Some will of course argue that you losing weight will also make you more confident, and thus you become more approachable. I think there's a lot of bias against fat people, against "unattractive" people, etc.
This also shows in the classroom, work, etc.
Of course, actually being conventionally attractive will come with its own perks. People will go out of their way to help you, and to support you. Over time this could very well boost your ego to also become more confident and decisive.
I watched something like this happen in a friend, but as an outside observer I saw a different explanation: The period when he got into shape involved a lot of changes for the better in his life, including becoming more outgoing, motivated, and disciplined (necessary prerequisites for weight loss in the pre-medication era). He also bought a new wardrobe and replaced his old worn out logo T-shirts and cargo shorts with clothes more appropriate for an adult. He also started paying attention to his grooming and hair style instead of looking like he just woke up.
For a while he tried to explain it all by his weight loss alone, but over time he realized it was an overall change in everything about the way he carried himself and presented himself to the world.
I won’t deny that there is some stigma around being overweight from some people, but I’ve also rarely seen a person change only their weight. Now that GLP-1s are everywhere I do know a few people who slimmed down rapidly without changing anything else and expected things like their dating life to completely change but have been disappointed that little has changed socially for them. They do feel a lot better though!
After a breakup I started being more active again, I went bouldering once a week and gradually got into shape and then really athletic after about 2 years when I started going twice a week. My total weight didn't change at all. I dress just as good as before and have the same overall style. Of course most clothes simply look better on me, now that I'm more in shape. Same good job that I still like. I do go out a bit more. But overall I would say I really didn't change anything except getting more attractive from putting on muscles and losing fat.
It made a hell of a difference for dating. Before I felt mostly invisible but since then got approached in bars all the time, which rarely happened before. After some time I got way more confident - but when this stated I sure wasn't yet. Some woman even told me into the face that I lacked confidence after they approached me and realized I don't have the personality and/or confidence matching my appearance. They certainly only approached me because of my appearance.
The people only loosing weight are probably held back by other things. If they changed everything but their weight they likely wouldn't have more success either. I would say I had most things figured out already before and It seems I was held back only by having an average build. Just getting fit absolutely made the difference for me.
All of what you're saying is just looks. Clothes, posture, etc. all matter and we all know some exceptions to the rule, but people make clothes look good and not so much the other way around.
>Now that GLP-1s are everywhere I do know a few people who slimmed down rapidly without changing anything else and expected things like their dating life to completely change but have been disappointed that little has changed socially for them.
Not everyone looks better if they slim down. And if you do it the wrong way, or don't update your clothes to not be baggy, or just plain have excessive expectations, it's going to be disappointing. Losing weight just gets you to the baseline of where you might not make people want to look away or find reasons to not like you. If you're short, then you'll still be short after losing weight. If you're ugly in the face, you'll still be ugly, if not more ugly. I know you're talking about men because even overweight women have lots of options. Dating is also nearly impossible for average men now. You shouldn't assume that weight doesn't make a huge difference based on a few examples of guys who can't get dates. Think of it more like not being fat is to make others not immediately blow you off for that one reason.
I lost 100lbs very rapidly. The difference in attention and little social things was noticeable almost immediately. Same style of dress, moderately kept hair, but otherwise decent personal care on both sides of the weight loss.
What is interesting though to me is that I hit my goal weight right around the time some major life events happened and I pretty much was operating at the lowest self confidence levels I ever had in my life. I was less social and much more withdrawn than before.
I still would notice the “second glances” from folks I never got before, and even friendly greetings etc that were a bit weird at first to me.
I don’t think you can really translate these changes into dating success or whatnot without other life changes though. They just Lower the difficulty level - you still need to put the work in.
I think the problem many __men__ have with that is that an "appropriate" wardrobe looks more uniform and less individualized, basically boring.
It took probably 10 years but finally I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism. I wonder if a lot of overweight people started out like me but were never diagnosed. At diagnosis I wasn't overweight but I have since gained weight just due to my metabolism now. I was always slim all my life now I'm on the low end of overweight.
