This is really interesting, particularly in how entirely normal it is. In the sense of while reading it (mostly at work away from my computer, hence the slow response) I was nodding my head thinking "yea, sounds about right." That there is one main dimension that is roughly tough hunter/warrior vs thoughtful counselor/priest makes sense in that those are sort of the two big archetype categories for men in history. People like both, but being in tension the preferred admixture of aspects differs by person. Casual empirics suggest that strategies favoring either end work, so long as your personality tends to work with what your body is signaling.
The correlation between liking bad boys and being mentally unstable also makes a certain amount of sense, from an Eric Hoffer perspective: feeling unhappy or maladapted to one's environment makes one drawn to those who reject the rules and standards of that environment. Whether or not doing so makes one better of or not is irrelevant, simply sharing distaste for the status quo is enough (at least until it becomes obvious that you are also part of the status quo). It reminds me of how people who are disgruntled at work tend to flock together, despite not particularly liking each other and sometimes being the source of each other's problems. They are against some external locus of unhappiness together, so they end up banding together, usually making themselves worse off.
The political stereotypes aspect is interesting as well. I am curious as to your thoughts on that. My first impression is that people who work with readily tangible things and people who work with symbols are the two primary groups of people driving modern political cleavages in the US. That lines up a bit with the masculine axis, as well as the pretty axis. (I feel the pretty point needs a little more explanation: it is hard to take pretty men seriously as hard workers because hard work and pretty hair, fancy cloths, immaculate nails etc. tend to be negatively correlated. If it looks like you just got done spending hours on your appearance that implies you didn't just spend time sweating and laboring on things that will spatter you with various fluids.)
Now, the obvious problem there is that the parties' membership tends to change over time in ways that don't match this split. Lots of blue collar, shower after work and not before, types shifted right in their voting patterns the last 10 years. At the same time, what it means to be a left politician varies quite a bit by locality in the US; for example in PA outside of the cities being a Democrat still pretty much required being anti-gun control as hunting was so broadly popular among the rural and small town voters.
On the other hand, the FAR leftists historically have tended to be people who had no truck with hard work at all, being largely academic dead beats, either the sons of wealthy men or the clients of same. (See: Rousseau, Marx, Hegel, etc.) Those on the far right tended to be reactionaries coming from a mix of backgrounds, much like centrists. (I say this with the caveat that left-right breaks down pretty hard over time.) However, utopian hard leftists coming from one group so consistently will skew the probabilities even if everyone else is randomly distributed. Sort of a "Just because you don't have a real job doesn't mean you are a hard leftist, but conditional on being a hard leftist the chances are really good you don't have a real job" kind of deal.
(Why is hard leftism so incompatible with hard work related to real objects? Because the short comings of such systems related to slacking and other defection when resources are shared usually become obvious very quickly to those actually doing the work and getting pissed off at those who are not but still want to eat.)
So first of all I'd like to thank you for this thoughtful comment. There's really quite a lot of interesting stuff here, and I'm not going to try to address everything all at once, but I can present a few responses that follow a somewhat coherent theme.
I’ll begin by saying that Eric Hoffer is interesting. I'd never heard of him before you mentioned him, so I obviously haven't had time to finish his True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, but I can at least give some impressions from what little reading I've done. He claims that fanatics and political extremists suffer from frustration, ineffectuality, and a desire for self-renunciation, but - however adroitly he poses his argument - this meshes neither with my personal experience nor with the research I've seen on the subject.
For instance, Alizadeh's (2017) "Psychological and Personality Profiles of Political Extremists" finds political extremists tend to be imaginative and emotionally stable, which is the very sort of person who tends to be individualistic. Conformists in general are too uncomfortable with independent thought to ever become an extremist. The kind of collectivistic submersion of the ego Hoffer speaks of is much more a staple of the kinds of middle class churchgoers on the right than actual fanatics, particularly fanatics on the left. For instance, Saroglou’s (2008) “Individual Differences in Religion and Spirituality” finds classic, non-fanatic religiousness correlates negatively with self-directedness, and positively with conformity.
