this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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I have been thinking about this, and I know when I was younger, most of the guys I knew were not physically attractive, more of the women made an effort and looked good. So it's not a ranking where you take ten people and line them up with 1 the ugliest and 10 the hottest, more like a percentage of possible good looks. Really there were no "10" guys around.
That doesn't mean none were acceptable, at all- I'm sure I have written about this before but I'm straight and my judgement of guys' physical attractiveness is binary - in or out. You look good enough? That is good enough, and everything else about you matters more. I am not going to like you better because you are hotter, and nobody is so good looking I can want them just based on looks. You don't look good enough? Nothing else you are can matter. That "good enough" bar is not all that high, but it's a hard line.
So the ranking of guys' looks like 1-10 or whatever is completely separate from how attractive I might find them, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I do think women women on average put more effort into being physically attractive to men (certainly more time on average). I'm sure it's controversial to say but on a basic 1-10 scale my gay friends rank higher on average than do my straight buddies, and I think that's about effort, not nature.
I think hair, makeup,and clothes can change your base rank a lot but average women take advantage of this way more than average men while celebrity men and women both take full advantage so the 10 ranking is set just as high for both genders, but higher rankings are more attainable for "regular" women.
So maybe women aren't so much pickier as it is that neither gender exists as a perfect bell curve in our natural state compared to 10s and a lot of women's beauty is "unnatural" raising our ratings.
My husband and I are both pretty low key on attractiveness effort normally but the difference between me on an average Saturday and me attending a wedding is way bigger than his difference.
I am a bi guy, and this is the least controversial thing ever, imo, lol.
I don't find the ... basically lets call it 'grooming effort gap', to be a compelling explanation for the different scoring distributions.
Because... most men actually can tell when a woman is dressed to the nines and quite glammed up or what have you.
They'll often utterly lack the vocabularly to accurately (muchless politely) describe this, but they have a strong internal heuristic way of doing this.
And most of them account for that in the way they rank the attractiveness of a woman.
By that I mean... they recognize it as gesture that takes effort and signals that someone is trying to be appealing, and that is a good thing...
...but they also know that it acts as a +1 or +2 bonus to the underlying score, or maybe a 1.25x multiplier, something like that, and then you can work backward to the 'actual' attractiveness score, basically.
Yet! You still have ~20% of women being rated as pretty darn attractive. Because guys can generally mostly tell when a woman will look quite attractive whether or not they're in a photoshoot, or just finished running a marathon, or something like that.
This is why there is the whole weird mismatched female vs male social phenomenon of:
"I'm dressing up and doing make up for myself"
vs.
"Yeah, but what does she look like without makeup?"
Like uh... hopefully this isn't a reality imploding thing to say, but men who value a long term relationship lie all the time to women asking whether or not that dress makes them look fat.
... but all of that is basically just my semi informed opinion, I could not off the top of my head produce like, a cluster of studies that prove that.
I suspect that if I spent enough time doing a meta analysis, I probably could find such studies, but I am currently way too lazy (and not being paid) to do that right now, lol.
Yeah. I wouldn't call grooming unnatural, and the difference also had to do with staying in shape but yes - insofar as looks are something you do, and not just something you are, on average straight guys seem to do the least, and women generally do more to get looking how we want to look.
Like, I don't makeup or straighten my hair but do at least organize my hair, do so much skincare, care how my clothes fit, work out, I guess just sort of care about appearance.
As I get older this disparity increases, guys who could skate on youth and metabolism hit a wall and age faster than guys who did stuff to stay in shape and used sunscreen, some skincare.
It ... kind of does... but to me, its basically kind of like answering a different question than what was asked.
Like, this kind of data comes from asking women to rate men's attractiveness, on a scale of ... 1 to 10 or 1 to 7 or however its phrased... based on the information on their profiles.
To me, you're describing a ranking system of 1 to 10, and then there's a pass / fail filter, basically ... if x > 7, or maybe if x > 4, then pass, else fail, something like that.
This is now a system of 'rank attractivness' and also 'what are your personal standards'.
