by „type of question“, you mean the framing? I guess like you did with the men, by putting the female respondents out of their social context. Holiday alone, etc.
Neither men's nor women's preferences are 'superficial', both are reasonable in evolutionary terms.
But looking at women rating men's pics just always gives these inane conclusions like 'Women think all men are below average' with the okcupid data. It's just silly.
"…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." 😂
This is a really interesting result! I think it may lead to an overly-optimistic view, though, for 3 reasons.
The first is that I suspect hotness (as a proxy for sexual bargaining power) drops off faster than fuckability and the other surveyed options. This surveys a simple would/wouldn’t, which only tells when women cross the threshold to wouldn’t. A beautiful woman will presumably drop from a 9, to an 8, etc before actually crossing that threshold, and since the curve is a right-skewed distribution, the actual wall shifts earlier. A more faithful survey might be “how much would you pay for sex with her, either directly or via dates/presents” or just “how hot is she on a scale of 1-10”.
The second is that the woman is presented as a presumably-unaging vampire. This likely increases the willingness of men to say yes to women older than they would otherwise. It might not make a difference for fuckability but probably would in the other 2.
The third is that I’m pretty sure the population-level averages for fraction of women that are beautiful aren’t monotonic. Being beautiful later requires better genetics than being beautiful earlier, with some people who were lucky at peak getting unlucky in the skin sagginess, asymmetry development, fat shift, etc categories. Or not taking care of aging as well as others. So while this may show the curve for beautiful women, a “9 within the 20s-women category” has a notable probability of dropping to a “7 within the 40s-women” category. Individual women are more likely to hit a wall than just looking at the beautiful women within the population indicates. Edit: I think I could probably fit “survivorship bias” somewhere in this paragraph, since it’s pretty similar to what I was trying to say.
Hm, looking at all the photos, it looks to me like the bigger headline here is that people are HORRIBLE at guessing real people's actual ages. The AI pics had people off by a year to three regularly, but with the real people, they were regularly off by an entire decade, especially for the younger people. A ton of the "not pretty" women in their teens and 20s got pegged to be like 11 years older than they were. And most of the AI pics were guessed younger than they were supposed to be but it seems like the real pics were opposite?
Looking at the guesses, a couple things stand out to me:
1. Most people seem to peg age based on what actress/model types are playing on TV...so if a woman who looks like a model is playing a 40 year old mom, that's seemingly what "40" looks like bc people only really guessed fairly accurately when it came to the AI "pretty" women.
2. AI seems to be trained on those types of images and mostly creates women who look younger than they're supposed to be, similar to Hollywood casting.
3. Men barely even register young women as young UNLESS they're pretty.
4. Pretty women in their 30s are assumed to be in their 20s (which I've found is true IRL too) while average women in their 20s are assumed to be in their 30s.
5. People do seem a little better at guessing age once you get to real old retirement age...probably because there aren't that many images of "pretty" old people presented in media so people are pegging this based more on reality.
6. People think Phoebe Cates is almost 30 years younger than she is, though the pic used was fuzzy.
My one friend of college who had lots of sexual partners, when I caught up with him in his 50s was definitely not discriminating based on age. He preferred the older ones in fact.
WRT this study, not bad but I suspect the numbers skew higher based on starting with extremely hot women. It's like how dementia will be diagnosed later in high IQ types. I'd be interested in seeing how this goes for merely above average women. My bet would be the drop off is steeper and earlier.
I’m in the 55+ cohort and participated in the “Serious Dating” category. I found myself rejecting the younger-looking headshots due to the potential of having no connection, nothing in common. Like the protagonist in the old Steely Dan song “Nineteen”.
I checked the photoset and it's even worse when you filter by "pretty", because AI-generated faces are much more obviously neotenous than many real ones. Maybe you are right and the vampire scenario is doing too much heavy lifting there. Maybe these people treated it like eating a deep-fried scorpion at a night market in Southeast Asia. "It's not that I necessarily *want* to eat one, but since you're offering and I've been assured it's totally safe, I'll give it a go to at least see what it's like."
Question: Were they shown faces only, or bodies as well? The analysis mentions "body of a 11 year old" and the such. But how would one be able to tell the body of someone just by looking at their face?
I think women who have taken reasonable good care of themselves are the hottest at ages 45-55. That life experience they have coupled with the desire to have experiences they may have missed out on from marrying in their early twenties and having a family in their twenties.