Granted, this isn’t post-replication crisis psychology, but it’s the opposite of what Hoffer is getting at when he says things like “The chief burden of the frustrated is the consciousness of a blemished, ineffectual self, and their chief desire is to slough off the unwanted self and begin a new life.” Speaking from personal experience, you just haven't met real weirdos until you've sat down with hardcore leftists; they aren't trying to submerge their egos. Their entire existence is a kind of left-hand-path attempt to develop and refine the self into its purest and most nuanced individuality.
On the other hand, your idea that a focus on tangible things vs symbols drives modern political schisms is more closely aligned with my experience. It's also aligned with the findings of psychological science, at least in this sense: Compared to (tender-minded) leftists, conservatives are well known to be low in imagination, intellectuality, aesthetic sensitivity, or – as it’s usually referred to – Openness. According to Dollinger’s (2012) Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning, such people have a preference “for perceiving the world in terms of real, practical, and tangible.” One of the questions I ask to determine people’s Openness explicitly asks whether they are “concrete” thinkers.
Indeed, I argue that one of the major problems humanity has faced since time immemorial is that leftists, free-thinkers, philosophers, and rationalists have *always* been saddled with an assumption that abstract, symbolic thinking is critical and important. I share their innate fascination for rhetoric, because my personality and background has obvious similarities to theirs. Unfortunately it’s all too easy to weave a web of words around an essentially hollow, misguided, or vacuous idea. The data I have supports the idea that (tender-minded) leftism, under ordinary circumstances, consistently relates to the kinds of personality characteristics related to abstract vs tangible thinking, analytic rather than holistic reasoning, disorganisation, emotionality, a preference for novelty, and a strong value placed on equality. Why these findings may be so consistent is something we can absolutely speculate about, but the simple fact *that* most of this has been consistently found to be true, on average, across multiple continents and over many decades, is difficult to avoid.
An awareness of these issues may very well be underlying the attraction patterns we're seeing here.
Good response! I will respond more when I am back from work tonight; I think you are a bit off on Hoffer, as well as a bit off on how you are perceiving the far leftists (and far rightists), but the perception will make it come together when seen from a slightly different angle.
Wow, this is fascinating! Thanks so much for doing this! Interesting how the factors correspond so closely between both sexes, and fit the political stereotypes.
So for the ladies:
Factor 1: size
Factor 2: personality
Factor 3: female-coded paraphernalia ('barbie')
Factor 4: maturity
Factor 5: tradwife
1+4 are analogous to 1+2 for men and are the masculine-feminine
2-5 are conservative-coded
For the boys:
Factor 1: hero (not artist)
Factor 2: masculine (not pretty boy) (analogous to factor 4 for women?)
Factor 3: personality (analogous to factor 5 for women? sounded kinda like factor 2 too)
Factor 4: dangerous (analogous to factor 3 for women?)
Factor 5: sophisticated (analogous to factor 2 for women)
1+2 are the masculine end of the masculine-feminine spectrum, as above
1-3 are conservative-coded (factor 4 preferred by conservative women as well)
So you have two factors associated with masculine-feminine and two factors associated with politics in each case, and one factor is shared between the two. The fact that masculine men are preferred by conservative women (and feminine men by liberal women) and masculine women by liberal men (and feminine women by conservative men) does suggest the stereotypes have some validity, though correlations are rarely 1.
Oof. The political stereotypes. I'm still trying to figure out how to admit that I found what I found there. I'm probably just going to gather all the data and say it very directly.
I'm not gifted enough with statistics to tell whether the pattern you see is relevant or not, but from a personal point of view I spontaneously felt like protesting a bit. As one of those women who are attracted predominantly to boyish men, I wouldn't guess that such an attraction pattern is an expression of closet lesbianism or even something close to that. Because (like most women, I guess) I'm also attracted to women. I have never acted in any way on my admiration for beautiful women and will never do so because I'm a demisexual. Nonetheless, in particular when I was younger I had a very particular taste for women. The girls and women I found attractive were all a bit on the heavier side, that is, not boyish at all. So from my very narrow perspective of introspection, I don't have the impression that attraction to men that are not maximally manly is somewhere on the scale toward attraction to women.
And yes, once upon a time I was electrified by What do Women Want by Daniel Bergner. It is a great introduction to the weirdness of female sexuality. But after having gotten used to the thought it is time to move on.
