Transcription
Has this ever happened to you? You're talking to someone of the opposite gender about a woman that you think is beautiful. Whether it be someone you both know or a famous person, and they're surprised you find them attractive, they just can't seem to see it. Maybe you've noticed, more generally speaking, that the women that guys find pretty look somehow different from the women that girls find pretty.
This is something you can discover for yourself. Go to a store and look at the women in magazines aimed at men and the women in magazines aimed at women. You'll see that the sort of faces and bodies are not quite the same. Or just open up Instagram and look at the models that women follow and compare them to the models that men follow. They're going to fall into different aesthetic categories.
Sure, all of these famous women are going to be considered attractive by basically everybody, and many women do fit both categories. It's not that women think guy pretty is ugly, or that men think girl pretty is ugly. In fact, all of the women we discuss in this video are going to have a lot of the traits in common. Traits that predict attractiveness, generally speaking, which we talk about on this channel and in our short-form videos all of the time. But if you have a keen eye for this sort of thing, you'll agree that the women's looks that men like most aren't typically the same as the women's looks that women like most.
On social media, this observation has gone viral, several times, as a folk psychological concept known as guy pretty versus girl pretty. But there's also some real research and theoretical writing on the topic, which we're going to cover in this video. We'd argue that there are five main differences between guy pretty and girl pretty, which we're going to review today. There are five subtle differences that you can see between models and celebrities marketed towards men versus those marketed towards women. And that's part of why this concept has been so captivating. People are all familiar with it, but they can't quite put their finger on what it is.
The first difference we've noticed is leanness. We now have multiple studies indicating that when you have men and women rate the attractiveness of women, women prefer thinner models than men do. While both men and women generally prefer quite slender figures, in the research, the figures that women aspire to are thinner than the figures that men find desirable. And we think this extrapolates also to faces. Like if you look at two women with otherwise similar phenotypes that most people would agree on are an example of girl pretty versus guy pretty, the girl pretty one will usually be leaner. Take a girl pretty icon like Jazelle Bunin and compare her to someone men find very attractive like Jennifer Lawrence, and you'll notice that Jazelle has much more prominent bone structure. The main cause of this is lower facial adiposity. Just as women prefer slimmer bodies than men, it seems that they also prefer slimmer faces.
The second difference is also in the framing. This is something first explored by British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in 1975, which has often been noted many times since, which is that women are often depicted in media and art in such a way that portrays them as objects of male pleasure rather than agents in their own right. While critical theory isn't exactly the normal academic literature that we talk about at Cooves—our expertise is in quantitative scientific studies—we can see that Mulvey does have a point. If you look at the facial expressions and postures and angles and outfits of women in men's media, a lot of it is highly sexualized. Whereas, if you look at the same traits in women's media, it's often much more agentic. Like, compare the facial expressions, camera angles, and postures of women in a Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition to the facial expressions, camera angles, and postures of women in a magazine meant to sell women swimsuits. You'll see what Mulvey is talking about. And related to this, while women's assessment of who is pretty seems highly focused on the face, men's assessment also seems to be biased by bodily indices of attractiveness, like waist-to-hip ratio.
The third thing we've noticed is that women perceived as girl pretty often make aesthetic choices that are about making a statement or doing something artistically interesting, while women who are perceived as boy pretty generally cater to mainstream styles and tastes. I'm sure you know what I'm referring to. For short, let's summarize the difference as conformity. Think back to earlier this year when Emma Stone cut her hair short. We made a video about why we thought it worked on her, and a member of her staff, anthropologist Maine Murphy, ran a poll and found that women were twice as likely to think she was pulling off the short hair look, where men were twice as likely to think that she wasn't. Guy pretty generally favors people who stick to conservative makeup and hair choices, whereas girl pretty favors those who branch out and try stuff that's more visually interesting.
Now, the last two differences are more speculated. We don't really have any particular studies or poll data to share, so you have to let us know in the comments what you think about these. But we'd say the fourth difference is in facial maturity. Maybe you've also noticed that the celebrities women admire vary widely in age, but the celebrities men admire are almost all in their 20s. You can even see this in the career trajectories of individual women. When Margot Robbie first started her career, she was a definition of guy pretty, and now she's widely considered to be girl pretty. Really, the few guy pretty celebrities that aren't in their 20s are also unusually young-looking for their age.
The fifth is facial androgyny. While the models and celebrities men admire generally have higher facial femininity, the models that women admire often have some striking masculine features. These last two aren't meant pejoratively at all. By the way, while colloquially saying a woman looks older or more manly is insulting, when we talk about facial masculinity or facial neoteny, it's an academic thing, not really a good or bad feature. For example, the eye area of Cara Delevingne is very impressive and striking, but it's also not very feminine due to her heavy brow ridge and straight thick brows. While men and women both will find her attractive, it wouldn't be surprising that women would be fans of her look much more than men due to this masculine feature.
What's up with these last two differences then? Well, just a hypothesis, but maybe some of these traits that women typically find attractive in the opposite sex bleed over into the traits they find attractive in the same sex. In other words, women generally like men who are slightly older with somewhat masculinized faces. And so, it would make sense that they, more than men at least, would like women who are slightly older with somewhat masculinized faces. Let us know what you think about our hypothesis. And if you want us to analyze your face, head over to the link in bio—accuzz.com.