The vampire thing seems like a mistake to me if the goal is to apply the findings to real women: vampires don't age. Maybe dating a 40 y/o is fine, but not a 45-50 y/o in 5-10 years. And maybe the men who would date 11 year olds are more intrigued by the vampire part than the 11 y/o part. Vampires, also, I assume, can't have kids. So the data isn't going to reflect the influence of declining fertility for men looking to have children
The vampire question is so far from reality it’s hard to make to make a judgement about it.
Probably most of us have seen Interview with The Vampire and Let the Right One In. E.g. is the fictional model of vampires that they get mentally stuck at the age they became a vampire; or they psychologically mature normally; or spending the last 200 years as a serial killer has messed them up; or they just ain’t right when they come back from the dead…. What is Jonathan Harker doing here, running up the stairs when he should be running out the front door?
For at least some models of how vampirism is imagined to work, them looking like they’re 70 is part of the deal here. (Cf. Nosferatu)
Joking aside, there’s a serious response, which is I’m not sure what, if anything, the vampire question reveals about actual preferences; and a joke answer, that once you learn she’s a vampire it’s still a hard nope, but now for completely different reasons.
I had no idea the vampire question was supposed to emphasize secrecy. I don't care if anything is secret or not.
The only thing I cared about in the vampire set of questions is that the person is actually 200, so they wouldn't have the immaturity and malleability of people who are genuinely young. For me, that's the turn-off of youth.
So, the vampire question allowed me to think about scenarios that I wouldn't remotely consider IRL because everyone on the table has lived longer and had time to learn much more than I ever will, whether that knowledge is academic, social, historical, etc.
Anything other than culturally enforced monogamy through sacred views of life, love, and structure will result in population collapse and warring men without a reason to live.
Women lose their mind boggling nation musing life affirming beauty by about 25. Still fuckable but no longer the source of mens love for life. They have it for about a decade.
We really are just evolved monkeys upon this earth at the whims of our evolutionary impulses and spiritual forces greater than ourselves.
Nobody's stopping you from joining the Haredim, Amish (granted, not sure they take in new members), or converting to Islam and living under the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Female sexuality is just as mental as it is physical— one could look like an Instagram model and be dead inside. A sexual pzombie, a sexual flash in the pan. Or one could have incredible internal femininity and sexuality but look chopped, and that isn't going anywhere either(but has more legs than the former, believe it or not).
Virtually every woman can cap her ceiling in the physical category at really any age. That is the easy part. Most men will find a woman who is 50, who clearly takes good care of herself physically, who has good sexual hygiene, who is fun, seductive, and easy going irresistible. I'm not talking about this woman's vagina, I'm more so talking about her underwear drawer. She might have no granny panties whatsoever while the 25 year old fertile prude has a single sexy thong she occasionally wears.
The hard part is cultivation of sexuality and femininity because thats often produced by a feedback loop between the former and the latter. Look hot, feel hot, be hot. But you can just as much go in reverse: be hot, feel hot, look hot.
Fundamentally this works the same for men, but men have an inherent advantage in that they fix and build and organize by nature. Women break and corrupt by nature. This doesn't need to be a moral claim or judgement, you don't need any male bias or misogyny to realize this is simply a fact masc/fem. The fastest way to get hot as a woman at any age is to get a man to lead you there. Don't have the hubris to think you can do it alone or the foolishness to think the coven will help you get there. The cat should be out of the bag on that one by now.
I'm curious how much non-appearance factors matter. Personally, I'd be much more willing to sleep with an older woman if I know and like her, or if she has (not very legible) sexy vibes, which are about more than just being photogenic.
The shape of these graphs surprises me as well. I remember reading in the book Dataclysm that men on OkCupid were most attracted to 20-year-old women regardless of their own age (https://www.businessinsider.com/dataclysm-shows-men-are-attracted-to-women-in-their-20s-2014-10). My own intuition as a hetero man, which I feel comfortable enough in this space to admit, would have been that 16 and 30 are about equally desirable if not for the taboo.
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.
Yes. As a 56 year old, me too
I think biology is on the man’s side, but I am ready to be proven wrong
I'm interested, but it's a little less obvious the type of questions to ask.
by „type of question“, you mean the framing? I guess like you did with the men, by putting the female respondents out of their social context. Holiday alone, etc.
Alas, women are just much less visually focused. You would get some rough trends out of it, but the map to reality is just weaker.