What I'm saying is only vaguely like the idea that being attracted to boyish men is an expression of closet lesbianism, but it's not that exactly. The map I give after "just a bit counter clockwise" does have youth and teenagers on it, but it points down and to the left. The direction of what I *think* is femaleness is down and slightly to the right, and I'd predict people who are significantly in that direction would be more attracted to androgynous people than they would be to men. However, according to the model, you would have to go far in that direction to have a committed attraction to women.
I will say, though, that it's interesting that you seem to be attracted to two different kinds of things in men and women. Definitely I can see the idea that "I like pepperoni on my pizza but not on my hamburgers" suggests that pizza and burgers are two completely different things that are affected by two completely different dials. Mrs. Apple Pie also leans somewhat to the right on the graph for women, but somewhat to the left on the graph for men, rather than taking an identical position in each space. This is only two people we're talking about, but if enough individuals with bisexual tendencies show disparate interests in men and women, I agree that this would indicate something more complicated is going on than just every person having a single set of dials.
I think that Mrs Apple Pie and I agree a lot (I also found Kate Winslet very beautiful in my younger days, although Marilyn Monroe's bodily features would be a bit over the top in my world: Kate could rather keep her own body). And I think that there is a word that explains this kind of preference pattern: Beauty. And beauty looks different in men and women (and in flowers and cats and mountains and...). But there is no hyper-manly man who can be classified as beautiful. So beauty enthusiasts have to look for the boyish features in men.
Also, I believe that bisexual tendencies are very common in females, because they are related to a very prominent feature of female sexuality: narcissism. Before I bragged about it on the internet yesterday, I hope that no one except Anders had a clue that I have such tendencies. It simply doesn't show. So if you continue researching romantic attraction, which you indeed seem to be very good at, I encourage you to investigate that dimension too.
Unfortunately, beauty is as frought as morality. Even if we shrug at the philosophers' objections that it may not exist, we find almost immediately that beauty is contentious and difficult to define. In this case while I do understand your attitude, specifically I don't agree that it's boyish features alone that make men beautiful. Frank Frazetta has created works of surpassing beauty in simple pen and ink using very adult, very masculine men as a template. There is also beauty to be found in faceless knights encased in gleaming metal, or the triangular forms of long-limbed, broad shouldered priests of ancient gods. Just as lions with their proud manes display a majestic beauty not to be excelled by their brides and cubs, so too does masculine beauty exist in a place far removed from the beauty of boys.
I entirely agree with you. I don't think that boyish features alone makes a man beautiful: for example, your AI-generated teenager in a suit is not, I think. And I think that many non-boyish adult men are beautiful (Frank Fazetta, for example, in his 1962 self portrait). And all the examples you mention above too.
Still, I believe that if you pull masculinity to extremes (and then I mean extremes, not just a normal adult-looking man) beauty will thin out along the road and grotesqueness will take its place. I believe that many women don't mind too much when this happens, because they value masculine force much more than masculine beauty. And I think that is a reason why there is such a broad spectrum of female preferences along the scale from the boyish to the hyper manly: some of us focus on force, some of us focus on beauty.
If Mrs. AP (and/or Tove?) prefers somewhat-masculine women and somewhat-feminine men, that would be more like liking lettuce on your pork chop and bacon on your salad, so to speak--a preference toward the middle of the spectrum. Which would make intuitive sense for a bisexual person, I suppose.
An unusually large number of my former paramours have been bisexual and I've heard something like that, but unfortunately it's so skewed by their tendency to prefer nerds, for obvious reasons, I'm not sure what if anything we could tell from that. Plus of course asking someone who else they're attracted to is very dicey indeed!
(Being as stereotypical as possible...'Shy' and 'Glasses' are negative on dimension 1, 'Shy' is negative on dimension 2, so I guess that leans feminine. 'Brilliant' isn't strongly coded except on dimension 5. For the ladies, 'Shy' leans negative on dimensions 1 and 2 but 'Brilliant' leans way to the right on Dimension 2; 'Glasses' leans positive on Dimension 4, so it seems to be one of these traits that's somewhat masculine in women and feminine in men...which would fit.)
BTW now Mrs. Pie is wandering around babbling about Kate Winslet's face on Marilyn Monroe's body. I try to convince her that complaining about the sex symbol of the 20th century is the very definition of pickiness, but it's too late, because she's trying to find the ideal woman.
