A friend of mine recently said that Ellen Barkin used to be on his list of the hottest of hot women. To me, she’s not the slightest bit pretty.
This brought to mind a bit of a tangent: What does it mean to be average-looking?
I used to think it meant that on the bell curve of Attractiveness in Population, an average-looking guy was in the big fat part in the middle, along with most other people. Attractive people are on the skinny bit to the right, less attractive people to the left.
Let’s say that 0 is a glob of goo, and 20 is the height of beauty:
But I don’t really think that’s true anymore. Or at least, it’s not as clear as that.
In that model, an average-looking guy like me would be, as I say, right in the middle. Or somewhere in there.
But I know for sure that some people think I’m actually a fairly ugly specimen. And others (even women!) have given me the impression that they think I’m occasionally on the less hideous side of the chart.
So how does that work? The fact is that it doesn’t work at all in the given model. I think that the real definition of an average-looking guy is someone who most people think is average-looking, but some find good-looking and some find… euphemism-looking.
Thus, instead of a chart of all the people, we each have our own personal charts. Our personal charts show how other people see us. Because I’m an average-looking guy, my chart looks like this:
Brad Pitt (or whatever) would have a chart that’s shifted way to right and probably never levels off on the right side. Joseph Merrick‘s (you might not want to look) would be shifted ever so slightly to the left.
Not knowing who Ellen Barkin was, I had to look her up. While I consider the picture you included to show her as quite attractive, some others put her in a less favorable light. I think you’ll need 3d graph paper to handle this one.
I didn’t want to seem to be showing her in a bad light, so I picked a decent pic. But, much to her dismay I’m sure, she’s not pretty to me in that pic either.