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Re: Bi-racial people are more attractive
Greg Stevens (stevens@prodigal.psych.rochester.edu)
Tue, 7 Feb 95 22:55:59 GMT
In <3h89c7$30c@larch.cc.swarthmore.edu> ejnute@raptor.sccs.swarthmore.edu (Eric John Nute) writes:
>The question of attractiveness is a tricky one, and I doubt that one
>could use international supermodels to elucidate American standards of
>beauty. Using supermodels presumes an international, or even just a
>European/ American standard of beauty, which I am not entirely convinced
>exists.
Well, I don't know if "standard" is the right word, but there can be no
denying that there are people who are statistically considered more
attractive than others (which, btw, varies between US and Europe. American
models are tanner and more muscular, though the trend is going away
from the "surfer dude" image of the 80's; European models are leaner,
and longer hair is statistically more prominent in European models than
American -- just check out the varience between American fashion mags,
and Europeans ones, the differences are immediately noticable and striking).
Looking at people who are considered very attractive and it tends to be
a matter of feature integration more than anything else. Brad Pitt,
who his the cover of People magazine with the subtitle "The Sexiest
Man Alive" (though, a careful look will show that he is closer to the
American mean of attractive males than the European) is really not too much
more than a conglamerate of what is found attractive (generally) in other
models, only he has more features on the list: full lips, square jaw,
tans easily, muscular (but nottoo bulky) and well-defined body, etc.
Now, I'm not going to say that a feature-integration model of attractiveness
(with features in the "desirable" list varying from culture to culture)
isn't a simplification, but is captures something about who people
STATISTICALLY tend to find more attractive in what I think is a meaningful
way.
The fact that many people have even made observations of differences between
such things as 1) US vs. European standards of attractiveness, 2) Gay
male versus straight female standards of attractiveness for men, and so on,
shows that there must be some recognizable -- if not STANDARD, then METRIC,
for such a thing.
>Using photographs of a variety of people and performing mass interviews,
>following the protocoll of psychological experimental interviews, might
>prove to be more convincing.
Well, it would certainly be MORE convincing, as all experimental settings
are MORE convincing scientifically than anthropological field work (which
is what getting statistics on models would in effect be). But that doesn'yt
mean you can't get meaningful results from gathering sociological statistics.
Greg Stevens
stevens@prodigal.psych.rochester.edu
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