Part of the problem may be that her laptop is broken and there's some free-floating restlessness there, but also part of it is your comment about "somewhat-masculine women" which has steeled her resolve to completing a quest to clarify precisely what it is that is most beautiful in a woman. She says narrow mouths with full lips are critically important, but these are preliminary remarks and we're all settling in for the long haul on this one
I sincerely apologize. You brought it up first so I assume it was a safe subject. :(
Could be the dials are just in different places (showing my age; different algorithms or channels maybe) for attraction to men and attraction to women for people attracted to both. I was curious about the correlation (positive or negative) but we're unlikely to have enough of a sample size.
Have you tried talking to Aella? I've heard it's all marketing for her business but she's got such huge sample sizes you might find something.
LOL no man, it's OK. What I said is strictly true, but you must not know my sense of humor yet!
I did read Aella regularly a couple years ago but frankly I've lost interest in her as a blogger. And while large sample sizes are appealing, I really gained an enormous understanding from just the ~600 people who participated in these surveys. The averages are clear, as are the first major dimensions, and there's still more I learned that was unrelated to romantic preferences. Ultimately this is a side interest to me, and I found it's proven to be extremely enriching.
Really talking to Mrs. Pie, she has what I would describe as a nuanced and unusual attraction towards slender, beautiful men, and a very picky but middle of the road attraction towards women. She liked Legolas from Lord of the Rings and thinks that long-haired, 18 year-old Mr. Apple Pie is the most handsome person in history, but when it comes to women she frowns critically at Kelly Brook, Drew Barrymore, and other celebrities and says that they look about right but their faces aren't quite ideal. But she emphatically wants me to relay to you and my other Internet buddies that she definitely doesn't like masculine women. (As you can see, after a couple decades of marriage questions like this stop being dicey.)
Also, so long as I'm on the subject, I'll add that my first fiancee was on the other end of the spectrum: absolutely crazy about big strong powerful men, and fantasized about impossibly-sized penises. Everybody is unique!
This is really interesting, particularly in how entirely normal it is. In the sense of while reading it (mostly at work away from my computer, hence the slow response) I was nodding my head thinking "yea, sounds about right." That there is one main dimension that is roughly tough hunter/warrior vs thoughtful counselor/priest makes sense in that those are sort of the two big archetype categories for men in history. People like both, but being in tension the preferred admixture of aspects differs by person. Casual empirics suggest that strategies favoring either end work, so long as your personality tends to work with what your body is signaling.
The correlation between liking bad boys and being mentally unstable also makes a certain amount of sense, from an Eric Hoffer perspective: feeling unhappy or maladapted to one's environment makes one drawn to those who reject the rules and standards of that environment. Whether or not doing so makes one better of or not is irrelevant, simply sharing distaste for the status quo is enough (at least until it becomes obvious that you are also part of the status quo). It reminds me of how people who are disgruntled at work tend to flock together, despite not particularly liking each other and sometimes being the source of each other's problems. They are against some external locus of unhappiness together, so they end up banding together, usually making themselves worse off.
The political stereotypes aspect is interesting as well. I am curious as to your thoughts on that. My first impression is that people who work with readily tangible things and people who work with symbols are the two primary groups of people driving modern political cleavages in the US. That lines up a bit with the masculine axis, as well as the pretty axis. (I feel the pretty point needs a little more explanation: it is hard to take pretty men seriously as hard workers because hard work and pretty hair, fancy cloths, immaculate nails etc. tend to be negatively correlated. If it looks like you just got done spending hours on your appearance that implies you didn't just spend time sweating and laboring on things that will spatter you with various fluids.)
Now, the obvious problem there is that the parties' membership tends to change over time in ways that don't match this split. Lots of blue collar, shower after work and not before, types shifted right in their voting patterns the last 10 years. At the same time, what it means to be a left politician varies quite a bit by locality in the US; for example in PA outside of the cities being a Democrat still pretty much required being anti-gun control as hunting was so broadly popular among the rural and small town voters.
