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Comment by CoolGuySteve | Hacker News Reader

I'm always surprised that while men apparently rate women's attractiveness on a bell curve, women seem to rate men on a Pareto distribution.

Considering how much I hear about beauty standards and how they harm women, I almost never hear anything about male beauty standards.

If society is to be improved by having more realistic female beauty standards, then there's apparently a lot more headroom for society to be improved by having more realistic male beauty standards.

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It's not like it's terribly hard to rationalize. Women, being the ones bearing the children, are probably better-served by being more picky.

There are two male beauty standards so to speak: male ideal for males and male ideal for women. Male ideal for males is overly bulked up dude with six pack. Male ideal for women is what you get in female journals or in boy bands.

But the other think is that the body shapes for males that showed up in entertainment were more various for males then for females. There was less perfection and more variety, but that is changing. Now it seems guys are moving toward similar restrictive requirements, so we may get there with guys too.

From what I've seen and heard from my friends, women tend to select for lean-ness. Smaller guy with six pack is usually more attractive to them than a big guy with six pack. And it shows in their dating preferences too.

Unrealistic beauty standards are absolutely a problem for both men and women, the difference is that in society, men can be valued for other things (occupation, knowledge, athletics) and that is much less true for women.

That's fair but it's not a zero sum game. Making men happier on average doesn't necessarily make women unhappier.

Though if men can be valued for other ways, that doesn't explain why most men are seen are far below average for the average woman. I think an amendment for your previous statement is that though they can be valued from different areas, the starting value for men is starts way below that of a woman.

For example in Asian cultures there is the idea of 666 standard for males, 6 feet tall, 6 figure salary, 6 pack, which make up less than 0.01% of the eligible population. It may be due to the gender ratio being off, but the standard leaves a lot of women unhappy in their later years

men can be valued for other things (occupation, knowledge, athletics) and that is much less true for women

very strongly disagree, maybe this is true in some subset of the dating world, or non western countries, but that's it.

It helps that women seem to weight attractiveness pretty low when it comes to partners. The stereotype of the funny fat guy with the hot partner exists for a reason.

Generally, women prefer physical attractiveness for sexual partners (genetic value), and high financial/social statue attractiveness for relationship partners (they are less likely to abandon her with nothing).

This leads to a very interesting conclusion - small gains in male attractiveness leads to a much larger perceived gain in their attractiveness. It basically means men have a LOT to gain from improving their looks!

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