Overrun by Beauty

[andrewducker]

A long time ago I read a study about mate-location. It showed that if there were many different ranking systems for people (say 20, for instance) each of which was used by a different section of the population (or even better, that each person used a variety of different ranks simultaneously) then this meant that people found partners that were very similar to what they were looking for. For instance, if I rated people on intelligence and sense of humour, while Dave rates them on dancing ability and ability to drink copiously then the chances are that we'll both find someone who falls close to our target partner.

What caused a massive disruption to the chances of finding a decent partner was the existence of a single ranking system that everyone used, i.e. beauty. Now obviously that's a simplification, there isn't any one beauty, with some people preferring dark hair, other's fair hair, some people preferring heavy or slim figures, etc, etc. But beauty seems to be one of those areas where there is far more agreement than not. Some people are generally considered to be far sexier, in a general sense, than others. For each of those, there will always be a few people who fail to understand the attraction, but the vast majority of people seem to be in general agreement. Anyway, the problem is that this takes the nice system whereby someone who is fairly well suited to you is reasonably attainable, and replaces it with one in which the person either isn't attainable to you (because they rate in the top 1% of beautiful people and you don't) or rates a long way down your wants list (take the rankings for myself and Dave and add Beauty to both of them. Now add that to everyone else's ranking systems as well - the person who was ideal a moment ago is now likely to be much less so).

This is bad enough with the modern culture, where the few stereotypically pretty people are all gathered together and diplayed globally, lowering the ranking of local people by their mere existence. With the amount of makeup and photo-shop modification that goes on you're now comparing real people with ficticious mega-pretty people, a competition that's never going to end well. Go back and take a look at that picture. Move the mouse over it to look at the differences. My first though was "Eww!" until I looked for more than a second and realised that the original person was actually rather pretty. She's not my type, but still actually good looking, it was only in comparison with the cleaned-up picture that she doesn't look good.

Looking back at what tribal/village beauty selection used to be like, the sheer lack of options would have made a lot of a difference. With only a few dozen women of a suitable age to compare with, your ranking system would go something like:

1. Prettiest girl in the village


2. A few similarly pretty ones


3. Most of the girls


4. Some less than pretty ones


5. Oh my goodness, that poor girl

Nowadays we've added a few layers on top of that to give something like:

1. Johnny Depp as a pirate


2. Johnny Depp with makeup applied on a photoshoot


3. Johnny Depp the person


4. Most gorgeous guy in the village


5. The other few good looking guys


6. Most guys


7. Geeks


8. The spotty geek who always has his finger up his nose

Now, just by adding in global access to the world's hottest people and a bit of makeup we've moved "the average partner" from 3rd place to 6th place. If we assume that our lust increases exponentially (where the people on each level get twice as much as on the level below, for instance) then suddenly you're just not going to be happy with the most gorgeous guy in the village. You're certainly not going to be happy with the average guy in the village. We know that there's better out there, just waiting for us, why would we be happy with so much less?

Comments

[wolflady26.livejournal.com]

This was a very interesting post. However, it puts an awful lot of emphasis on beauty.

Personally, while I appreciate beauty in other people, physical attractiveness has never been very high on my list of important features in a mate. I think my husband is pretty handsome, but that was a bonus, not a reason to date him. My reasons for dating him were nearly entirely for the similarity of our views on how lovers should act, learned on the internet as we talked. I met him in person before I met him online, but only briefly.

My earlier boyfriends were generally much worse looking. Maybe not the "Oh, that poor guy" kind of quality, though my first boyfriend did have a terrible scar over his eye from a childhood burn, but definitely not a "what a looker" reaction.

Therefore, I believe that your premise, that people have given up other rankings and rely basically only on beauty, is flawed. Some people might, but certainly not all.

[andrewducker]

Not all, but a large proportion of people do. I was fairly shocked when I realised that most of the people I was interacting with rated intelligence fairly low, for instance, but there's fairly constant discussion of the looks of partners, potential partners and random people seen in the street.

Looks seems to be a 'first-impression' thing, with other factors outweighing it in the long run. The internet is a boon for skipping those first impressions entirely, but looks still seem to play a large part for most people. Not as a deal-killer necessarily, but when it comes to looking at other possible partners and seeing what's available, looks always seem to be the main point of comparison.

[wolflady26.livejournal.com]

I think an alarming number of people look for someone to date for reasons other than finding someone they can be happy with and enjoy. Instead, reasons like "my friends will be jealous" or "I'll look great next to them" or "I bet I can get him/her away from the one they're dating".

[diffrentcolours]

I suspect this is why Internet dating sites are doomed to failure. People in category six don't look at other category 4+ (5+ if you're being generous) and concentrate on the 1-3's who are happy with the other 1-3s...