Conveniently for a follow-up to yesterday’s post about the men’s insufficient vocabulary for our own appearances Scott Adams of Dilbert.com Blog says
Yesterday I spent several hours at a photo shoot. The photographer was an award-winning top-of-his-field professional with an almost supernatural sense of visual rightness. At one point he was taking some profile shots of me and I mentioned that I thought I had a “good side” but couldn’t remember which one it was. So he had me face left, then right. As soon as I turned right he said, “It’s that one.” No hesitation. No doubt about it.
I find this to be an inconvenient sort of knowledge. For the rest of my life, every time I talk to someone I will want to cheat my face toward the good side. I will never again make eye contact unless it by peripheral vision. In the interest of public safety I will only walk on the side of the street that puts my good side toward traffic.
...
Or was it my other side that the photographer said was my good one? Shit.
Again, it’s not that we can’t know who does or doesn’t looks good to us as far as men go, it’s that there’s so little context we can’t related it to anything.
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Follow-up to the follow-up: an important point I forgot to mention yesterday that I only glanced off off with the Dan Quayle discussion. It wouldn’t matter that men’s ideas of attractive men were the same as women’s. It’s that very often when we say “don’t you think so-and-so is attractive” we’re often asked if we’re serious. Which sounds like another way of saying “not so much.”
And yes, in a way it shouldn’t matter. And yes, it’s grievously unfair… and dumb… that straight women and gay men, who may be no more attracted to attracted to other women than straight men are to other men, nevertheless are saturated to the scuppers with messages about exactly what is or isn’t desirable about women’s appearance. And oh yes, it would be a serious problem if men were evaluated only by their ability to reflect photons in an appealing way. But the preferred alternative to TMI isn’t sphinx-like silence, it’s something closer to a happy medium.
Submitted by 2899 (not verified) on Fri, 2009-05-01 13:20.
I feel like I actually get a fair amount of input from pop culture about what sort of men are attractive... and that input mostly doesn't match my experience. The pop culture ideal of an attractive man is clean cut, muscular, tanned, short haired, tall, and with a masculine sculpted face.
MY ideal of an attractive man is long haired, bearded, extremely lean (I often use the word "scrawny" though that tends to have negative connotations to most people), deathly pale, tall, and with soft androgynous facial features (other than the beard), full lips and a delicate nose. Oh, look, I have one feature in common with the pop culture ideal! We both like tall! Other than that I'm almost the polar opposite. And, yeah, over the years I've encountered a lot of men of this description who didn't believe me when I told them they were pretty because they were literally hearing it for the first time.
The flip side to this is, I think my experience here is not gender specific. In that I think an awful lot of men are ALSO attracted to women who may be polar opposites of the cultural ideal of an attractive woman. People are varied and different. The world takes all types.