you are, it’s something you become. I would rather be an Arab than fat is a comical observation.

In terms of being ugly… it’s a way more flexible quality than people care to admit. Being fit, successful, undergoing plastic surgery, using makeup, dressing fashionably, etc - so many ways to improve your perceived attractiveness.

mostly agree - especially with the thought that even unattractive people can become very attractive if they maintain above-average-fitness level and also groom well. This goes for men and women.

Correlated: "The obesity pay gap is worse than previously thought"

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/11/23/t...

What a surprise! Or, as someone who has always been unattractive had realized. Being attractive does not always guarantee success, even with girls, but lacking it is very, very bad.

Good looking people do better in life. Fascinating.

Physical attractiveness is gold ... you're life more then likely will be an easier road. You have the opportunity to experience the many positives life has to offer (more frequently too) as they are easily obtained and or they just fall at your feet. I.e. dating apps you have tons of choice .. you do not ever have to be alone... you post pics on social media and get tons of likes.. you post pics of you and the beautiful family you created and get tons of likes... you use it to climb the professional ladder..use it as a social media influencer to make money. Beauty is worth more then gold as gold is more easily obtainable!

Overall it's interesting there a study about this as it seems so obvious. Tho I looked up lookism..is there a movement suddenly happening against attractive people?

> I.e. dating apps you have tons of choice .. you do not ever have to be alone... you post pics on social media and get tons of likes.

I could agree with those, but those are a rather limited part of life. They may help us, "the pretty ones" to feel good, but it takes more for someone to be considered successful generally.

> you use it to climb the professional ladder.

I think this is way overrated and lots of pretty girls end up disappointed or disappointing people, thus the meme of the dumb blonde.

the world is different today than it was in the 80s. I m not sure past performance is indicative of future results

If you are a person who has never had any issue with dating options vs. one who has and refuses to settle just to have someone then consider yourself lucky. Living life alone sucks...mine goes in waves where I have found someone for some years who im attracted to yet they are not as respectful to the relationship or me as I am (they cheat or refuse to have an open relationship yet still cheat) to it and them.

The dumb hot blonde most likely is never alone ... she could be broke cause of not respecting a good partner as they respected her or she could just have been with a lot of attractive men who constantly cheated cause they have choice. She could then drop her standards for a good guy to find security and respect or just say F it im done then her beauty fades. Hmmm being human ... and again if you are one who never had issue finding someone good/respectful who fits your wants/needs ... again consider yourself lucky!

i am being facetious about being "the pretty one" but you are focusing on a single measure here, being alone.

At a first glance, attractiveness measurements seem unreliable.

> We study the effect of individuals’ attractiveness on intergenerational social mobility by using Add Health's interviewer-rated physical attractiveness. Information about physical attractiveness was collected during Wave I of the survey when all interviewers were asked to assess the physical attractiveness of respondents with answer options of (1) very unattractive, (2) unattractive, (3) about average, (4) attractive, and (5) very attractive.

Yeah I noticed that, too. What was the makeup of the Add Health interviewers? Might that heavily bias how people are rated in terms of attractiveness?

How attractive someone is or becomes is not an immutable attribute. If you have a little bit of success or luck in your early life and have a decent diet, access to healthcare, decent clothes and grooming that can make an insane difference in how attractive you are at say 30. You see the opposite in people that get mixed up with hard drugs or alcohol at a young age.

One of the nice things about working in tech, as opposed to something like sales or marketing, is its possible to work surrounded by people who behave in a more intelligent and less shallow way, and appreciate others for who they actually are as a person, and appreciate their technical contribution, while looks doesn't really feature. Probably not every tech job, but a lot. Its refreshing working with a bunch of nerds who just don't judge people on how they look, and frankly have a lot more interesting things to think about. This study would seem to me to just reinforce what we all already know -that in certain fields/professions, looks are important for making money. Seems to me like fields to avoid working in!

SNL had researched and published a paper--excuse me--a video on this: https://youtu.be/PxuUkYiaUc8.

I can't believe anyone would do a study about this for two reasons.

First, well, duh. Don't need a study to tell you this.

