Why is hotness so hot?

[Narz]

See title. I mean I understand the argument that a pretty face means healthier but is that really true? I see plenty of ugly folk reproducing just fine. Shapelier bosoms don't produce better milk, right? And girls no flat butts & no hips still manage to push out babies too.

I'm kinda fascinated by anything that gets my brain juices firing really intensely.

Also I was on the train the other day & there was a woman who was really ugly, young woman & I was trying to analyze her face (discretely) to determine just why. And I couldn't. Her face didn't seem asymmetrical and I couldn't find anything specifically wrong with her eyes, nose, ears, mouth or cheeks, it was just an overall repulsion to the big picture. Obviously on the other end of the spectrum sometimes I just get gaga over a woman's face & have to look away, its so hot it's painful.

What's the big deal? I mean I get it but I don't.

Also, if hotness is so great why isn't everyone hot?

I'm sure there are good books on this.

 

[Berzerker]

I see plenty of ugly folk reproducing just fine.

booze

 

[Birdjaguar]

See title. I mean I understand the argument that a pretty face means healthier but is that really true? I see plenty of ugly folk reproducing just fine. Shapelier bosoms don't produce better milk, right? And girls no flat butts & no hips still manage to push out babies too.

I'm kinda fascinated by anything that gets my brain juices firing really intensely.

Also I was on the train the other day & there was a woman who was really ugly, young woman & I was trying to analyze her face (discretely) to determine just why. And I couldn't. Her face didn't seem asymmetrical and I couldn't find anything specifically wrong with her eyes, nose, ears, mouth or cheeks, it was just an overall repulsion to the big picture. Obviously on the other end of the spectrum sometimes I just get gaga over a woman's face & have to look away, its so hot it's painful.

What's the big deal? I mean I get it but I don't.

Also, if hotness is so great why isn't everyone hot?

I'm sure there are good books on this.

"Hotness" is cultural and subject to change. In humans it is not connected to ones ability to reproduce. Good looking women may attract more men, but for the most part they still only have one baby at a time every couple of years. Most men would rather have sex with a less attractive woman than not have sex at all, so that makes almost all women worth pursuing by some one.


As far as the woman on the train, clearly, the problem is not with her, but with you. Did you smile at her? You should have.

Click here

 

[Narz]

As far as the woman on the train, clearly, the problem is not with her, but with you. Did you smile at her? You should have.

Clearly. I never said she had any deficiency other than in my eyes. I didn't make eye contact so I didn't smile, just neutrally looking as well as out the window & at my phone.

 

[Mechanicalsalvation]

There is a beauty in the hideous but 'hotness' isnt just a judgement of estetic beauty but it involves ones instinctive emotional attraction as well.

 

[Lexicus]

I find that physical attractiveness matters to me less and less as time goes by. Gaining my interest is one thing, keeping it is another.

 

[Paul in Saudi]

I'm kinda fascinated by anything that gets my brain juices firing really intensely.

I suppose it is not your brain juices that are in charge in this situation. We can make generalizations as to what Beauty is. We ought not to forget the other half of the transaction, the eye of the beholder.

Most everyone is beautiful to someone.

 

[Kyriakos]

Identifying a person as good-looking is obviously very important an ability in the way humans are set up. That doesn't mean 'good looking' actually translates very much to something non-anthropomorphic. Some aspects of looks do tie to health, but this likely is a result of the instinct of self-preservation. Besides, people in chronic/deep depression tend to look clearly worse than they would otherwise.

While anything approaching a positive or negative extreme does indeed get picked up as clearly 'positive' or 'negative', i suppose that good looks themselves are formed in the brain as tied to some variables we aren't calculating consciously after some rather (ehm...) epidermic level

 

[Atticus]

See title. I mean I understand the argument that a pretty face means healthier but is that really true? I see plenty of ugly folk reproducing just fine. Shapelier bosoms don't produce better milk, right? And girls no flat butts & no hips still manage to push out babies too.

This is what goes wrong with "evolutionary psychology" and such things in pop science etc. In the papers they explain that some traits are hot because it produces healthier offspring or people do something in order to spread their genes. Somewhere kissing was explained to be a stone age inoculation. However, stone age people knew nothing about genes or things like that.

Here's an example first: why does a hare run faster than a fox? So that it could escape it? No, that's the wrong answer because it's teleological. The right answer is that the slower hares have been already eaten.

The same thing with reproducing and genes: people don't find some traits hot because that produces healthier offspring. It's just that those people who find these traits hot have already produced healthier offspring (to which those traits also appeal). So finding those things hot is the evolutionary advantage, the evolution is not the reason behind finding them hot.

Summa summarum: something is hot to you because something is hot to you.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

That's all just semantics really.

 

[sophie]

That's all just semantics really.

It's really not.

 

[abradley]

IMO Hotness begins with healthy looks, then it's mainly a cultural thing like breasts weren't a sex symbol in Japan until after ww2, in West Africa a large 'derrière' can be sexy. In some areas the bride is hidden away and fed, and fed, and fed to insure she looks plump/healthy at the wedding.