So yeah weight can be a problem but so can other issues. It's difficult to be yourself when you have hidden weights you don't even realize are dragging you down.
This feels like it could be a correlation vs causation thing. Its a lot easier to put effort in if you see it getting results. Is it that they suddenly put effort in triggering all this or is it the weighg loss made the investment of putting effort in return results where previously you'd need a much higher level of effort to see results making it only seem worth it after the weight loss?
Or is it the weight loss resulted in higher self confidence giving all sorts of knock on effects.
I think its really hard to tease apart cause and effect here. Would the same changes be possible without the weight loss or have the same results is kind of a hard question to answer.
Maybe it's different, these days, with GLP-1 drugs (I have always called it "Gila Lizard Poison" in my head), but it takes serious discipline and grit to lose the weight, and keep it off.
That generally comes from massive personal change; both internal, and external. Quite difficult.
Having been one of the people who experienced this (well the inverse, scarily skinny to lean and muscular), the confidence comes entirely from people in your life congratulating you, followed by strangers and new people just having a baseline positive glow towards you.
I don't know who came up with that line, it's repeated a lot, but I am almost certain it came from someone who never experienced the transition and soothed their ego by telling themselves it's all just a state of mind.
I know a ~55ish year old lady who is beautiful, but looks 55. I see her adjusting to her new reality and its painful. I imagine she used to be able to get away with being mean and sarcastic because she was so hot.
Now it just causes office fights. "I wont work with X" is something Ive heard.
The interesting part is that I originally only worked with her on the phone, so I always thought she was mean... Then I saw her in person and everything clicked.
The baseline level of basic respect you receive from strangers such as simply making eye contact, holding doors, or initiating small talk changes almost overnight. It is a very bitter reality to wake up to when you realize you were basically invisible before.
Without changing at all, the difference of how people treat you when you are accompanied by a very beautiful woman is staggering. People are more nice and polite even dare I say subservient. People low key treat you like you are some sort of important person.
Beauty, and proximity to it, was is and will be a social status symbol.
My pet theory is that it is a term in the objective function to limit the mutation rate; hence the theories that claim that beautiful faces are the "averaged" faces of a race/ethnic group
The first prerequisite for making difficult changes is a supportive environment - not a judgmental one.
It’s also a huge problem when people shame you for being fat. Some of it might be their fault but some of it not. Either way, I think it’s better to accept the body for what it is and work towards improving it and that’s what the “positivity” is. Shaming or judging someone is not a solution, it makes things worse. Yeah it can fuel motivation for some, and be quite detrimental to others - either way it’s nobody else’s business.
But, we also shouldn't forget that the idea of body positivity didn't just pop up out of a vacuum, it's inherently a reaction to the culture. And here I disagree with you, if your peers and society in general just slightly nudges you to be healthy then that'd be okay, but that's not really what happens from my experience. I used to be quite overweight, especially while I was a teenager, and it was tough. People didn't really treat me like a peer, everyone avoided me, and made fun of me constantly for my weight. Random people would tell me how fat I am (by the way, I wasn't even that fat, far from obese). And in the end it fucked me up quite badly, I had no self-respect, no confidence, and I didn't really want to live at that point. I managed to turn it around, I stopped eating properly for days, often just snacking on a package of nuts for an entire day, I would start passing out when standing up, I would exercise so much until I couldn't walk anymore, and in the end it helped! I lost a ton of weight, people stopped tormenting me, and I started to be perceived as quite normal. I even had my first real boyfriend, nobody even looked at me before. But I was still miserable and felt way more unhealthy, at that point I was underweight and eating one portion of rice a day, maybe with some vegetables. No snacks or sweets of any kind. What was essentially bullying did help me to lose weight, but it did not make me healthy. That's just my personal anecdote, I bet there are people who used people making fun of them to start a journey of healthy self-improvement and honestly that's great, but I know most overweight people can't take it well. This is kind of the issue with using shame to get people to improve (though most people who hate on fat people definitely do not have that as their goal), as that shame often messes with your mental health, and makes progress way harder. Many overweight people straight up turn to food to try to feel good, just making the issue way worse. Or they get better in a self-destructive way like me. Ironically I was definitely not healthier when I was underweight, I felt physically awful most of the time, but because I looked quite normal people thought I was more healthy! Weight isn't a perfect metric for health itself, and we shame overweight people disproportionately more than underweight people (especially for women, though I bet for men it's different).