Second, was this done for someone to explain why they're not successful? A lot of people want to justify a lack of effort because the chips are stacked against them. All any of us are supposed to do though is be the best version of ourselves we can be.

There will always be someone smarter, taller, better looking. Who cares? Do your best.

I'm a standard nerd; I have a warm personality towards people but overall, you know, I'm basic to look at. I feel like my attractiveness would be a neutral overall.

By some dint of cosmic luck, my wife and I's baby girl is astonishingly cute - as verified across multiple countries of travel and countless unprompted compliments paid to her from all types of people. She's got a winning smile and looks that consistently warrant the phrase "she looks like a doll". People get distracted from what they are doing when they see her and trip over things - it's absurd. It's not merely a "oh, every parent thinks their kid is cute" thing.

When I'm carrying her I get to experience this second-hand charisma boost related to being good-looking. It's incredible, people are more friendly, more helpful, and much more pleasant. So I would not doubt for a second that attractive people get a helpful boost!

social mobility upwards or downwards?

Assuming it's upwards, how are the many very successful asians explained by this study, considering that they are usually evaluated as less attractive

There's a saying (which could be specific to my country) about men approaching women. If you're handsome it's called flirting, if you're ugly it's sexual harassment.

Joking aside, I do notice that successful men (again, maybe specific to my country) tend to be attractive and they usually have an attractive and smart partner. Successful but not attractive men can still have either attractive or smart partner (or both, but different persons, and the former is a trophy—and the latter doesn't know about the former).

I got SO many downvotes on Reddit for suggesting that.

Much of reddit is incapable of generalized or abstract thought, especially when done in humor.

So you're saying that all reddit users are incapable of dealing with generalisations!? This has been debunked by science experts. It's called reading a book.

You sound like a redditor. /s

Everyone is stupid except me.

Are there real people on Reddit on anymore? I’m not sure how the hell they’re going to IPO. The app is horrible and the users are too.

> The app is horrible and the users are too.

Good thing none of this matters as long as the number goes up!

They are going to IPO cause capital has no other ideas about where to put their money and they will show a line going up and to the right in terms of user base.

Maybe there is more women and socially competent humans in general on reddit?

How did that work with Donnie and Ivana :/ ?

I think you're engaging in a bit of humor, here, but Trump was born at the top of the socioeconomic ladder. There's nowhere for him to go but down. I don't think this study applies to people like him.

Was he actually ever considered attractive when he got "on the scene", so to speak?

If you ever found his daughter Ivana attractive well then she came from ...

You mix an average male with an attractive model and something decent may come out. Plus she could afford surgeries.

Outside of ones feelings for Trump ...Ivana holds the standard of beauty. Those who loathe him prior to their dislike of him ..those ppl and the majority of them thought the same about her looks. That she is natural beauty even prior to any plastic surgery.

Attractiveness runs in Trumps family. He afterall was the Paris Hilton / Kardashians of the 80s and early 90s. Those types of socialites have beauty and wealth and society loves to follow them because of it.

Money is attractive, too. I'd be pretty flexible on my standards for a partner if it meant I could never have to work again in my entire life.

I feel like age hurt him for sure. You see Donald Trump in Home Alone and he looks like an average white dude. But now he looks like a troll.

What's the deal with the orange? When do you think that became "a thing" and why do people do it? Its beyond repulsive as a similarly fair person...

Plus, an average-looking dude in the 90s had a chance regardless.

Yet another quaint thing (affordable housing, education, chick's standards, boy are we all gettin screwed)

And an average-looking billionaire has even better chances.

What is Trump's main pathology as it relates to his wealth? There's always this conjecture that he was like Nouveau Riche and wanted so bad to be accepted in line with the Old Rich? Why does he care so much, did Fred beat it into him that they needed to assimilate or why's it such a huge fucking deal to him?

Trump was conventionally attractive by the standards of 1977: https://cmg-cmg-tv-10020-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/.... He was 6’2”, had a straight, narrow nose, clear skin, and straight white teeth. His face was chubby but back then it was boyish and youthful. If you look at old pictures, he and Ivana weren’t an obviously mismatched couple.

>There's a saying (which could be specific to my country) about men approaching women. If you're handsome it's called flirting, if you're ugly it's sexual harassment.