As I posted before, Thai men often say 'Westerners marry our ugly women.', but we westerners think they're beautiful. This may be changing ... more Asian women are getting breast implants and nose job.

So I repeat, IMO first comes healthy looks then culture.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

It's really not.

Oh well if you say so sir.

 

[Bootstoots]

Why are tautologies so tautological?

More seriously, weird things related to sexual selection pop up relatively often in evolution, with peacocks' tails being a classic example. The evolutionary psych explanation is that male peacocks are advertising their abilities to have useless and conspicuous tail feathers while not getting eaten anyway, which means their fitness is high and females should mate with them because of how awesome they are at fitness. Whether this is correct or not is impossible to test. Even though evolution is as well-established as any scientific theory ever, explaining why things evolved the way they did is mostly a topic for plausible-sounding but untestable armchair speculation.

Now back to humans. Why do humans have unusually large breasts and penises, relative to other great apes, even though human-sized breasts and penises don't work any better than chimp-sized ones. Clearly there's some sort of sexual selection going on, which is reinforced by the fact that humans seem especially attracted to these traits. But bonobos, which are tied with common chimps as our closest relatives and have an even more highly sexual pattern of behavior than we do, haven't evolved similarly large breasts and penises.

It's probably all a matter of happenstance, really. Once a preference appears for whatever random reason, individuals who satisfy that preference especially well will be more successful at creating offspring than ones that don't. An arms race favoring large tail feathers/breasts/penises (or whatever) develops, and pretty soon there's some weird and obvious difference between one species and its closest relatives.

 

[Kozmos]

arms race favoring large penises

all that needs to be said really, it's why we build bigger rockets and skyscrapers instead of groundscapers

 

[Bootstoots]

Penile arms races. Human history in a nutshell.

 

[Narz]

That's all just semantics really.

Yes, alot of letters to say not very much.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Why are tautologies so tautological?

More seriously, weird things related to sexual selection pop up relatively often in evolution, with peacocks' tails being a classic example. The evolutionary psych explanation is that male peacocks are advertising their abilities to have useless and conspicuous tail feathers while not getting eaten anyway, which means their fitness is high and females should mate with them because of how awesome they are at fitness. Whether this is correct or not is impossible to test. Even though evolution is as well-established as any scientific theory ever, explaining why things evolved the way they did is mostly a topic for plausible-sounding but untestable armchair speculation.

Now back to humans. Why do humans have unusually large breasts and penises, relative to other great apes, even though human-sized breasts and penises don't work any better than chimp-sized ones. Clearly there's some sort of sexual selection going on, which is reinforced by the fact that humans seem especially attracted to these traits. But bonobos, which are tied with common chimps as our closest relatives and have an even more highly sexual pattern of behavior than we do, haven't evolved similarly large breasts and penises.

It's probably all a matter of happenstance, really. Once a preference appears for whatever random reason, individuals who satisfy that preference especially well will be more successful at creating offspring than ones that don't. An arms race favoring large tail feathers/breasts/penises (or whatever) develops, and pretty soon there's some weird and obvious difference between one species and its closest relatives.

35 years ago we raised peacocks and had a flock of about a dozen (maybe 3-4 males). As I recall from reading about them at the time, large tails demonstrated a resistance to bird parasites. The large tails apparently allow the males to harbor many more of them. I have not confirmed that information. Our birds all went wild in the end.

 

[warpus]

See title. I mean I understand the argument that a pretty face means healthier but is that really true?

You've evolved to find certain traits attractive. On top of that are socio-cultural pressures that you've accepted as well, whether subconsciously or not.

It's often not possible to look at a woman (or man) and decisively determine why exactly you find her attractive and why you don't find the woman just to the right of her as attractive. Sure, if you know that you're a "leg guy" and she has amazing legs, you can probably immediately point to that as a factor. But a lot of this stuff is so nuanced, you either "feel it" when you look at another human or you don't.

"She's not my type" - a very common saying, right? But what does it exactly mean? Could you explain "your type"? A lot of people could get started, but once you get past a couple generalizations it's not easy to explain the details. You just look at a woman or man or whatever and you either get a tingly feeling or you don't. Your subconscious/inner lizard/whatever has followed its programming and you are either feeling an attraction or you aren't.

I see plenty of ugly folk reproducing just fine.

That's creepy, stop watching ugly people getting it on.

Also, if hotness is so great why isn't everyone hot?

Q. Being tall is beneficial in almost all respects, how come we're not all giants?

A. Because if we were all 8 feet tall, nobody would consider any of us giant. We'd just be 'normal'

It wouldn't even make sense, really, we need variety in our species for it to continue forward. Without variety you get genetic defects, I believe, so you can't just have everyone look like Miss Tennessee. That's what beauty pageants are for - to show off women who look exactly the same. If that's what every single woman on the planet looked like, I reckon our kids would have defects.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Well said!! ^^^^