And I think a lot of people who try to follow body positivity have a similar experience to mine (at least I think so, I don't really have proof!). They have endured a ton of meanness for their weight, and often started to hate themselves because of it, and then they turn to body positivity as a sort of "Fuck you!" to the people who made them feel subhuman for their weight. And it's obviously also not productive, it's just a heavy swing in the opposite direction. It's caused directly by the shame society places upon being overweight. It's just the opposite side of the same coin, where I believe both sides suck.
- "Being fat is morally bad!"
- "No, being fat is morally good actually!"
It's kind of tough to find a good solution for this, I think we all agree that we should try to prevent as many people being an unhealthy weight as possible for the good of the people themselves and society as a whole. And I 100% don't think we should encourage people to be and stay obese just because it's easier, but making fun of people who are overweight does not actually help them either. I don't really have a solution for this. I personally try to stay "body neutral" in a way, I try to avoid putting a moral value on unhealthy weight, and I try to view it as any other health issue. But as a society, I think it makes more sense to avoid bullying fat people in the hopes that they take the bullying and turn it into nice and productive improvement, and just make being a healthy weight easier, make healthy food the easiest food to access, put value in sports and walking, and just make it easier to live a healthy life by default.
Sorry if this response kind of turned into a sob story, I thought it was important to try to offer what my own experience was like when I was experiencing the pressure to lose weight, as I know a few people who were or still are overweight who felt similarly, even if it's not universal! :)
i am not fat, infact very fit, athlectic and in shape. This never happens to me. maybe if you are a woman, this happens.
I'm 6'4" so not freakishly tall, but tall enough that people notice and for it to be a problem.
1. Im ever ones human ladder. About once a month someone will ask me to get something off a high shelf.
2. Shopping sucks. Wookie sized pants, Wookie sized shoes, Wookie sized shirts. It's a pain in the ass, I dont ever have anything trendy, and I pay more if they have it in my size.
3. Cars: There are some cars I just cant drive. For years I could walk into a Volvo dealer and NO ONE would talk to me. Why? Heigh notches at the doors and they just knew on my way in that I was never going to be able to be comfortable. And sports cars: forget it. In my youth a friend of mine got her father's Porsche: not a fun car to even sit in.
4. Little things, like flying, taking a nap on a couch, or laying in any sort of medical "bed" becomes a comedy sketch.
5. There are just a litany of things that arent fun that one would not think of: from wacking my head on every low hanging thing that jumps in front of me, to being "too big" for a lot of activities that I would otherwise enjoy (smaller sail boats as an example).
Would I trade height in for short, and the social stigma it comes with. Nope, you do have it worse in that regard. But the world isnt built for people outside the average...
But there is another side to the coin. If you are attractive, a lot of the nastier people out there will try to manipulate you and gaslight you just to be closer to you all the time. Some people will be cruel and nasty to you just because they know you will sexually reject them. Some teachers will be mean or passive aggressive towards you because they are attracted to you and they know they can never be with you.
It is actually very dangerous to be attractive but not to have the social skills to handle the way people react to it. Many attractive people grow up with these social skills because they grown up as attractive children and they get used to it, but for some people that suddenly become attractive because they lose weight or another reason it can be very challenging. Similarly for people that are just born introverts and don't have the social skills.
Perhaps we are evolutionarily programmed to avoid people with impulse control issues?
I understand that it's not that simple, and someone's physical ability has nothing to do with intelligence in the real world. Unfortunately we're all subject to making split second judgements when interacting with strangers and as a result people don't think deeply about how that impacts those they deal with (or don't care).
People aren’t much more sophisticated than our ape brethren at the end of the day.
