The Hotness Curve (how age changes a woman's appeal)
depending on how you measure women's value
People say women hit the wall in their mid-30’s, when their spell over men’s penises finally fades and they are left flailing. Is this true?
I got a bunch of photos, some AI and some real (including a few of myself and friends across different ages), and made a game - ageguessr. You can play it yourself - you get shown a photo, and guess how old the woman in the photo is. For photos of real people, you’re scored against their actual age. For AI, you’re scored against an average of both the prompt I used to generate the photo, and the average guess of everyone else.
This gave me a dataset of a bunch of photos of women, their ages vs the age people think they are, which you can explore here.
This gave me basically a dataset of photos, and the average age people think each photo is. So using the perceived age, I pulled out a subset of photos. I picked ~2 photos per age, and I limited it to white-ish people who were really pretty (as in, generated under the prompt ‘beautiful’ or ‘supermodel’). I wanted to give the full set of ladies the best fighting chance in the survey to come, and I wanted this to be free of noise introduced by men’s different racial preferences.
Because yes - I am here to measure how hot women are at various ages!
I made a survey where men (sourced from my twitter) got randomized into one of three buckets - I asked them:
Casual Sex: A 200 year old vampire shows up in your window at night. She wants a one-night stand. There are no consequences, and nobody will know. Do you say yes?
A Date: She’s looking for something serious, and wants to go on a date with you. Do you go on the date?
Public Perception: She offers to be your public-only wife. You are never intimate with her, but everyone else believes you are married. (You’re cursed to stay single forever otherwise)
The vampire question is asking about casual sex, but I framed it as a vampire question because I was including (AI) depictions of people who appeared to be under 18, and men have a very complicated relationship with attraction to minors in today’s culture. I tried to phrase it in a way where she was not actually a child, but only in the form of one, and where the scenario was divorced from any social judgment or consequences.
Men only ever got one of these scenarios, they didn’t see multiple. They rated a randomly-drawn 15 faces from the pool, and that was it. ~6,300 people took the survey.
They didn’t see how old the faces were - I just showed them an image and asked ‘what about this one’. I internally knew how old those faces had been voted, but I kept that secret.
The casual sex vampire one
If we count 80% as “certified hot”, then women are hot (for sex) between the ages of ~20-42.
Sexual interest climbs very fast, and generally hits a cresendo around women who appeared to be ~24 years old (or 28yo for the older men).
15% of men said yes they would have casual sex with a vampire in the body of an 11 year old. This rose to a third of men for the body of a 13 year old, and a half of men agreeing to the body of a 15 year old. By 18 we’re at roughly 70%, and by the time a 24 year old is hypothetically entering your window, ~90% of them were down.
How old does a woman have to be before she drops down to the casual-sex value of a teen? Well about as many men said they’d bang a hot 18 year old as they said they’d bang a woman in her mid-40’s; a 15 year old is as hot as a sexy lady in her early 50’s, a 13 year old equivalent to early 60’s, and an 11 year old equivalent to a woman roughly turning 70 years old.
You might notice this is not as pessimistic as many redpill currents predict. It’s very possible my data is a bad representation of reality; perhaps men really do not want to admit any attraction to immortals in the bodies of women who appear below 18. But men were not told the ages, and we have a whole 6 years of improvement of fuckability between the ages of 18 years and 24. Who knows!
Here’s an example of a 21-year-old photo, who clearly looks like an adult to me:
And the top-rated ladies for casual sex were these two, who voters guessed as 29 and 28 years old:
One interesting thing to note is that the dropoff in fuckability for women - what we might call The Wall - happens for women in their mid 30’s just as predicted, but only in the eyes of men under the age of 25. For older men, we find the ‘wall’ occurs in a woman’s early 40’s. Older men assigned equivalent ‘yes I’d have sex with her’ ratings to an 18 year old as they did to a woman in her early 50’s!
What about dating?
A different chunk of guys got the question “She’s looking for something serious, and wants to go on a date with you. Do you go on the date?”
This one ups the ante a bit. Sex is on the table, maybe. There’s a shot at the possibility of a life together, and you know she’s gonna be interested in it. Dating is public - other people would probably see you on the date. We’ve got a little social judgment mixed in. How do the numbers change?
For dating, women are certified hot from ages ~21-28 for younger men, ~22-35 for mid-ranged men, and ~28-45 for older men.
(The mid-aged men appear to prefer slightly younger women cause most of the voters skewed on the younger range of 26-49. Really, the bump shifts right relatively smoothly as men age. You get the point.)
For most of this, each decade a man ages, his taste in women increases by 3 years.
Only 2.5% of men said ‘yes’ to a date with an 11 year old (probably lizardman’s constant?), but this climbs fast; nearly a third of men said they would go on a date with an image of a 15 year old; nearly two-thirds for a 17 year old, three-quarters for a 20-21 year old, and peaking at 92% for a date with a 27 year old.
Again - keep in mind these men were not told the ages of the person in the photo.
How many of those ‘yesses’ is driven by just, really young men taking the survey? After all, a 14 year old teen boy is pretty normal if they’d accept a date from a pretty 14 year old teen girl. How much are young survey takers driving up the data?
Not significantly! While minors are down to date other minors at ~45%, a still signifcant 20-30% of older men say they’d be interested, too.
