Quote: (05-07-2014 03:47 PM)The Lizard of Oz Wrote:
@Excelsior, this may seem like a quibble but I have to disagree. I believe that there is an objective standard of beauty and that any female in the world can be compared to any other and assigned a number and a rank. Of course, there is allowance to be made for tastes and types, but that does not negate the existence of an objective standard.
I disagree. Men across regional, ethnic and racial boundaries do agree on a few things when it comes to female attractiveness (.7-.8 waist-to-hip ratio is ideal, youth is preferred, etc). They can generally agree on what passes the boner test and what doesn't. It is when you move beyond that basic agreement that things get difficult: men might all agree that a given girl is no lower than a 6 on a 10 scale (let's just use that number as a hypothetical cutoff for passing the sober boner test), but they're not all going to agree on which of the numbers above that ranking should apply to the girl in question. Some might call her a 6, others an 8, others still a 9. The answer you get depends on subjective preferences.
There are significant variances between groups when it comes to preferences. Let me use some photos and hypotheticials to illustrate this:
This girl (Maliah Michel) is widely considered physically elite in the African-American community. If you polled 10,000 random African-American men and asked them to rate here out of 10, you would get a lot of 8s, 9s and 10s.
Poll a similar number of East Asian or White American men, and you could expect a much larger number of 5s, 6s and 7s.
Ask all of these same men about Kate Upton and you'll get similar polarities. The African American men would not give her as many 8s, 9s, or 10s as their Asian and White American peers will. Why?
Upton has large breasts, but not a lot in the hips. African American (and, to a somewhat similar extent, Latino) men prefer larger hips and are more willing to compromise on breast size. This can also be seen manifested in the ideal measurmeents of models in different communities. Your ideal playboy centerfold (the kind of girls favored in suburban white communities) is something like a 36-25-34. Your ideal urban video vixen/hip-hop model (the ones generally favored in the black/hispanic communities) comes in at more like 34-26-45 (these are Michel's measurements).
A girl with the playboy measurements will never be a superstar in the urban community, even if she is considered generally attractive. She doesn't have the booty that men in that community want to see. Similarly, a girl with Michel's measurements has no chance at Playboy, as many of those readers will consider her hips to be far too large.
This is the kind of reality that makes it very difficult to do the kind of objective global ranking/comparison you talk about. You can compare any female to another female as you mentioned, but the business of assigning a number and a rank will not work objectively. The number/rank a girl gets will depend heavily on the highly
subjective tastes of the men doing the ranking, and these vary by ethnicity, region and culture. Maliah Michel, for example, is going to get a MUCH higher rank among African-Americans than she will among Asian-Americans.
This is why I say there is no strict objective beauty standard. Again, you'll get guys to agree on what is very ugly and on what passes the boner test for the most part, but you'll have a hard time establishing universal 9s, 8s, etc.
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In this case, it is true that Candice is objectively better looking than Bieber's girl.
That is an opinion, and whether or not you agree is going to depend heavily on your individual preferences with regard to hip size, height, hair color, skin tone, etc. All of that makes this comparison highly subjective.
If you are someone who favors darker complexions, prefers more dramatic waist-to-hip ratios and does't put much of a premium on height, Yovanna Ventura (that's the latina's name, for the record) might be more attractive to you than Candace.
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Numerically, Candice is something like a 9.5, and Bieber's girl is an exact 8.
These are your
subjective ratings.
Some guy somewhere thinks Ventura is 9.5, and Candace is an 8.5 (he's not into blondes and likes thickness). Some other guy thinks they're both 9.5s (he find a wide variety of women appealing). Some other guy thinks Candace is a 9.5 and Ventura is a 7 (he loves tall, trim blondes and thinks the Latina is too thick to be ideal for him, though he'd still smash). Meanwhile, some other guy rates Ventura a 6 he WNB and Candace a perfect 10 (he just doesn't like larger hips, but loves nordic features).
Like I said, subjective.
[qote]But is she on the same level as Candice? No, that is just a higher level. And this is not because CS is a light-skinned blonde.
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A higher level
in your opinion. And it wouldn't be wrong for you to base some of that opinion on the fact that Candace is a fair, blue-eyed blonde. Some men prefer that phenotype and give women who possess it more points than those who do not. This is natural - we all have preferences.
My point is to say that said preferences preclude any notion of hard objectivity with regard to the beauty standard you're talking about. There's some agreement, but not nearly enough to make the argument you're making. Far too much of male opinion with regard to female beauty is shaped by subjective factors for your hypothesis to really work.