On the other hand, the FAR leftists historically have tended to be people who had no truck with hard work at all, being largely academic dead beats, either the sons of wealthy men or the clients of same. (See: Rousseau, Marx, Hegel, etc.) Those on the far right tended to be reactionaries coming from a mix of backgrounds, much like centrists. (I say this with the caveat that left-right breaks down pretty hard over time.) However, utopian hard leftists coming from one group so consistently will skew the probabilities even if everyone else is randomly distributed. Sort of a "Just because you don't have a real job doesn't mean you are a hard leftist, but conditional on being a hard leftist the chances are really good you don't have a real job" kind of deal.
(Why is hard leftism so incompatible with hard work related to real objects? Because the short comings of such systems related to slacking and other defection when resources are shared usually become obvious very quickly to those actually doing the work and getting pissed off at those who are not but still want to eat.)
So first of all I'd like to thank you for this thoughtful comment. There's really quite a lot of interesting stuff here, and I'm not going to try to address everything all at once, but I can present a few responses that follow a somewhat coherent theme.
I’ll begin by saying that Eric Hoffer is interesting. I'd never heard of him before you mentioned him, so I obviously haven't had time to finish his True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, but I can at least give some impressions from what little reading I've done. He claims that fanatics and political extremists suffer from frustration, ineffectuality, and a desire for self-renunciation, but - however adroitly he poses his argument - this meshes neither with my personal experience nor with the research I've seen on the subject.
For instance, Alizadeh's (2017) "Psychological and Personality Profiles of Political Extremists" finds political extremists tend to be imaginative and emotionally stable, which is the very sort of person who tends to be individualistic. Conformists in general are too uncomfortable with independent thought to ever become an extremist. The kind of collectivistic submersion of the ego Hoffer speaks of is much more a staple of the kinds of middle class churchgoers on the right than actual fanatics, particularly fanatics on the left. For instance, Saroglou’s (2008) “Individual Differences in Religion and Spirituality” finds classic, non-fanatic religiousness correlates negatively with self-directedness, and positively with conformity.
Granted, this isn’t post-replication crisis psychology, but it’s the opposite of what Hoffer is getting at when he says things like “The chief burden of the frustrated is the consciousness of a blemished, ineffectual self, and their chief desire is to slough off the unwanted self and begin a new life.” Speaking from personal experience, you just haven't met real weirdos until you've sat down with hardcore leftists; they aren't trying to submerge their egos. Their entire existence is a kind of left-hand-path attempt to develop and refine the self into its purest and most nuanced individuality.
On the other hand, your idea that a focus on tangible things vs symbols drives modern political schisms is more closely aligned with my experience. It's also aligned with the findings of psychological science, at least in this sense: Compared to (tender-minded) leftists, conservatives are well known to be low in imagination, intellectuality, aesthetic sensitivity, or – as it’s usually referred to – Openness. According to Dollinger’s (2012) Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning, such people have a preference “for perceiving the world in terms of real, practical, and tangible.” One of the questions I ask to determine people’s Openness explicitly asks whether they are “concrete” thinkers.
Indeed, I argue that one of the major problems humanity has faced since time immemorial is that leftists, free-thinkers, philosophers, and rationalists have *always* been saddled with an assumption that abstract, symbolic thinking is critical and important. I share their innate fascination for rhetoric, because my personality and background has obvious similarities to theirs. Unfortunately it’s all too easy to weave a web of words around an essentially hollow, misguided, or vacuous idea. The data I have supports the idea that (tender-minded) leftism, under ordinary circumstances, consistently relates to the kinds of personality characteristics related to abstract vs tangible thinking, analytic rather than holistic reasoning, disorganisation, emotionality, a preference for novelty, and a strong value placed on equality. Why these findings may be so consistent is something we can absolutely speculate about, but the simple fact *that* most of this has been consistently found to be true, on average, across multiple continents and over many decades, is difficult to avoid.
An awareness of these issues may very well be underlying the attraction patterns we're seeing here.
Good response! I will respond more when I am back from work tonight; I think you are a bit off on Hoffer, as well as a bit off on how you are perceiving the far leftists (and far rightists), but the perception will make it come together when seen from a slightly different angle.
I'm growing my hair long and am hitting the gym to get ever more muscular. Therefore.... ALL THE GIRLS LOVE ME!
That is indeed the way: a sense of humor ranks above both bulging muscles and long hair.