The top-rated image for ‘would you go on a date’ was this woman (27yo):
(In Ageguessr, people rated my own (Aella’s) photos as looking 32 years old; the men who found “32” the most attractive for dating were around 40-42 years old. Maybe I should set my preferred age range to 40-42 on dating apps!)
If you’re a lady, here’s a handy graph to find out who considers your age group the cream dollop of dating. If you’re 26, other 26 year olds think you’re more datable than any other age. By 35, the men rubbing their hands together and smacking their lips for a chance to feast on your fine ass are ~50 years old.
Let’s get to the final one question:
Public-facing ‘marriage’
The vampire one-night-stand scenario emphasized secrecy (nobody knows). The dating one was ambiguous. But what if we consider a relationship that’s entirely for public view? You never actually get to have sex with her, and only perception matters?
“She offers to be your public-only wife. You are never intimate with her, but everyone else believes you are married. (You’re cursed [by a witch] to stay single forever otherwise)”
Men liked this scenario less across the board, so I gotta lower the ‘certifiably hot’ to 60%. For young men, women aged ~20-35 crossed this threshhold; then early 20’s to late 30’s for the second cohort of men, and then around 30-45 for the older cohort.
But really, a full 20% of men aged 55+ said yeah, they’d like to be publicly married to images of people who were voted to be minors. I’m not sure what’s going on with that. It’s probably partially trolling (weirdly nice/even slope for trolling), but probably a lot of older men would actually be pretty proud to have a barely-legal teen who looks underage on their arm with a rock on her finger? I would imagine these guys imagine the girl is legal, and simply looks younger.
Here’s all three lines together, raw (not adjusted for anything)
Let’s stretch the chart up to the same peak so we can better compare the shape of the lines:
Dating and public-marriage has an identical slope for the younger ages, but public marriage tapers off slightly more slowly with age, probably around 5-10% higher. This is surprising to me, I thought the gap would be bigger! There’s a lot of public pressure and shame around men for dating too much younger, and I sort of expected that picking a mate for appearances only would cause men to select closer to their own age.
Let’s look at the graph again, but split out for men 25 or younger, and men 50 or older (dropping the guys in the middle):
Fascinating! Older men view older women about as equally attractive for fucking, dating, and public-facing, but younger women as more interesting for fucking specifically. Younger men are the reverse; they find younger women about equally as interesting for fucking, dating, and public-facing, whereas their greatest fucking allowance stretches up for older women. Basically: men regardless of age have higher tolerance for one-night-stands with women of far-away ages from themselves, though this graciousness does not extend towards more serious forms of relationships.
As a 34-year-old, I am inspired.
Another interesting thing in this data overall is that public-facing appears to lie in between dating and fucking. I'm surprised by this - I predicted the least sex-driven type of relationship to lie the farthest away from the most sex-driven question, but it is not so.
A man’s sluttiness increases his age tolerance
Roughly 10-20% more high-bodycount guys say yes to casual sex with women at every age of a woman right up until 65, compared to low bodycount guys! Where low bodycount guys find women to drop below 50% fuckability at age 50, high bodycount guys view women as viable for almost another full decade, god bless their souls.
So - what have we learned?
Functionally, the wall isn’t in early-mid 30’s, it’s in early 40’s. Sure, young guys think you’re less hot faster, but by the time you as a woman are waist-deep in your 30’s and braced for the wall, your dating pool probably does not include younger guys. You’ve got more runway than you think.
The steepest drop occurs from early 40’s to 50s, where suddenly acceleration picks up - but this is mostly losing out on men closer to your age. You’ve still got another decade or two of being appealing to much older men.
If 42 is the wall, I’d consider 65 to be the pit; by this point you’ve lost your sparkle for most of even the oldest men.
…Not everyone, though. There’ll always be a small, horny cohort of slutty old guys who will happily plow you straight into the grave, if by that age you still care about that sort of thing.
Of course, my data has caveats. For data collection, I posted to my twitter, and so I got almost exclusively guys-who-follow-me. I don’t think this introduces any special selection bias for age preference (I don’t post many photos of myself on my twitter, for exmaple, that might pull in guys who really like me at whatever age I’m at), but it does introduce a special bias for sex positivity and sluttiness, which might slightly inflate all ‘yes I’d go for her’ numbers across the board.
And the data is based on the age that a photo appears to be, which is based on other people’s votes in Ageguessr. It’s possible that if how old someone seems to be does not correlate with their actual age, we’re missing some important stuff about how this manifests in the real world.
For the charts above, I took the average of nearby ages too to smooth out the line. The actual line was very noisy, since we only have ~2 photos per age, and guys found some individual photos more appealing than others.
You can explore the data visualizations in more depth here (it’s a bit of a rough draft but good enough for now)
A few other charts:
As a housekeeping note: I’m preparing to do a survey based on first impressions. You can submit a photo of yourself, have people make guesses about you, and then get a report of how you’re perceived. This is available to people on Glosso who’ve completed enough info! You can find invite code for paid subscribers at the bottom of this post here (the post is marketing the sex-matching aspect of the site but there’s a lot more to the site than just that).
I would be quite interested in the results of the the reverse survey, that is, perceived hotness of men by age, as judged by women.
"…Not everyone, though. There’ll always be a small, horny cohort of slutty old guys who will happily plow you straight into the grave, if by that age you still care about that sort of thing." 😂