The biological factors that underlie sexual preferences are pretty well established, for a long time actually. This wasn’t a polemical topic until ideology desguised as social science started intervening. That said, this is not the forum adequate for such discussion, so I’ll let it rest. Just don’t tell me that there’s no such thing as objective criteria to evaluate female beauty and that it all lies “in the eyes of the beholder”. That’s a farce.

I would submit that beauty (aesthetics) is different from reproductive desirability. I mean, I can appreciate how beautiful/handsome some men are, even though it makes absolutely no sense from an evolutionary biological standpoint, as there is a zero percent chance of two men producing offspring with each other naturally. And I don’t actually feel sexually attracted towards men.

I’m not an evolutionary biologist, even though I’ve done my reading on Desmond Morris - but as a linguist, I am armed and ready to discuss the definitions of the concepts we use to death.

Clearly. You can appreciate a beautiful horse and not want to ■■■■ it! :smile:

But that’s not the topic. The topic is why do most humans around the globe naturally feel desire towards some physical traits without any need of learning. That’s biology.

After that, there are layers superimposed upon our natural instincts coming from different sources, like the culture where we developed, passing fads, group trends, etc. For instance, thin eyebrows where a thing a while back. Then, the trend became thicker eyebrows. This is an example of a passing fad. They add to biological drives. There’s also individual preferences. Some people prefer dark hair, others dark skin, etc. Some prefer counterparts more meaty, others more skinny. Then add fashion, social status, etc.; into it and we’ll find an incredible diversty of preferences.

All these factors combine.

However, there are basic features appreciated by the overwhelming majority, like those I described in my earlier post, by the reasons explained, that don’t change. We can’t consider gross deviations to the norm as representative, like we can’t consider someone who was born with no arms as representative of our species, invalidating what is normative as being such. Just because someone is born blind, you can’t say that blindness is a human trait. It’s not, something went wrong. That blind person was supposed to see, if something abnormal hadn’t occurred. That’s the same for people who have a preference for the morbidly obese. These people exist, but something went wrong in their development. They should prefer healthier bodies, but something went wrong. There’s people who like to ■■■■ the corpses. It’s called necrophilia, one among many paraphilias in existence. These are all deviations to the norm. Some are harmful, others are not, but none of them represents normative human preferences. If we generalize from these outlier cases, we are committing an informal fallacy. That’s what I pointed out earlier. In some cases, rare circumstances lead to scenarios that very much differ from what is mostly occurrent and, in this particular case, can’t be used as a way to invalidate what the norm is. On the matter at hand, that men prefer women with a curvy body and well developed secondary sexual characteristics. In a nutshell, big boobs sell for a reason.

1 Like

Plausible Solution: Place a broken thrall prior to placement in the Orb of Nergal. Easy solution with minimal dev work. The IQOL mod does such a good job, FC is just lazy.

3 Likes

Attraction is attraction. No surprise we have leaders who are (generally) more attractive than the norm. In my opinion and experience, people who are blandly attractive are more often selected as leadership material. People with more exotic good looks are often held out even further as “aliens,” and are either (or both) lauded and mistreated.

We generally like symmetry, clear skin, expressive eyes and good hair, as they are wired into our breeding mechanisms. Thus we tend to confer success on those in our society who have those attractive traits. We don’t really need to range into the perverse to examine this.

My own named Entertainer thrall is not exactly the most attractive fellow in the herd, and that’s OK by me. Makes him easier to kill or let die in a Raid-based explosion. I do wonder how he’d be perceived if Funcom had modeled him on my actual features? :mirror:

1 Like

Which in today’s society is absurd, but we are wired that way. There’s a bias skewing in favor of beauty even where it shouln’t belong. Many don’t even notice it.

If people choose beautiful people as leaders, there is nothing wrong with that, IMHO. Quite the contrary. All other things being equal, a handsome leader is unlikely to be a villain and a despot, a mass murderer. Usually they become people with an inferiority complex. Tyrants and dictators were not beautiful. Hitler, Stalin, Putin are disgusting.

I don’t think Stalin looked particularly bad, Putin is unsettling but that’s his facial expression, he ain’t ugly.

Anyways, our President in France looks good, but he is tyrannical.

2 Likes

Have you ever heard of Ted Bundy?

@heaven13 We talked about leaders.

He was small, pockmarked, had a withered hand and, as they say, 6 toes, they laughed at him until he came to power.

Okay but all this BS aside, Stephen Hawking wasn’t “handsome” and yet he was awesome.
As @MarcosC pointed out, we should not fall for the beauty bias, it is false correlation.

1 Like

The point is that attractiveness does not, in any way, affect a person’s morals. I’m sure you could find a long list of unattractive leaders who are kind and upstanding and then as equally long a list of conventionally attractive leaders who are guilty of truly despicable actions.

Being attractive doesn’t make you any more or less likely to commit heinous crimes. It’s this bias that pretty = good that allowed people like Ted Bundy to commit his crimes because no one suspected the handsome, friendly guy of being evil.

Like him, so many others. Besides, beauty is important, but there’s a whole personal universe beyond that. You get used to beauty fast. Then you’ll have to deal with all the rest. Beauty is also fleeting. Those who are lucky to live long enough, eventually lose it. If that’s all you have, you’ll lose yourself.
I’m lucky enough to be married with a gorgeous women, but her attractiveness is the least of her qualities. She could end up disfigured and I would love her as intensely as I do now.

I don’t know, I don’t know… personally, I haven’t met beautiful or simply charming people - scoundrels. I haven’t even met demonically beautiful scoundrels. Usually scoundrels are ugly and unattractive. But this is my personal experience.

Dude, I met a lot of them, but they were… “fixed”. Like plastic surgery fixed. Beauty and morals have nothing to do with one another, @Teng . I can tell you that the most attractive women I met in my life weren’t the most interesting by a long shot.

He’s a narcicist. :smile: Hopefully, you guys will find a better one next.
I quite like our president (Portugal). He’s very classy, very well educated and an upstanding guy. He is a good person, unlike so many in politics. I’ve known him for many years. Unfortunately he is already on his second term. We won’t get one as good as him soon.

1 Like

I believe that moral uncleanliness somehow shines through the physical shell, leaves its mark on it, and this person can no longer be considered charming and attractive, even if he has the right facial features.

That’s one way to express your personal experience on this bias :+1:

Ah, but that’s a tottaly different thing. People can be attractive because of their charm. The way they look, the way they speak, their body posture, how they move, etc. Your mental state influences all of that. We’re reasonably good at perceiving micro expressions too, and they tell a lot about a person.
There’s also markings that stay on your face if you tend to keep the same expressions for a long time.
But you can be stunning while being a horrible person. And it’s perfectly possible to feel repulsion for stunning bad people. You know they are physically beautiful, but they are so insufferable that you feel repelled in spite of their good looks.

1 Like

It’s much less obvious than in @Teng 's case. People don’t realize it. They may even deny it while thinking they aren’t biased. Again, this has all been thoroughly studied. :slightly_smiling_face: