KinkInExile has this to say about beauty. It's not clear that she's talking about gendered beauty but it's clear she's talking about her beauty.

For all the time and money I spend on beauty, fashion and the like, this morning caught me by surprise.  This morning, for reasons that are far too convoluted to go into right now, I ended up breaking down tents, dragging around easy ups, packing trucks, loading and unloading food, and generally scrambling to pull things out of the Occupy Oakland encampment ahead of an advancing police line in the mud while also smiling at and trying to be friendly and engaging toward the police.  After what felt like a sprint of activity both in its intensity and its briefness, as I disrobed next to the washing machine in my apartment and stood in a hallway, sweaty, sore, and naked except for the bandana I had used to tie my unwashed hair out of my face, I realized I hadn’t felt that beautiful in ages.

Source: Kink In Exile

I raise that mostly to contrast with an anonymous correspondent to Em & Lo implicitly offered a substantially gendered view of beauty in general and hers in particular.

Why do guys cheat down? Meaning, picking a woman less attractive. My husband cheated on me with a woman twice my size. He said he found her unattractive but couldn’t help himself. Another friend of mine (she is a model) had her husband cheat on her. It was while he was out of town and all the women were less attractive. Of course these are just two examples. I was always under the impression that if you are going to cheat, at least make it worth it.

She said it here.

So the first question should always be who's idea of beauty are we talking about? Society's? The correspondents? Her partners? My guess is that there's a difference in her experience of society's philosophy of men's relationship beauty and her partner's actual experience of it. (Which is in collision with his experience of society's expectation of him.)

Second question: What makes so many people think that conventional/consensus beauty is the only reliable metric for male attraction? Especially when it so often isn't a very good metric?

Third question: What makes her think beauty for men is an apex rather than a threshold, such that no matter how beautiful one woman is men will inevitably prefer someone even more beautiful?

Fourth question: When woman A is less beautiful but still preferred to woman B, why is the assumption that woman A must "give better head?")

Fifth question: Where do so many people get the idea that beauty is like some kind of points system such that if you’ve got more you automatically win? Or else that it’s an entitlement such that if you’ve got more you should automatically win?

Next question: Would the correspondent feel somehow better if he instead cheated “up?” (If so… if one really would feel better… then stop right there and think about that! Because really?)

Final question: I’m… pretty sure the correspondent would feel insulted if someone suggested that she, like "all women," was attracted to men based only on the gendered masculine quality of income or worth. So why think that men, including her partner, are attracted only on the gendered feminine quality of “beauty?”

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As long as we're on the subject of gendered notions of attraction, try running the numbers again for men, substituting worthiness for beauty. For question four, replace "must give good head" with "must have a big dick."

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A lot of years ago a now-dark blogger named Sam Sugar, trying to make a claim about men's nature, said something like "given two women with similarly attractive personalities men will choose the more beautiful one every time." It's actually even true... but not particularly telling. First because what at least ought to be an obvious corollary: "given two women with similar beauty, men will choose the one with the more attractive personality. Second the same true but empty observation could be made about women's attraction to men.

I think the fallacy, which Sam Sugar was perpetuating and which I think a lot of people fall for, is the idea that men simply aren't aware of any qualities other than beauty in women such that they express deep surprise when men actually do enjoy and often prefer other qualities more.

Similarly, of course, it seems to perpetually surprise people when women fail to ignore beauty in men.

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If you look at beauty in KinkInExile's terms I think it's a lot harder to have disconnects between social expectations and our actual experiences.

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Disclaimer: I know I sound like I'm all about heteronormativity all the time. Instead just think there's a lot more unconscious assumptions to question about heteronormativity, and that it takes a lot more effort to become conscious of them.

So the other day most recent OKTrends, which routinely analyzes OKCupid's dating-site user statistics, came up with the paradoxical finding that, at least for women who are contacted by men, it seems that women who are rated beautiful by some men and unattractive to others are contacted more often than women who are uniformly rated beautiful. Or universally rated cute.

Economist Alex Tabarrok closed his analysis of the analysis with an uncharacteristically acute observation about rules of attraction.

In the marriage market what you want is not so much to increase your attractiveness to the average person but rather to the one person who will  cherish your unique features. Thus--conditional on attracting a decent number of suitors from a reasonable pool etc.--what you want to do is accentuate your unique features even if doing so reduces your average ranking. In short, heteroscedasticity makes you hot.

Source: Marginal Revolution

I think that's a wonderful insight. I also think it may illuminate the one genuinely positive benefit of so-called "pickup artist" techniques: inducing yourself to make contact with more people than you might naturally be inclined to do. Because I think that more than any specific "technique" is the actual "trick." (To the extent they don't actively antagonize women, e.g. "make the ho say no," PUA "tricks" may be useful for conversation starting. But I'm almost certain that graduates of, for instance, Dale Carnegie courses are going to be more universally successful.)

Update: Incidentally, when I mentioned Dale Carnegie a minute ago I wasn't damning with faint praise. It's an awesome course not only for public speaking or self-esteem but for developing genuine, generous interest in other people -- the key, incidentally but non-trivially, to its promise to help you "win friends and influence people." It's pretty good stuff.

Summary: The title says it all.