There’s a decent anime exploring this on Netflix right now. “Lookism” https://m.imdb.com/title/tt22297722/
This was my first thought about why the move to online works for men but not women. When I was attractive, people intuitively thought I was competent as well. I could speak with authority on topics not knowing more than the average and people would believe me.
Fo women this might sometimes even be the other way around - more beauty is associated with less intelligence.
All the slim ghosts might think different here.
Its sad, but it is what it is. And why its sad? Because this uneven treatment is sometimes cause of big evil in the world.
Evolution made us this way for survival reasons, and it's mostly pushing us towards being healthy. And whatever your opinion, it will not change.
Once things have "improved", the filter remains and I'd argue those solid friends/colleagues/etc are proven gold.
In my books, there's nothing worse than being rich, beautiful, attractive off the bat as you might never know if those close to you are hangers on or the real deal.
Lots of ""'s here to be respectful that my opinions on the matter may differ from others.
I’ve known a few very attractive people close up, and their lives are difficult. One example: you are presented with so many partners it can be very difficult to choose, and hard to discern who actually likes you as a person vs is just attracted to you. How can you pick a partner who is going to be a good match and faithful? And when you’re in a relationship, it’s harder to stay faithful when other people are throwing themselves at you and you suffer FOMO.
I could go on, but you get my point.
step 2 don't be unattractive
> On the contrary, for male students, there was still a significant beauty premium even after the introduction of online teaching.
So the submission title’s claim that attractive students no longer receive better results when teachers can see their face isn’t true. The result was only detected for female students.
The fact that there is a discrepancy doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in the results. When you can only find a significant change after you start subdividing the group into different sub-groups it’s getting a little too close to p-hacking for my comfort. That’s not to say there isn’t a gender effect here, but the fact that males rating high on the beauty scores also got higher grades should suggest that this isn’t as simple as teachers biasing their grades based on what the students looked like.
Surely you mean biologically
The company went on to grow quite successfully until it was acquired 6 years later. I feel that zoom and video conferencing allows some of that "appearance" factor back in. Based on my experience though, if I had my way, job interviews would be exclusively audio only.
This varies with country/company, with Euros usually being appearance focused, but in US companies, it's dudes in crumpled T-shirts all the way to the top (in engineering).
Seriously, it's so entertaining to sit in on an important meeting with a US vendor which looks like a college dorm party with an impeccably dressed guy or lady (from sales and/or management) who sticks out like a sore thumb.
(Incidentally, the best boss I ever had was barely 5 feet.)
Unfortunately, cheating is becoming rampant in remote interviews, especially for early career roles right now. I think companies are moving toward having final interview rounds in person because it’s such an effective tactic to discourage interview cheating.
The problem just shifts. People with attractive voices would then have an advantage.
And you could argue having a clear easy to understand voice is a job skill for most positions, I think.
Have fun. If you do it in volume, you'll get scammed pretty badly. Both by luck of the draw, and scammers who will actively target you.
For research studies, we slowly revert to on premise physical interviews at work. If we want the ChatGPT answers, we don’t need another human in the loop.
Have fun. If you do it in volume, you'll get scammed pretty badly. Both by luck of the draw, and scammers actively targeting you.
if that mismatch increased more for women than men, the estimated “beauty premium” for women could fall even without any change in teachers’ discriminatory behavior. The paper just assumes the attractiveness stayed constant during the period, but seems to have had no data to verify this.
I'm sure that attractiveness does play a role for grades, it's just not nearly as simple as the paper puts it.
There are a lot of potential explanations, which is why these kinds of studies are unfortunately not that helpful and often cause questionable media coverage.
The phd student who conducted it trawled through students' Facebook pages and took their profile photos (without consent). Then he had a jury of 74 teenagers rate the photos on a scale from 1 to 10. Then he tried to correlate beauty with grades for distance or in-class education. De-anonymizing the data was trivial so everyone could pretty much see how the jury had rated each profile photo. And research data is public.