There's a famous comic meme about your distinction that's regularly reposted on the internet: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/663/485/1f8...

But many women have commented that they find the "attractive" guy's compliments also unwanted.

Selection bias? Most of the women who _commented_ feel that way, in the same way that 70-95% of people who read reddit/hn/whatever only lurk. Vocal minority maybe.

There are also other factors. Attractiveness not only depends on physiognomy but also skincare, hygiene, dress and even medical interventions (e.g. orthodontics) which are often tied to wealth and especially childhood wealth. Childhood eating disorders and childhood obesity/malnutrition for example are hard to overcome as an adult and more common in poorer families. So attractiveness already is in part an indicator of wealth (at least on aggregate if not for every individual).

It's well-known and widely established that coming from wealth makes it easier to get with "gentlemen crimes" (e.g. being caught drinking underage or using illegal drugs is more likely to result in confiscation and a stern warning or "slap on the wrist" if the police officer knows you're from a wealthy family, other biases aside) as well as sexual assault.

So the difference between the two can simply be that the "handsome" guy in a suit is just more likely to "get away with it" because it's riskier to confront or report him compared to the "ugly" guy who is likely on a lower rung of the social hierarchy.

To be completely frank, this applies to both sexes. As a man it feels nice to be complimented by attractive women but when I face the same attention from women I don't consider attractive and just prefer to have normal work relations with, I feel very awkward. I don't want to sound rude and hurt them, but sometimes when you don't react they take it as an approval to go further. But most of the time just dry "thank you" and moving on to the next topic solves it.

If the woman is attractive, it is different? My commercial is a very attractive female (and I mean, very), she flirted with me (my bad really, I sent weird signals, we didn't knew each other enough for the level of friendlyness I showed, it's an issue in my family, my father and my sister have the same), I put a "i'm moving in with my girlfriend" somewhere later in the discussion (it wasn't exactly true), bam, clarified, but I felt really awkward doing it and finding a way to close that door. I think that if you don't see the other as a potential mate, it's always awkward.

Mentioning a partner very early on seems to be a very common pattern in getting to know people.

> But many women have commented that they find the "attractive" guy's compliments also unwanted.

Pay attention to what they do, not what they say.

This has gotta be one of my favorite parts of HN, it's an odd glimpse into how men view the world.

You've got it backwards. In both cases what makes it harassment is continuing to push when it's unwanted. Why you seem to see a difference in results based on attractiveness is because your average guy can't take a hint no matter how attractive they are. So "success" becomes literally stochastic because guys never back off (and bonus take being unresponsive, ignoring them, or outright telling them no as "playing hard to get") so it only works when coincidentally the feeling of attraction is mutual which is sorta related to conventional physical attractiveness but not as 1-1 as it's made out here. 95% of the time I don't want even the hot guy approaching me and even 1/20 feels high.

I kinda wish it worked like Brazilian steakhouse rules where I could wear something that signaled, "open to being hit on by strangers."

What you said there is exactly what they mean though. Hot guys acting like assholes and not asking typically doesn't get issues due to the effects you talked about.

I think typically is doing some heavy lifting that simply isn't true. But even if it was surely this isn't what you want to aspire to, right? Get hot enough that you can disregard women's signals because it accidentally works out for you marginally more often seems a lot harder than... ya know not doing that.

I swear the guys that just start dancing on me would do far far better if they just asked first. It goes from "oh god ew how do I discretely get one of my girlfriends to get me out of here" to "eh ya know what, sure."

> But even if it was surely this isn't what you want to aspire to, right?

Yes, most guys don't want to be assholes which is why they talk about this. You might notice that when you are out dancing most guys on the floor aren't grinding their crotch against you. The people who are fine with being assholes aren't complaining, you wont find them in these discussions.

> I swear the guys that just start dancing on me would do far far better if they just asked first. It goes from "oh god ew how do I discretely get one of my girlfriends to get me out of here" to "eh ya know what, sure."

The guys who do that don't want to dance with you, they want to sleep with you. Asking for a dance will probably get them girls who wants to dance and not go further, you instantly rejecting them is what they want.