Wow, this is fascinating! Thanks so much for doing this! Interesting how the factors correspond so closely between both sexes, and fit the political stereotypes.
So for the ladies:
Factor 1: size
Factor 2: personality
Factor 3: female-coded paraphernalia ('barbie')
Factor 4: maturity
Factor 5: tradwife
1+4 are analogous to 1+2 for men and are the masculine-feminine
2-5 are conservative-coded
For the boys:
Factor 1: hero (not artist)
Factor 2: masculine (not pretty boy) (analogous to factor 4 for women?)
Factor 3: personality (analogous to factor 5 for women? sounded kinda like factor 2 too)
Factor 4: dangerous (analogous to factor 3 for women?)
Factor 5: sophisticated (analogous to factor 2 for women)
1+2 are the masculine end of the masculine-feminine spectrum, as above
1-3 are conservative-coded (factor 4 preferred by conservative women as well)
So you have two factors associated with masculine-feminine and two factors associated with politics in each case, and one factor is shared between the two. The fact that masculine men are preferred by conservative women (and feminine men by liberal women) and masculine women by liberal men (and feminine women by conservative men) does suggest the stereotypes have some validity, though correlations are rarely 1.
Oof. The political stereotypes. I'm still trying to figure out how to admit that I found what I found there. I'm probably just going to gather all the data and say it very directly.
I'm not gifted enough with statistics to tell whether the pattern you see is relevant or not, but from a personal point of view I spontaneously felt like protesting a bit. As one of those women who are attracted predominantly to boyish men, I wouldn't guess that such an attraction pattern is an expression of closet lesbianism or even something close to that. Because (like most women, I guess) I'm also attracted to women. I have never acted in any way on my admiration for beautiful women and will never do so because I'm a demisexual. Nonetheless, in particular when I was younger I had a very particular taste for women. The girls and women I found attractive were all a bit on the heavier side, that is, not boyish at all. So from my very narrow perspective of introspection, I don't have the impression that attraction to men that are not maximally manly is somewhere on the scale toward attraction to women.
And yes, once upon a time I was electrified by What do Women Want by Daniel Bergner. It is a great introduction to the weirdness of female sexuality. But after having gotten used to the thought it is time to move on.
What I'm saying is only vaguely like the idea that being attracted to boyish men is an expression of closet lesbianism, but it's not that exactly. The map I give after "just a bit counter clockwise" does have youth and teenagers on it, but it points down and to the left. The direction of what I *think* is femaleness is down and slightly to the right, and I'd predict people who are significantly in that direction would be more attracted to androgynous people than they would be to men. However, according to the model, you would have to go far in that direction to have a committed attraction to women.
I will say, though, that it's interesting that you seem to be attracted to two different kinds of things in men and women. Definitely I can see the idea that "I like pepperoni on my pizza but not on my hamburgers" suggests that pizza and burgers are two completely different things that are affected by two completely different dials. Mrs. Apple Pie also leans somewhat to the right on the graph for women, but somewhat to the left on the graph for men, rather than taking an identical position in each space. This is only two people we're talking about, but if enough individuals with bisexual tendencies show disparate interests in men and women, I agree that this would indicate something more complicated is going on than just every person having a single set of dials.
I think that Mrs Apple Pie and I agree a lot (I also found Kate Winslet very beautiful in my younger days, although Marilyn Monroe's bodily features would be a bit over the top in my world: Kate could rather keep her own body). And I think that there is a word that explains this kind of preference pattern: Beauty. And beauty looks different in men and women (and in flowers and cats and mountains and...). But there is no hyper-manly man who can be classified as beautiful. So beauty enthusiasts have to look for the boyish features in men.
Also, I believe that bisexual tendencies are very common in females, because they are related to a very prominent feature of female sexuality: narcissism. Before I bragged about it on the internet yesterday, I hope that no one except Anders had a clue that I have such tendencies. It simply doesn't show. So if you continue researching romantic attraction, which you indeed seem to be very good at, I encourage you to investigate that dimension too.
