All Men Have Different Taste

I am strongly convinced that it does more harm than good to give a compliment when it isn’t deserved, or to give handouts that haven’t been earned. So I wouldn’t write this post if I didn’t honestly believe every word of it. I am not trying to tell ugly girls that they have a chance with Gerard Butler, or suggest that fat women don’t need to hit the gym and diet like their life depends on it, but I am also not interested in watching a perfectly attractive girl despair when she gets rejected or called unattractive by a guy she likes.

The fact is this: all men have different tastes, and the variety of tastes is surprisingly large. I could summarize this whole post by saying that my experience has shown the standard deviation of men's ratings of women on a 10 point scale to be ± 25 %, but since most women don’t like getting information in such cold and concrete terms, I will do my best to elaborate.

While every man wants a “beautiful” woman, no two men have the same idea of beauty, and the variety of taste among men will surprise most women. I am friends with some very good-looking, intelligent and accomplished guys – in other words, guys with options when it comes to selecting women. When we go out and one of us sees someone he likes, he will usually point her out to the rest of us. Invariably, we disagree about how attractive the girl is. Only rarely do two or more of us agree that she is very attractive (above an 8). More often than not, one of us thinks she is drop-dead gorgeous and the rest think she is mediocre at best. I cannot count the times I have had this conversation:

“Dude, you see that girl over there?”

“Which one, the girl in red? Yeah she is cute. I think I…”

“No, no, the one further back, in the blue dress and heels, the brunette. That girl for me is at least a 9.  I gotta go talk to her.”

“In the blue?? Dude, no way man, I’d say she’s a 6 or 6.5 at best. I like her friend though.”

“Alright, well that works for me, let’s go talk to them, I call the blue girl.”

“Haha you can have her, I got the cute friend.”

We tend to think of physical attractiveness as an absolute thing. This tendency is reflected (and reinforced) by Miss Universe-type pageants and lists bearing titles like “Hottest Women of 2010,” which suggest that attractiveness is highly objective. However, it clearly is not this black-and-white – any guy can tell you this after watching one of these pageants or looking at the girls on the lists; no man agrees with the rankings. The women that appeal most to any given man are those with a look that resonates with him personally, and the factors determining a man’s “type” are innumerable, which leads to an extremely varied concept of feminine beauty. This is an extremely good thing for men because it means we aren’t all competing for the same women, which would mean an order of magnitude more bar fights – probably wars too. I suspect the same variety exists for women’s taste in men, but I haven’t asked around enough to know if this is true.

I’ve also found that when I agree with a friend that a girl is extremely attractive, her attractiveness tends to lose its initial effect quickly. The same thing happens all the time with music. The catchiest songs, the ones that appeal to a large number of people, are the ones that you grow tired of most quickly, while the ones that you end up listening to ten years later are the ones that were more unique to your personal taste, and took some time to appreciate.

The upshot is that a girl should not get discouraged if a specific man isn’t drooling over her; there are probably other guys that will – or would, anyway, if she presented herself at her best.

It is worth noting that this variety of taste applies primarily to a girl’s style, ethnicity, dress style, or complexion – most of which are interrelated in some way. It applies to a lesser degree when it comes to body type and age, but there is a surprising variety in taste there as well.