"But if they danced and did some more work then maybe..." But they don't want to go through that, that is the entire point they want to skip the work to build a connection and just do a one-night stand.

I don't think so. There is a growing movement on places like Instagram and Tiktok, currently it's mostly played as a joke but there are woman complaining about how they said to a guy "No" and he backed off instead of trying again. Many women want to play hard to get and want a guy to try multiple times. The problem is if an attractive guy does it then he "is confident and really wants her", but if unattractive guy does it he's a "creep who can't take a hint".

You can play this to your benefit, though. If you back off confidently enough, it creates ambiguity making it look like you've got no time for "hard-to-get" games. Which is good for you if everyone else is stuck in the "won't take no for an answer, must try again" status quo.

What? I think it's fake women saying that.

My sister was raped by her boss, so maybe she is more sensitive, but she box and spend 6 hours a week at the gym (10 hours total if you count boxing), and truly attractive males hit on her daily. Any guy who hit on her without being prompted, even the 'cute' ones (which is, to be fair, a big part of gym goers), get on her 'red flag' list, that she share with her gym and box friends. Maybe when she was younger she might have thought that.

My personal experience (which was until recently limited to feminist hippies living in vans/tents and playing guitar around a fire tbh) is the same. Just have normal conversation, a bit of small talk, listen and pay attention, flirt a bit, only show off if it doesn't break the rhythm of the moment (better yet, don't show off at all), ask for a date without saying it's a date. If it's no, it's no. Doesn't mean you can't flirt anymore, flirting is always fun (and if it's not for you, think about that: more practice!).

> Just have normal conversation, a bit of small talk, listen and pay attention, flirt a bit, only show off if it doesn't break the rhythm of the moment (better yet, don't show off at all), ask for a date without saying it's a date.

It's really hard to do this well and not be boring however. You have to do all those things and also subtly telegraph that you're somehow attracted to them and don't just want to have "a normal conversation" - mostly by 'showing off' subtly enough, not looking like you're blatantly showing off. It can be done, but plenty of guys are going to try and fail. I do suppose it's better to look excessively boring and inoffensive than to end up on their "red flag, animal, unsafe to be around. Must be avoided" list.

> It's really hard to do this well and not be boring however.

Takes like these are very odd to me. The parent comment is basically saying to have a conversation and if it goes well ask the person out. If said person finds your conversation boring then why would you want to date them in the first place?

So much discourse online about dating is "I HAVE to do X and Y and Z and it's just exhausting", but why? Why go through all this effort if you don't want to? Isn't the whole point of dating to find someone who makes you happy and likes you for who you are?

> Isn't the whole point of dating to find someone who makes you happy and likes you for who you are?

Yes it is, that's the whole point. As a dude, you're not going to signal "hey I like you for who you are, I care about making you happy" with boring conversation. You need something that's not just that, and is not "keep pestering them and don't take no for an answer" either.

I guess I just find the idea of "signaling" things strange. It's like women are fish and men are trying to figure out which bait to use.

A conversation will naturally be interesting if two people are interested in each other, even if it's about a boring topic. That's what chemistry is. It may start out boring, but if there is chemistry, it won't stay that way.

But hey, that's just me. I have absolutely zero interest in "the game" and doing things I wouldn't normally do to get women to date me, and I am lucky enough that I don't have to. I just see people talking about doing all this stuff to get women to like them and I can't help but think that a relationship started that way is doomed to fail. I would find it exhausting to constantly worry about "signaling" things to someone to keep them interested. I want to be myself, always, and if they're not interested, oh well.

You think women don't try to figure out what 'bait' to use? It may be a game, but if so it's a game everyone plays. And we're all fish.

As a general rule, don't seek dating advice from (probably scripted) Tiktok videos. Really, the less you try and learn about the human condition from sources like that, the better.

I agree that men should be better at taking a hint, but I think there are a few reasons why men continually push, which mostly boils down to survivorship bias. First, you have plenty of pop culture movies where the guy strikes out time after time, but then eventually is able to win the heart of the girl. There is also the family stories of how "grandpa" kept asking "grandma" out and she finally said yes. A guy who never tries will never win, so you have to try to have any hope of winning. At this point is it baked into men's genetic code for survival.

> In both cases what makes it harassment is continuing to push when it's unwanted

I worked at a place that had lots of young people and HR's definition included even a single time, and intent does not matter, perception does.

They would also punish without letting the person know who/when/where they were accused by.

This was not theoretical CYA policy, I saw one guy fired and another lose promotion and both swore they did not know why.

A workplace is a very special setting though. Your coworkers are people you have to be around day in and day out, and to mix any kind of romantic pursuit with that is just asking for trouble. Especially in this day and age when "perception" can easily shade into outright paranoid attitudes.

That should be standard HR policy everywhere. There is no appropriate way to hit on coworkers. It's unprofessional at best and a company-ending liability at worst. HR's job is to protect the company from both.

> I kinda wish it worked like Brazilian steakhouse rules where I could wear something that signaled, "open to being hit on by strangers."

The "pear ring" is trying to make this happen but it hasn't really caught on much.

This is great. No idea why it's some weird product when the whole value is teal silicone ring for straight, light purple silicone ring for not straight which you can get same day shipping on Amazon but if they manage to get it to catch on guess I don't care about the means.

This notion (step 1: be attractive, step 2: don't be unattractive) comes up a lot in male-dominated online spaces.

It's a fallacy, and actually a self defeating one since it causes guys to ascribe their failures to something out of their control (looks) instead of what is actually in their control (behavior.)

Here's a pretty good deconstruction of the concept IMO: https://www.doctornerdlove.com/understanding-the-hot-creepy-...

The article is more a takedown of the strawman "hot guys can't be creepy".

It seems obviously true that certain behaviors are hot if they're performed when there is mutual interest and creepy when there isn't any. And being hot has a huge impact on whether or not there is mutual interest.

In addition hot people are just given more latitude than ugly people in terms of social faux pas.

> In addition hot people are just given more latitude than ugly people in terms of social faux pas.

No no, that's exactly the point. If an advance is welcome, it's wasn't a faux pas. If it's not welcome, it's a faux pas. This is true regardless of hotness level.

Are hot people more likely to be welcome to a larger set of people? Sure, that's nearly tautological. But the expected behavior is the same: be sensitive to context, read signals, don't violate boundaries. Hot people and ugly people can both do this (or not.)

Hot people are more likely to find people that are into them. But nobody owes or is owed anything regardless of attraction level, and it's every guy's responsibility not to act like a creep.

Any guy who hit on my sister without being prompted, even the 'cute' ones (which is, to be fair, a big part of gym goers), get on her 'red flag' list, that she share with her gym and box friends.

I think it's typically wishful thinking. Just act like a normal human being, it's often enough, even if you're ugly.

I've been fat from 24 to 29 years old, and obese from 26 to 28. I did not have any sex during that time (my libido was quite low tbh), but I did have a few date, maybe half a dozen?, despite being quite ugly (23 to 27 especially, I didn't took care of myself at all). I assure you I wasn't attractive. But I was a normal human being who could listen and find cues before asking someone out.

Creeps are mostly people who aren't socially aware or don't care. And another side to this discussion is that if you hit on someone substantially more attractive than you, you're already signaling that you aren't very socially aware or don't care i.e. a creep.

This relates to a criticism I have for woke and SJW people: Do they follow the same tendency?

Most SJW people I know tend to be critical of the idea of a beauty standard at all, which is an interesting initiative if they can actually pull it off. And I do agree that it would be nice to stop being biased towards conventionally attractive people.

Then, with that logic, we should be seeing "woke couples" who don't follow that tendency: "Conventionally attractive" people with "conventionally ugly" partners, not with the idea of having a trophy or "liking ugly people", but with the same power dynamics as a couple where both parts are equally attractive. Since both are woke, in their own eyes the idea of being ugly or pretty either shouldn't exist, or be based around some very different personal attributes (like empathy or intelligence, perhaps).

Sadly, I almost never see it happen.

There is an absurd tendency to deny and reject the presence of certain traits and behaviors that are common to animals and humans. The fact that we are aware of certain tendencies doesn't make us free from them. There is a clash between how we would like the world to look like and how it is. In the real world, women in general are physically weaker than men, most of them menstruate and so on. We can consider these things unfair but we can't change it, just like we can't change the fact that we feel physically attracted to attractive people, even though in some cases we might find them mentally/morally etc. repulsive. This constant denial is creating only problems for everyone, not just the people that have these beliefs.

