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Aside from how overused that one study is, the other major problem is that the womens’ answer is straight up incorrect, therefore bullshit. Women have the capacity to actually rank men on a respectable bell curve (just like gay men can rank women), they just choose not to because they concentrate on the ‘what will that answer say about me?’ implications. Similar to how straight men will sometimes performatively deny that an attractive man is attractive, or say that they can’t tell because they’re so straight it hurts and blinds.
It’s the opposite. If they were ranking some strangers as anthropologists, far from the context of their own coupling, they’d give a straight answer, as they usually do in the other studies. But on Okcupid, they think rating merely above average men as above average marks them as easy, low quality, desperate participants in the coupling game.
Also possible. It would be nice to have some kind of backing, though. Are you going on experience? Intuition?
I agree wholeheartedly, I just don’t think that a serious attempt at real data collection is going to happen for societal reasons, so we’re stuck with stuff that got scraped when nobody cared yet.
In "The Typical Man Disgusts the Typical Woman" post Update (the post that y'all are discussing), Caplan links to Emil Kirkegaard's analysis of four much more representative data collections:
In all of these, the OK Cupid's stark disparity in ratings do not reproduce. Women's photos do tend to get slightly higher attractiveness ratings, but, you know, there's probably a reason why both men's and women's magazines are full of half-naked women.
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