It was a seriously weak study with questionable methodology and a too low effect-size to draw any conclusions anyway. So no reason to get alarmed if you are ugly. :)
I wonder how much of this is less about attraction and more about social skills. Granted, higher attraction affords more opportunity to develop those skills, but I have met plenty of charming people who were not conventionally attractive.
I think this is largely a distraction from the direct effect. For any level of social skill, good-looking people at that level are perceived much more positively than others at the same level.
The question of the causal effect between physical attractiveness and social skill is interesting, though. There are plausible stories both ways, imo: your version, and the contrary one saying that pretty people coast on their looks and the rest of us have to try harder to be interesting or appealing in other ways.
(It's also hard to fully separate the skills from the looks, because the same behaviours that work for a good-looking person might backfire terribly for someone at the other end of the scale. Do we say those two people are equally socially skilled, or the pretty person is more skilled because they chose a strategy that works in their context and the other person didn't?)
This was summed up well in the "Hello, Human Resources?" cartoon[1]
1: https://www.threads.com/@smiling__sisyphus/post/DN56r2hkRXs/...
Attractive people have advantage even without the social skills. We have all observed it. Don't cope.
I used to think this was wrong, until I got into engineering.. Sure there is the rare math problem, but most of the difficult part was: "Are you willing to fly to mexico and be awake at 3am when the parts are made?"
I might be downplaying though... I did calc 1 at a job.
It probably wasn't intentional, just 'I have x minutes a day with the students to teach them the day's lesson. I have more than x minutes worth of content to convey. If you willingly spend more time with me, you may get information that was lower in importance and was missed during the day's classes.'
Chatting with professors after class or attending office hours might be a grift, but it's not necessarily unfair. Specific circumstances aside, anybody can do it to get some leverage.
That’s what happens in the US with the SAT/ACT.
I think you’d need free, universal SAT tutoring available to everyone in order to be more meritocratic.
Someone rich spending a lot of money to obtain tutoring doesn't necessarily make their score higher, and there's also diminishing returns. Someone poor who do not afford private tutoring can also receive good score due to their natural talent and/or hard work in self-teaching/practicing.
> universal SAT tutoring available to everyone in order to be more meritocratic.
and that is now called school isnt it? Everybody gets at least some minimal standard of schooling.
The fact is, meritocratic is meant to describe the opposite of nepotistic (or sometimes hereditary/aristocratic). Under a nepotistic system, no matter what you do, you cannot succeed without becoming the in-group somehow.
Colleges in the US that removed standardized testing from their applications, in the pursuit of trying to be more meritocratic, found that fewer students from underrepresented backgrounds got in, not more. In hindsight (and to some in foresight) this makes sense because now schools leaned more heavily on grades and extracurriculars, both of which can be gamed by wealthy families far more easily than a standardized test.
Effect of tutoring is greatly overstated.
Of course candidates that study more have an advantage. But that doesn't make it non-meritocratic. That'd be like saying a marathon isn't meritocratic because some people spend more time training.
Of course candidates that study more have an advantage. But that doesn't make it non-meritocratic. That'd be like saying a marathon isn't meritocratic because some people spend more time training and conditioning.
I always find it slightly ironic how mother nature gets so much reverence from ostensibly communal types, despite her being the most shamelessly power hungry entity ever conceived.
There may be some good things about the Gaokao but having spoken to some (Chinese) teachers in China, it's also a limiting factor for education prior to university in a lot of ways, limiting the freedom of teachers and driving up risk aversion in parents.
(It's also effectively graded on a regional curve, which might be a good thing but isn't meritocratic in the straightforward way you suggest.)
It makes sense, if the SAT starts asking you do calculate epicycles, schools are going to add Ptolemy to the study, or look worse than those that did.
Scope of gaokao = teaching the test is just teaching everything a well rounded student should know. it's not sats where you can cram a few test tactic sessions and get a few 100 extra points. At the end of the day, gaokao is there to beat knowledge floor/foundation into kids, and one would argue knowledge floor is very deep if you want to generate most bodies that can transition into technical tertiary. Like... if one want human capita pool to be launchpad for innovation, you don't make calculus optional to athletics or other extra curricular.