Not just 'rank attractiveness'.
Does that make sense, as to why I say its... kind of like answering a different question?
The direct reading of this data that I have is this:
Men actually do believe that there are a significant number of extremely attractive potential women partners.
Women basically don't believe hardly any men are extremely attractive partners.
Women thus not only have a different way of setting their bar of standards... they also have a different way of doing the calculation that happens before the bar can measure anything.
Because they rate more than half of men as below average... well then of course many of them very often feel like they are 'settling' or 'compromising' in a partner choice.
The kind of pass / fail filter behavior you describe, thats also well known in these kinds of studies.
Its well documented that women consistently date men who they think are beneath them, less attractive than they are, while at the same time, the man believes they are roughly proportionally attractive, in the same league.
And of course, I'm speaking in generalities here; there will always be people who break from the general paradigm.
This is kind of an aside, not sure if its directly relevant or not
I will also note that I am bi guy, so... I tend to judge both men and women by what at least think is much closer to a standard disribution kind of 1 to 10 scoring metric, where an actually commkn, average guy or gal is a 5... and then I am also honest enough to say that where I draw the cutoff, the 'bar', basically directly correlates with self-esteem levels, and then I try to temper that with trying to realistically gauge my own attractiveness, the same way I judge other men's attractiveness.
And that of course is all just the very basic kind of surface level analysis.
What I also look for are things that would indicate actual potential viability of a long term relationship between me and another, which I can basically summarize as: Are we two people who can probably actually deal with each other's bullshit for more than 6 months, or not?
So that would be a seperate scoring metric with a seperate bar/cutoff, so to speak.
I think my standards may not be standard (maybe nobody's are) and I think of that 1-10 as a more universal ranking, like something a committee would set standards for.
Not whatever scale my husband is using that puts me at "smoking hot 10/10" when objectively that is not true, either, when I love someone they do not get better looking to me.
So maybe. But it doesn't feel to me like it has much to do with how objectively good looking a guy is, it's more like whether I can look at him comfortably. Which might exclude extremely good looking guys actually.
Both my long term guys I would put around the same good lookingness as me, so maybe buried in there is a ranking and it's not conscious. Maybe the filter is 49.
Thats basically what I'm saying.
There are still those 2 steps, the ranking/scoring, and then the 'what range of those are acceptable to me' part... its just that it seems to be harder for women generally to think of these explicitly as two distinct systems or steps.
Also:
Of course, everyone has a personally different measuring rubric by which they actually place people on the 1 to 10 scale.
Maybe somebody thinks chubby cheeks are really really cute, maybe somebody really prefers a specific kind of nose.... tons of people just have outright racial preferences in dating... maybe you like square faces.more than round faces, etc...
But... above that, or encompassing that... men vs women seem to approach the entire concept of just assigning people by their own personal preferences along a 1 to 10 scale ... completely differently.
Like yes, its dehumanizing and objectifying to reduce someone to a number... but that is the question that was asked in that survey,.or rather, gathered from the existing data.
And the amount of metrics and existing data has now grown by, I dunno, a factor of a million, a billion, since that chart was produced like 15 years ago?
All social media and dating apps work based off of much more complex and precise mathematical modelling such as this, with much more complex layers of conditionality and logic... thats what 'the algorithm' is.
They're basically quantitatively reverse engineering the actual logic of the heuristics by which human brains operate, the heuristics that most people cannot actually explicitly articulate or define.
This all makes sense, But do guys even have the yes/no? Most who I talk to about this (both straight and gay) say it's more points for more beauty, that the prettier (for lack of a less gendered word) someone is, the more other stuff they might overlook, and that if someone is freaking awesome as a person, they can start to literally look more attractive to them. I don't experience either of those.
Like they weight beauty in their evaluation, it's a factor to set on there with everything else.
Oh boy do I agree it's dehumanizing, it reminds me of dog shows and how they have "conformation" as a quality. Racists make me think of dog breeders too, it's dehumanizing in a similar way. People aren't breeds and beauty isn't conformity.