Human nature is sometimes more malleable than we think.

Many aspects we attribute to human nature are products of a more subtle tribal instinct, yet influenced in a particular way by culture and nurture.

10,000 years ago people didn't consider other tribes as human. 100 years ago some people didn't even consider other races humans. Now, while racism still exist, we don't have those ideas anymore.

In short, let people cook and see what it changes over time.

Sometimes we see positive changes in our society.

Sometimes those movements crumble down due to its own futility.

I don’t know if you get it. Just because someone isn’t stereotypically attractive doesn’t mean they aren’t hot in some other way.

I’m close to conventionally attractive but my type is shorter, overweight bearded guys (balding optional). There is no virtue signaling here, or “being attracted to what’s on the inside”. It’s still attraction, it just falls out of the standards set by men’s health magazine or w/e.

That’s what “woke” people are talking about when they say there’s not an objective 1-10 scale for attractiveness. We all have different types.

As a “woke SJW” I don’t think we’re on the same page for what it means to be “critical of the idea of a beauty standard”.

For example, to me being critical of a beauty standard is rejecting the following statement:

“All else equal, a person with double eyelids is more attractive than a person with single eyelids”

Widespread acceptance of the above statement culturally is an example of a beauty standard, and it’s the reason why eyelid surgery is the third most common cosmetic surgery in the world.

Rejecting this beauty standard does not mean I need to be attracted to every person with a mono eyelid nor have a partner with a mono eyelid.

Your example is overly focused on a small detail. I think what the parent commenter means, is that it's fairly uncommon to see highly attractive women who subscribe to the idea of "everyone is beautiful" date conventionally unattractive men.

And the same applies to attractive men with unattractive women. It's not necessarily a women vs men issue.

“Conventionally (un)attractive” aren’t well defined, but usually mean someone at the intersection of several/many beauty standards. Thin, busty, blond. Tall, dark, handsome. Pale, smooth skin, double eyelids. I just used one example for my post but the concept applies broadly.

> Rejecting this beauty standard does not mean I need to be attracted to every person with a mono eyelid nor have a partner with a mono eyelid.

You don't need to be attracted to _every_ person with single eyelids, unless you're attracted to every person with double ones. It's about treating both groups with the same standard.

And it also comes down to dating. If you don't try to incorporate your belief system into your own life, are you really rejecting it?

I see this all the time: I have fat friends, whose friends are all in for fat acceptance, yet when it comes to their own life, they avoid getting fat like the plague. They avoid being fat, their partners are almost never fat, and they share memes where the subject of ridicule is a fat person (not for being fat, but some other despicable attribute. But in the joke, they're always fat. Never athletic nor muscular).

Of course, it's not a 100% rule. We are all free to do whatever makes us most happy and nobody is obliged at gunpoint to do a radical shift overnight.

But If anyone subscribes to a core belief, it's expected to turn that belief into concrete actions in their life. Otherwise everything ends up being "web activism", and when you close the browser and go to the real world, everything stays the same.

Right, I largely agree with everything you’re writing. If you see an otherwise attractive guy and then he stands up and you realize he’s under 6’ and you are instantly turned off, you should examine your own preconceptions of beauty and reflect why you have such a toxic standard on height.

And so on for everything else.

I don’t even bring up weight because if you talk about being fat on the internet you get the “but you can change it” and “it’s for your own health” flame wars, and I don’t want the broader topic derailed.

GP made it sound like “I see SJWs with attractive partners, why are they such hypocrites” and while I’m sure there are hypocrites it’s also not the responsibility of any person to pick a partner that affirms their belief system. And certainly not for the sake of broadcasting this to internet commenters who want to feel confirmation bias about their views on “woke”

I don't think that many progressives actually believe or advocate that beauty doesn't exist. Generally what they advocate is that there is a wider variety of attractive body types than what is often depicted in media, that being unattractive should not be treated as a moral failure, and that society should avoid elevating physical attractiveness over competency for women.

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