"this survey works because men are fundamentally superficial and don't care about anything other than a way a woman looks"
Neither men's nor women's preferences are 'superficial', both are reasonable in evolutionary terms.
But looking at women rating men's pics just always gives these inane conclusions like 'Women think all men are below average' with the okcupid data. It's just silly.
"…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." 😂
This is a really interesting result! I think it may lead to an overly-optimistic view, though, for 3 reasons.
The first is that I suspect hotness (as a proxy for sexual bargaining power) drops off faster than fuckability and the other surveyed options. This surveys a simple would/wouldn’t, which only tells when women cross the threshold to wouldn’t. A beautiful woman will presumably drop from a 9, to an 8, etc before actually crossing that threshold, and since the curve is a right-skewed distribution, the actual wall shifts earlier. A more faithful survey might be “how much would you pay for sex with her, either directly or via dates/presents” or just “how hot is she on a scale of 1-10”.
The second is that the woman is presented as a presumably-unaging vampire. This likely increases the willingness of men to say yes to women older than they would otherwise. It might not make a difference for fuckability but probably would in the other 2.
The third is that I’m pretty sure the population-level averages for fraction of women that are beautiful aren’t monotonic. Being beautiful later requires better genetics than being beautiful earlier, with some people who were lucky at peak getting unlucky in the skin sagginess, asymmetry development, fat shift, etc categories. Or not taking care of aging as well as others. So while this may show the curve for beautiful women, a “9 within the 20s-women category” has a notable probability of dropping to a “7 within the 40s-women” category. Individual women are more likely to hit a wall than just looking at the beautiful women within the population indicates. Edit: I think I could probably fit “survivorship bias” somewhere in this paragraph, since it’s pretty similar to what I was trying to say.
Hm, looking at all the photos, it looks to me like the bigger headline here is that people are HORRIBLE at guessing real people's actual ages. The AI pics had people off by a year to three regularly, but with the real people, they were regularly off by an entire decade, especially for the younger people. A ton of the "not pretty" women in their teens and 20s got pegged to be like 11 years older than they were. And most of the AI pics were guessed younger than they were supposed to be but it seems like the real pics were opposite?
Looking at the guesses, a couple things stand out to me:
1. Most people seem to peg age based on what actress/model types are playing on TV...so if a woman who looks like a model is playing a 40 year old mom, that's seemingly what "40" looks like bc people only really guessed fairly accurately when it came to the AI "pretty" women.
2. AI seems to be trained on those types of images and mostly creates women who look younger than they're supposed to be, similar to Hollywood casting.
3. Men barely even register young women as young UNLESS they're pretty.
4. Pretty women in their 30s are assumed to be in their 20s (which I've found is true IRL too) while average women in their 20s are assumed to be in their 30s.
5. People do seem a little better at guessing age once you get to real old retirement age...probably because there aren't that many images of "pretty" old people presented in media so people are pegging this based more on reality.
6. People think Phoebe Cates is almost 30 years younger than she is, though the pic used was fuzzy.
My one friend of college who had lots of sexual partners, when I caught up with him in his 50s was definitely not discriminating based on age. He preferred the older ones in fact.
WRT this study, not bad but I suspect the numbers skew higher based on starting with extremely hot women. It's like how dementia will be diagnosed later in high IQ types. I'd be interested in seeing how this goes for merely above average women. My bet would be the drop off is steeper and earlier.
I’m in the 55+ cohort and participated in the “Serious Dating” category. I found myself rejecting the younger-looking headshots due to the potential of having no connection, nothing in common. Like the protagonist in the old Steely Dan song “Nineteen”.
Wait why no one is talking about 15% of men who would go with 11 years old? I am not sure I understood that.
Check the photo set, and search by "pretty" instead of "all" (default) so you know what was shown.
Then add the vampire scenario to remove moral harm, and I expect a few honest "would" guys at least.
I checked the photoset and it's even worse when you filter by "pretty", because AI-generated faces are much more obviously neotenous than many real ones. Maybe you are right and the vampire scenario is doing too much heavy lifting there. Maybe these people treated it like eating a deep-fried scorpion at a night market in Southeast Asia. "It's not that I necessarily *want* to eat one, but since you're offering and I've been assured it's totally safe, I'll give it a go to at least see what it's like."
Question: Were they shown faces only, or bodies as well? The analysis mentions "body of a 11 year old" and the such. But how would one be able to tell the body of someone just by looking at their face?