IMO useful perspective is PRC diaspora, who readily acknowledges they don't want their kids going through gaokao not because it's ineffective but because it's tough, and half the reason they immigrate is because their statistically mediocre kids can't hack it under gaokao, but with some east asian education rigour/pressure will still be top 5% students under western education.
That’s just like with sports: anyone can learn how to train himself, and anyone can improve with training, but in the end, some people will end up faster, and some people will end up slower.
The SAT or ACT are technically the only ones "required" for college, but most of the elite schools expect AP or IB (which tends to give the students a year or two of calculus, a fourth year of foreign language, and some deeper dives into other sciences or social studies).
But, because it's split across so many tests, there's no single "score poorly and your life is ruined" exam.
Back home in Spain we follow the same style of a single national-level exam that you mentioned though.
After all, if you flipped the script and the US used standardized tests and you were then told that China uses a committee of experts that will certify incoming applicants' stated political positions, race, and cultural background in order to "craft a class" (as an admissions officer calls it in SAT Wars) with a carve-out for the children of those who have already attended, you would be informed of the need for meritocracy, the tendency towards nepotism, and the obvious racial biases that will affect individuals in such a system.
Likewise, you would doubtless be informed that the East's more holistic look at the total student is a superior form of student selection since it is driven by a Confucian focus on the gestalt human rather than on the reductive metrics of the West.
What is interesting to me is to hear from those who have succeeded in some system but nonetheless wish it were different.
However I've never met anyone from these countries who have a high opinion of their systems. Personally I do think our standardized exams cause massive 'overfitting' issue (borrowed from machine learning). The exam is not as brutal as Korean one though.
YMMV.
Ultimately, the only "fair" outcome is an abundance of opportunity. The vast majority of people are worth something to their community and society. And even then, as long as there's enough food and shelter to go around, no one should have to justify their mere existence.
The road to hell is built on good intentions.
My wife, upper middle class, took entire weeks of courses and scored higher than me on everything. But I am better than her at math for sure.
"We rated 307 Swedish industrial design students by facial attractiveness and after controlling for socieconomic factors found that males with attractive faces retained a statistically significant grade advantage before and during COVID remote learning whereas females with attractive faces lost their pre-pandemic grade advantage. The beauty premium is only visible in qualitative subjects, not quantitative ones. We don't quantify the extent of the beauty premium in this report."
Women rely on beauty for success much more than men. It is not just in terms of "grades". Even in engineering jobs you can see it, a beautiful woman can get armies of male engineers to "help" her. I literally saw one female engineer get 2 male engineers to spend 3 weeks on a project for her just by virtue of the fact she's a woman.
And she's not even aware of this. Like she thinks people are just "nice". But men are not conditioned to ask other men for this kind of help and we can't expect 2 idiots to spend weeks on a "favor" for someone else.
We live in a world that tries to deny this reality with "gender equality" but these cultural ideas fly in the face of millions of years of biological evolution.
Now that being said. We very much expect that the grades of women should go down when not in person to a degree MUCH MUCH more than men. That is completely is expected. The question now is, why was there even a correlation of better grades and beauty among men in the first place? Why did that correlation exist when men do not rely on beauty? That is the anomaly here.
I think part of the answer is clear. Beautiful men do not rely on beauty for success. They never did hence why when you removed it as a factor the success rate did not change. What's going on I suspect is even more controversial: Beauty correlates with intelligence. This is not an insane notion. We already know that height correlates with intelligence, but it is likely beauty does too.
Edit: I looked it up, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
And it looks like my guess was true. This is indeed what's going on.
Oh us men also have a beauty industry - or, I should rather say, an attractiveness industry. We just get sold different, and arguably far more pricier, things... luxury watches and cars, tailor-made suits and shoes, grooming, gym memberships.
And similar to how women got anorexia through unhealthy beauty standards for decades, that comes back to bite us men this time with "looksmaxxers" [1]...
> Clavicular attributes his looks to, among other things, taking testosterone from the age of 14 and smashing his jawbone with a hammer to supposedly reshape his lower face - neither of which is recommended by health professionals.
