Monday, May 18, 2009

Attractiveness index

    Society tells us what to find attractive in possible partners; this is really no secret.  Society tells us that for a woman to be attractive, they must be thin, large-breasted, and feminine.  Men must be muscular, confident, and masculine.  There is, of course, nothing objectively true about these standards.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and everyone has their own opinion about what is attractive, or at least they should.
    I've noticed that over time, people's natural tastes tend to become polluted by the standards of society at large, so that their preferences start to match society's.  I have tried, at least in myself, to reverse this process as best as I could.  How, you ask? I basically try to subtract society's preferences from my own, to get a better idea of my own natural attraction.  When I find someone attractive, I ask myself how attractive I find them.  Then I consider how society's standards would view them and subtract (or divide; it's not an exact science) that from how attractive I found them.  The resulting degree of attractiveness, I call an "Attractiveness Index," and I try to use this when considering whether I'd like to date someone (with a higher index being better). 
    It sounds unnecessarily complicated and calculating, but it's actually quite simple.  If you find someone to be hot, but society would deem them to be absolutely smoking hot, then it seems that your natural attraction to them is actually pretty low, and that you find them attractive is based mostly on society's standards, so they would have a low index.  On the other hand, if you find someone attractive but society at large finds them completely unattractive, then it's pretty clear that your attraction to them comes completely from yourself, and not from society imprinting itself on you; they would have a high attractiveness index.
    I behoove you, the reader, to also adopt the practice of choosing people with high attractiveness indexes, as it will be beneficial to both you and to society at large.  You'll fin yourself to be happier in your relationships, as you will end up with people who you find attractive based on your preferences and not society's, so your attraction to them will be strong as it is more personal and runs deeper.  It will be better for society at large, because if more people begin seeking out partners based on their own innate attraction rather than society's standards, it will result in less homogeny of what people find attractive, which will mean that sought-after-ness will be more evenly distributed across all kinds of people.  The less-homogeny thing will also benefit you personally, because it will result in less competition for people that you are attracted to, if they don't meet society's standards.
    In case you're wondering about the methodology for creating this, it basically comes down to the assumption that our apparent attraction to someone (how attractive we think they are, without really thinking about it) will be an average of society's view of how attractive they would be and our own inherent attraction to them (untainted by society's views).  So, given the first two values, we can extrapolate our inherent attraction.  Here's a chart:

attractiveness

1 comment:

  1. But I have big boobs! What does that say about me? Will I always get discounted because of that? I sure hope not.

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