I think women who have taken reasonable good care of themselves are the hottest at ages 45-55. That life experience they have coupled with the desire to have experiences they may have missed out on from marrying in their early twenties and having a family in their twenties.
The vampire thing seems like a mistake to me if the goal is to apply the findings to real women: vampires don't age. Maybe dating a 40 y/o is fine, but not a 45-50 y/o in 5-10 years. And maybe the men who would date 11 year olds are more intrigued by the vampire part than the 11 y/o part. Vampires, also, I assume, can't have kids. So the data isn't going to reflect the influence of declining fertility for men looking to have children
The vampire question is so far from reality it’s hard to make to make a judgement about it.
Probably most of us have seen Interview with The Vampire and Let the Right One In. E.g. is the fictional model of vampires that they get mentally stuck at the age they became a vampire; or they psychologically mature normally; or spending the last 200 years as a serial killer has messed them up; or they just ain’t right when they come back from the dead…. What is Jonathan Harker doing here, running up the stairs when he should be running out the front door?
For at least some models of how vampirism is imagined to work, them looking like they’re 70 is part of the deal here. (Cf. Nosferatu)
Joking aside, there’s a serious response, which is I’m not sure what, if anything, the vampire question reveals about actual preferences; and a joke answer, that once you learn she’s a vampire it’s still a hard nope, but now for completely different reasons.
I had no idea the vampire question was supposed to emphasize secrecy. I don't care if anything is secret or not.
The only thing I cared about in the vampire set of questions is that the person is actually 200, so they wouldn't have the immaturity and malleability of people who are genuinely young. For me, that's the turn-off of youth.
So, the vampire question allowed me to think about scenarios that I wouldn't remotely consider IRL because everyone on the table has lived longer and had time to learn much more than I ever will, whether that knowledge is academic, social, historical, etc.
We're just in a collective collapse.
Anything other than culturally enforced monogamy through sacred views of life, love, and structure will result in population collapse and warring men without a reason to live.
Women lose their mind boggling nation musing life affirming beauty by about 25. Still fuckable but no longer the source of mens love for life. They have it for about a decade.
We really are just evolved monkeys upon this earth at the whims of our evolutionary impulses and spiritual forces greater than ourselves.
Nobody's stopping you from joining the Haredim, Amish (granted, not sure they take in new members), or converting to Islam and living under the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Female sexuality is just as mental as it is physical— one could look like an Instagram model and be dead inside. A sexual pzombie, a sexual flash in the pan. Or one could have incredible internal femininity and sexuality but look chopped, and that isn't going anywhere either(but has more legs than the former, believe it or not).
Virtually every woman can cap her ceiling in the physical category at really any age. That is the easy part. Most men will find a woman who is 50, who clearly takes good care of herself physically, who has good sexual hygiene, who is fun, seductive, and easy going irresistible. I'm not talking about this woman's vagina, I'm more so talking about her underwear drawer. She might have no granny panties whatsoever while the 25 year old fertile prude has a single sexy thong she occasionally wears.
The hard part is cultivation of sexuality and femininity because thats often produced by a feedback loop between the former and the latter. Look hot, feel hot, be hot. But you can just as much go in reverse: be hot, feel hot, look hot.
Fundamentally this works the same for men, but men have an inherent advantage in that they fix and build and organize by nature. Women break and corrupt by nature. This doesn't need to be a moral claim or judgement, you don't need any male bias or misogyny to realize this is simply a fact masc/fem. The fastest way to get hot as a woman at any age is to get a man to lead you there. Don't have the hubris to think you can do it alone or the foolishness to think the coven will help you get there. The cat should be out of the bag on that one by now.
"women break and corrupt by nature"
This is an insane view
I am insane, so
I'm "talking about her underwear drawer."
You're definitely more advanced in the underwear fetish department than I am!
You'd be surprised, I just like thongs
I'm curious how much non-appearance factors matter. Personally, I'd be much more willing to sleep with an older woman if I know and like her, or if she has (not very legible) sexy vibes, which are about more than just being photogenic.
The shape of these graphs surprises me as well. I remember reading in the book Dataclysm that men on OkCupid were most attracted to 20-year-old women regardless of their own age (https://www.businessinsider.com/dataclysm-shows-men-are-attracted-to-women-in-their-20s-2014-10). My own intuition as a hetero man, which I feel comfortable enough in this space to admit, would have been that 16 and 30 are about equally desirable if not for the taboo.
"In their 20's" =/= 20.