Social graces require that she play it off as people being "nice", but I guarantee you she knows precisely what's going on. Women aren't stupid.
She may have even deliberately cultivated this relationship, but that's not something a rando internet person like I can determine.
Physical attractiveness is a social asset, and it's a more useful asset for a woman because men are affected by how women look more than the other way around - that's all fair enough ... but "the core of their power anthropologically lies with beauty" is a bizarre framing.
Why is beauty a productivity-enhancing attribute for males in non-quantitative subjects? Generally, it is difficult to disentangle the reasons behind why beauty improves productivity (Hamermesh and Parker, 2005). However, relative to other students, attractive men are more successful in peer influence, and are more persistent, a personality trait positively linked to academic outcomes (Dion and Stein, 1978, Alan et al., 2019). In addition, attractive individuals are more socially skilled, have more open social networks, and are more popular vis-à-vis physically unattractive peers (Feingold, 1992). Importantly, possession of these traits is significantly linked to creativity (Soda et al., 2021). In our setting, the tasks faced by students in non-quantitative subjects, for instance in marketing and supply chain management, are likely to be seen as more ”creative”, and significantly contrast the more traditional book-reading and problem-solving in mathematics and physics courses, the latter presumably perceived as more monotonous. Together with the large use of group assignments in non-quantitative courses, these theoretical results imply that socially skilled individuals are likely to have a comparative advantage in non-quantitative subjects.
One gender still has to approach, the other gender still waits to be approached.
1. This should have a 2022 tag
2. This is ripe "red pill" fodder and many of the comments here are "red pill" coded.
The manosphere has its own distinct jargon.[31] A central tenet of the manosphere is the concept of the red pill, a metaphor borrowed from the film The Matrix. It concerns awakening men to the supposed reality that men are the oppressed gender in a society dominated by feminism
( From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manosphere#Jargon, I landed there from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pill_(disambiguation) )
It suggests to me that good-looking men are socially valued for several reasons that are robust to distance education, but good-looking women are socially valued for their bodies if they are in proximity, the same way we value objects. Very limiting and frustrating.
If anyone in the red pill camp is looking to reexamine their perspectives in good-faith, "You Just Don't Understand: Men and Women in Conversation" (Tannen) is a good start.
The documentary was an interesting if somewhat unsettling thing to watch.
Most of the documentarians from the BBC even some of the better ones like Adam Curtis, tend to distort things.
The "Red Pill" thing was stolen by these guys back in ~2018 from smaller political communities online that used it to just mean "I've been sold on an idea" usually people who were agorists / libertarians / ancaps.
So what? We should act like attractiveness is not a huge privilege because of that? As with other privileges, I think it's important that we are aware of that.
Outside of social media these people effectively have very little if any influence and aren't worth worrying about.
This only serves as a tool for people who are trying to find a basis for their beliefs.
In the past they would stare in pure awe at my guaranteed impeccable looks.
Now they ask me damned question to calculate the speed of fluids in different pipes through the Bernoulli's principle. And ChatGPT only helps so much here ...
Also, I think there must be a pretty big difference between female and male, because even if a male student is attract, if I am a male teacher and interested in females, would I wish to prioritize on looks, if the underlying grading is instead done on e. g. testing knowledge and skills? Why would looks even factor in here? Such a system would be flawed from the get go.
I have huge doubts about the study. In cinema, theatre, sure, you need physical presence, but engineering... I don't believe Von Newman would have needed presence to impress other people.
Another very important thing is that there are very important differences between sexes. The most physically attractive man in the world without the proper attitude and without leadership and success is nobody.
I am what is called a sigma male. I was never interested in power, dominating others, being the boss. Women prefer ugly and short people if they are leaders to tall and beautiful man that are not social.
In fact, if you get uglier as you age but get more successful, you will receive way more attention. If you command a group of people, run a company or are a big boss, women will get in love.
Also, if you are tall and beautiful, men will get envious of you.
Tell that to the "hot felon". Because of his mug shot from stealing cars got a modeling deal and married a billionaire heiress