The question for the Wise Guys feature this week at Em & Lo seems like a pretty straightforward gender-cliché-confirming opportunity to, well, confirm a cliché!

Does every guy see a woman and immediately assess whether or not he’d want to have sex with her?

See the rest of the question, answers, and reader comments here.

And sure enough, the two straight guys (one married, one single) confirm the stereotype: yes, they assess whether or not they’d like to have sex with her.

Then more generously but perhaps nearly as male-cliché, the gay single guy said “Every human creature that falls within your sexuality spectrum is instantly sized up as a potential slap-and-tickle.”

Where it gets fun, though, is in the comments:

• Chelsea B Says: I feel the same way as a woman though. Almost every time I see a remotely attractive man, I asses his “bangability.” I am in a long term relationship as well. I feel like it is in human nature, not just men. Maybe I’m completely wrong, but I don;t think so
• Elea Says: Same here! Human nature.
• Jen Says: I guess my only difference is I almost never would want to do them :p Not that I don’t question it. And I have to ‘like’ a specific guy (or say, be dating him) to want to add him to the, er, show.
• Dannie Says: Totally human nature. I think the range may vary from time to time–obviously, people with asexuality probably wouldn’t have this thought process as often, but anyone with any interest with sex most certainly will have sexual thoughts on their gender of attraction. Sometimes, though, it’s not even about the sexual fantasy; it’s just…people using their imaginations in the way that sexual creatures do.
• Michael Says: For me, the woman doesn’t really have to be attractive–it’s just about curiosity. I’ll be watching the news, and the anchorwoman is perhaps just somewhat attractive, and I’ll think, “I wonder what she looks like having an orgasm.”
• Rei Says: Women totally have these same fantasies as well as men!!! Any attractive man I see I wonder how big he is between his legs, and how he’d make love/sex. I’m married to a great man, but as humans, everyone has fantasies, and fantasize about someone not their sig other. It happens. But, you shouldn’t always think about the bus boy/or waitress, every time your man/woman is pleasuring you!
• Emi_ Says: I never used to because I thought it was wrong to think about another guy while in a relationship. But luckily I don’t guilt myself over it anymore. And although sometimes I do think about cute guys other than my boyfriend, I wouldn’t actually do anything.

• Madamoiselle L Says: The Wise Guys actually made me laugh out loud. “A walk in part in some fantasy.” “Jessica Rabbit.” “We’d never leave the house.”
  I remember in college playing “Would you fuck that guy?” (Quietly!) while sitting on the Quad with other women or gay friends (never played it with straight guys, though, you KNOW they’d ask.. ...Hell, the gay guys would ask, “Say I was straight, or really really drunk, would you….) The answered about the men walking by ranged from “Ew!” to “Hell yeah!” to “Maybe I could, if he was nice.” “Maybe I could, if he lost that perm.” (Some of the girls needed some Trust Fund or other financial incentive included, not kidding.) We were young, dumb and full of…...energy then.
  My Man does this, during movies or TV shows (he does it during the news” “What about him? Is he hot? If I were a chick, I’d think he was hot.” (He doesn’t get my obsession with House…..my Man looks just like him.) However, I DON’T ask him. But, he tells me anyway. :) Not bragging, but the closer a woman’s look is to mine, the more likely he is to want her, no matter what her age. (although tall blondes, which I am surely not, wouldn’t be said “no” to in this game…) I’m more picky than he is, that’s for sure.
  In nature,(animals) the female usually does the choosing, while the male takes whatever comes along and is reasonably healthy looking. Makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, the answers in comments have too much sample-selection bias, self-selection bias, and all that to have much statistical relevance. But anecdotally it’s very nice confirmation of, well, confirmation bias: if you only asked men you’d confirm a cliché about men. If you ask everybody though… and you learn something much more interesting.

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Speaking for myself I don’t know if it’s because I’m older, or that I’ve grown more confident, or that I no longer believe in heterosexual sexual scarcity and the whole rest of the no-sex class indoctrination men give themselves, but I can’t say I immediately assess someone for sexual compatibility. Eventually, maybe, and probably sooner than I start guessing about, say, their computer savvy. But probably after I assess them for, say, political/philosophical compatibility. Which, now that I think about it, is sort of the same thing.

Jonathan Leake, Science Editor of Rupert Murdoch’s Times Online begins a much discussed research from the University of Helsinki this way

FOR the female half of the population, it may bring a satisfied smile. Scientists have found that evolution is driving women to become ever more beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors.

Read the quote in context here.

That would be a no then. If it were the case that selective pressure is driving the “evolution” of good lookin’ women it would necessarily imply that, rather “bring a satisfied smile,” women would experience selective pressure, a.k.a. stress, to be attractive. Which would make it anything but a laughing matter. If true.

Also, about men being as aesthetically unappealing as our caveman ancestors: that would imply that whenever she had a choice between two potential partners are identical in every other way their looks still won’t factor into that choice.

The article also quotes the researchers as saying

Historically this has meant rich men tend to have more wives and many children. So the pressure is on men to be successful.

To which I can only say Desmond Hatchett, a seemingly handsome minimum-wage-earning 29-year-old from my home town who’s had 21 children with eleven partners.