this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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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.
Generally speaking, I think yes, they do.
It is just that the way they do the prior scoring is different than the way women do it, as you go through in the rest of your paragraph.
It could also be the case that the way they do the 'how/where do i set the bar/range' is also substantially different from women... I'm not sure if you can specifically conclude that with confidence just from the one graph I posted though.
But yes as a guy, I can say that if a women (or guy) is extremely physically appealing, that would influence at least a younger stupider me to score them higher by way of overlooking things I would normally consider a detriment to their 'overall attractiveness score'...
...and I can also confirm that I genuienly have and still do also view some women who have just a stellar combination of other personality traits, where we have a history of good experiences together... yeah that does actually make them 'seem' more just purely physically/superficially attractive to me as well.
Maybe thats like... partner imprinting, or... regular association with oxytocin = more beautiful.
But yeah most guys I know and have known can, if pressed a bit, break down a partner into a 'physical attractiveness' score and a 'personality/behavioral attractiveness' score, as long as they're not in full on limmerence or a toxic codependent relationship.
They can then tell you how those two scores can be put together to make an overall score, and then they can do their pass/fail range. Or, sometimes, both of those scores stay seperate, and each get a pass/fail range.
Its complicated and varies from person to person, but most guys I've known can do this explictly.
Whereas most gals I know and have known ... basically recoil at the idea that this is a thing you can do, find it innately ... impossible, or dehumanizing, as you do. Its difficult and basically icky to ... try to disentangle the web, to try and talk about it explicitly.
I mean... when you lay it out explicitly, yeah, it does seem that way.
But the thing is... everyone does this, men and women.
Thats what a heuristic is. Its a complex and kind of 'fuzzy' calculation that people's brains make, in the background... its just that most people don't actually know, aren't conscious of the actual specific calculation itself.
And they will often deny, or awkardly and inconsistently attempt to justify the inner workings of their own brain that they aren't fully aware of.
Like uh... I'm autistic. I would say that a major way I am different from most neurotypicals, and even other kinds of neurodivergents... is that I am highly analytical of all things, including my own mind; for me its fun and entertaining to try and reverse engineer my own heuristics. I tend to be hyper-aware of most of the facets of my own thought processes, compared to most neurotypicals.
But for most neurotypicals... they are made uncomfortable by that level of introspection, they think its rude to be asked to do that, to think in that way, to have other people try and think in that way about them.
Everybody has different ways they 'do' their internal heuristics. That is basically equivalent to saying 'people have different personalties and value sets and characteristics'.
... But everybody does have a system of unconscious heuristics they use to interpret and act in the world.
Yeah, some people's are much more... extreme or off putting or reprehensible than others... but everyone is judging everyone most of the time, that's what brains do. Its just that a lot of people aren't conscious of the extent to, or ways in which they do it.
Well see even here things get... awkward to talk about.
It is extremely common for people to have racial preferences in dating. Way, way more common than the amount of people who will just outright admit to agreeing with a statement like "I believe some races are inherently superior to others".
Which I think at one point was a question OKCupid asked its users, or gave them the ability to answer or not answer, not sure if they still do.
Everybody has their own 'scoring system' for others, whether they are fully conscious of it or not, and different people do their personal scoring system differently, they weigh or value different factors to different extents.
But at the end of the day, everyone still has some kind of a scoring system, and then you take the results of all of those, add them together, and you get something like the original graph I posted.
Thus there is no universal, perfectly applies to everyone, 'attractiveness rubric'.
But there is instead a general concept of scoring, and there are broad trends that most people who belong to some certain group (ex: male vs female), that those group members place more or less emphasis on, or do the calculation in a different way.
So, there's another old OKCupid blog post that I found to be very interesting.
When looking at people who get rated as attractive or unnatractive by others...
There are basically two kinds of patterns.
One is a kind of person whom everyone else broadly agrees os either ... average, or very attractive, or very unattractive.
But then there is another kind of person.
This second kind of person will tend to have a fairly uncommon set of proportions to their facial features.
And what happens is that instead of 90% of people giving them roughly the same score... you get about 40% of people rating them very attractive, and 40% of people rating them very unattractive, and only around 20% rating them in the middle.
For lack of a better term, I call these people 'striking', or 'controversially beautiful'.
Some people are thus... generally beautiful, to just most people... and then some people are... well if you just averaged their scores from others, they'd just be average, but whats really going on is that they're very appealing to some, very unappealing to others.
I bring this all up to try to show that... just having a 1 to 10 or 1 to 7 attractiveness score as concept does not inherently enforce a broad conformity mandate of beauty.
If you look at the data in detail, it can and has revealed that actually yes, people do disagree on what constitutes physical beauty, it actually proves or shows that in many cases, there is not a universal scoring rubric for perceived beauty.