Unfortunately, beauty is as frought as morality. Even if we shrug at the philosophers' objections that it may not exist, we find almost immediately that beauty is contentious and difficult to define. In this case while I do understand your attitude, specifically I don't agree that it's boyish features alone that make men beautiful. Frank Frazetta has created works of surpassing beauty in simple pen and ink using very adult, very masculine men as a template. There is also beauty to be found in faceless knights encased in gleaming metal, or the triangular forms of long-limbed, broad shouldered priests of ancient gods. Just as lions with their proud manes display a majestic beauty not to be excelled by their brides and cubs, so too does masculine beauty exist in a place far removed from the beauty of boys.
I entirely agree with you. I don't think that boyish features alone makes a man beautiful: for example, your AI-generated teenager in a suit is not, I think. And I think that many non-boyish adult men are beautiful (Frank Fazetta, for example, in his 1962 self portrait). And all the examples you mention above too.
Still, I believe that if you pull masculinity to extremes (and then I mean extremes, not just a normal adult-looking man) beauty will thin out along the road and grotesqueness will take its place. I believe that many women don't mind too much when this happens, because they value masculine force much more than masculine beauty. And I think that is a reason why there is such a broad spectrum of female preferences along the scale from the boyish to the hyper manly: some of us focus on force, some of us focus on beauty.
If Mrs. AP (and/or Tove?) prefers somewhat-masculine women and somewhat-feminine men, that would be more like liking lettuce on your pork chop and bacon on your salad, so to speak--a preference toward the middle of the spectrum. Which would make intuitive sense for a bisexual person, I suppose.
An unusually large number of my former paramours have been bisexual and I've heard something like that, but unfortunately it's so skewed by their tendency to prefer nerds, for obvious reasons, I'm not sure what if anything we could tell from that. Plus of course asking someone who else they're attracted to is very dicey indeed!
(Being as stereotypical as possible...'Shy' and 'Glasses' are negative on dimension 1, 'Shy' is negative on dimension 2, so I guess that leans feminine. 'Brilliant' isn't strongly coded except on dimension 5. For the ladies, 'Shy' leans negative on dimensions 1 and 2 but 'Brilliant' leans way to the right on Dimension 2; 'Glasses' leans positive on Dimension 4, so it seems to be one of these traits that's somewhat masculine in women and feminine in men...which would fit.)
BTW now Mrs. Pie is wandering around babbling about Kate Winslet's face on Marilyn Monroe's body. I try to convince her that complaining about the sex symbol of the 20th century is the very definition of pickiness, but it's too late, because she's trying to find the ideal woman.
Part of the problem may be that her laptop is broken and there's some free-floating restlessness there, but also part of it is your comment about "somewhat-masculine women" which has steeled her resolve to completing a quest to clarify precisely what it is that is most beautiful in a woman. She says narrow mouths with full lips are critically important, but these are preliminary remarks and we're all settling in for the long haul on this one
I sincerely apologize. You brought it up first so I assume it was a safe subject. :(
Could be the dials are just in different places (showing my age; different algorithms or channels maybe) for attraction to men and attraction to women for people attracted to both. I was curious about the correlation (positive or negative) but we're unlikely to have enough of a sample size.
Have you tried talking to Aella? I've heard it's all marketing for her business but she's got such huge sample sizes you might find something.
LOL no man, it's OK. What I said is strictly true, but you must not know my sense of humor yet!
I did read Aella regularly a couple years ago but frankly I've lost interest in her as a blogger. And while large sample sizes are appealing, I really gained an enormous understanding from just the ~600 people who participated in these surveys. The averages are clear, as are the first major dimensions, and there's still more I learned that was unrelated to romantic preferences. Ultimately this is a side interest to me, and I found it's proven to be extremely enriching.
Really talking to Mrs. Pie, she has what I would describe as a nuanced and unusual attraction towards slender, beautiful men, and a very picky but middle of the road attraction towards women. She liked Legolas from Lord of the Rings and thinks that long-haired, 18 year-old Mr. Apple Pie is the most handsome person in history, but when it comes to women she frowns critically at Kelly Brook, Drew Barrymore, and other celebrities and says that they look about right but their faces aren't quite ideal. But she emphatically wants me to relay to you and my other Internet buddies that she definitely doesn't like masculine women. (As you can see, after a couple decades of marriage questions like this stop being dicey.)
Also, so long as I'm on the subject, I'll add that my first fiancee was on the other end of the spectrum: absolutely crazy about big strong powerful men, and fantasized about impossibly-sized penises. Everybody is unique!