When you finally got first experience?

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I find all of them attractive. I'd rate the last one as most attractive.



You are putting way too much into attractiveness here. Let's just say it like this: A woman being attractive has nothing to do with if I want to get to know her or be in a relationship with her, so when people start to mix up those things, they are no longer talking about attractivity.

I've had attractivity ratings in Aspie Quiz, and one undeniable result of this is that men of all ages think teenagers and girls in their early 20s are most attractive. The peak is somewhere around 18-19 years old. The reason for this has evolutionary causes. Men seek women that can deliver as many babies as possible for them, so they desire young women. Because of this fact, attractivity cannot be something purely cultural, rather has a strong biological component.

Yes, that's basically the same conclusion as I made. All of them are clearly attractive, but I wouldn't pursue any of them unless they gave me some favorable signals. At first sight, all of them come off as rather spoiled models, and that is kind of off-putting to me.

I personally cannot entirely separate physical attractiveness from attraction to personality in most cases. Features I might typically find attractive take on a much less attractive appearance on people with very distasteful personalities, the way their nasty personality will twist those features in the worst way.

I mean here is an example, though probably not the best...I am into the Game of Thrones show and books, and there is a character Sansa who's totally in love with an attractive prince and wants to marry him and all that, well the prince, Joffrey turns out to be very evil and abusive to her, the way it describes it in the book is all the features that once drew her to him became cruel and unpleasant to behold. Point being attractiveness isn't all in the looks.

i forgot to add:

...which will make you more confident, which in turn will make you more generally attractive

and i also forgot to summarize it:

"know thyself"

On the contrary, I think you've confused 'attractive' with something like 'culturally given good looking'. Someone is attractive if I (or you, or Sweetleaf) am attracted to them. That's it. There is a different notion of 'attractive', which is related to social and cultural and media representation etc. anagram observed that, though he doesn't find any of the women attractive, he nonetheless thinks they're attractive. I know what he means, but it's still an odd statement. The contradiction is explained by their being two different meanings of the term. As it happens, I think the latter one makes little sense.



I absolutely agree what we find attractive has a biological component. I am not arguing it doesn't.

I will say that you seem to me to be taking a simplistic perspective on the matter. Which is to say, I will have two remarks on your 'ratings' remark.

1) Again, I'm a heterosexual male. And I do not find women of that age the most attractive. I'm probably not the only one. The same evolutionary pressures have contributed to my biology as they have my fellow XY chromosome owners.

2) Young women are not the only ones found attractive by men - not by a long shot.

Were the 'evolutionary causes' as strong and/or singular as 'men seek women that can deliver as many babies as possible for them, so they desire young women', all we would see is men ignoring any woman over 22, and those who succeeded having child after child with them. That simply is not the case, as is evidenced by, you know, the actual factual world.

I always start with the world. Consider everyone in human history anyone has ever found attractive. Each one of those instances had a strong biological component, yet what variety we would find! This tells us the 'evolutionary causes' have given us a far wider range of experience and behaviour than question-begging Just-So stories would have us believe.

I once saw some kind of documentary featuring young guys in relationships with women quite a bit older than them, another example that guys don't always see younger as being more attractive.

I agree with this. I don't want children, and I rarely relate to younger people. I briefly dated a woman twice my age (roughly 30 year age difference). Personality is a huge, huge part of attraction, and I don't get why this is such a point of contention for some. I'm curious how many men who believe purely in a biological attraction are in relationships which fulfill both partners.

Last edited by HighLlama on 13 Aug 2016, 5:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

yes, it is odd. which is why i wouldn't just leave at that, in any situation where i actually need or want to be clear. it's a deceptive word. my answer ("yes, they are attractive") is an acknowledgement of what is actually being asked in most cases, which is besides the point of what actually matters when it comes to attractiveness (namely: attracting people that matter -- and, hopefully, also keeping away undesired people. which is when "too much attractiveness" often gets to be a problem, because it does the opposite of that job)

so, another way to put it is: there's qualitative attractiveness (attracting the right people), and there's quantitative attractiveness (attracting more people). people normally think of the latter, and then assume that it overrides the former, or maybe they can't even tell the difference

as for "ratings", if the idea is to extract any meaningful information, then the scope has to be explained and acknowledged and controlled for. if you're a hetero guy and you're shown a picture of a woman, and you react like "whoa, she's hot!" before giving it any thought, and then you're asked to "rate her attractiveness", you'll probably give her a high rating, regardless of any other thoughts or ideas or opinions that may occur to you about that same woman in that very picture. so what is actually being judged? brief moment for reflection here...

...and what is effectively being judged is: how competitive or high-ranking you believe you need to be in order to secure a sexual encounter/relationship with that woman (regardless if you would be interested in it to begin with). it's not a personal response, it's a socially-oriented one. in short, it's not a measurement of personal preference, even if it may be based on hardcoded instincts

I equal attractivity with physical attractivity, and I have no idea what attractivity based on something else is supposed to be. Might be because I don't desire sex with people and that physical attractivity plays no role if I'm romantically interested or not. So when you speak of other forms of attractivity, I, and probably a few other asexual people as well, have no idea what you actually talk about. It's kind of problematic to discuss this in forms that some (maybe even many) people really don't understand or can relate to.



I never claimed everybody had these preferences, just that a majority has, and it doesn't differ between NTs and NDs.



That's because it is largely women's preferences that rule. Women don't have a preference for young guys. They typically have a preference for guys their own age, and it's their preferences that largely determines the outcome.

The mechanism behind this is pretty easy to understand. Since men of all ages desire young women this group becomes highly wanted, and so can decide according to their own preferences, which are guys their own age. Older men know it operates this way, so seeks older women instead, which are less wanted and easier to get into relationships with. Some highly successful older men however succeed with younger women, causing younger men to adjust their preferences upwards as well, or delaying getting into relationships.



Still, it is a lot more common for young girls to be paired with older men than the reverse, and there also typically is an age difference in relationships, and the guy is usually older. These are largely the effects of male preferences.

rdos - thank you for your reply.

As it is, I think (as you suggest) we're speaking at cross-purposes. I feel I've been as clear as I can, and I'm sure you feel the same about what you've written, yet it still seems like we're talking past each other. And indeed, our different experiences of sexuality could well play a part. I don't think there's anything I can say that isn't just repeating myself. So I'll leave this here for now - I'd guess we'll end up talking about it again at some point anyway.

This is all greek to me.

1. I have no urge to have sex with any stranger woman, regardless of how attractive she is or how good her personality traits are. Thus, sexual attraction has no meaning to me.

2. I form bonds with women nonverbally, so I cannot decide if their social personalities are any good or not beforehand. I do get important input from the observation game, but it is not related to typical social information, rather it has to do with persistence, creativity, being protective and alike. If I enter the observation game or not doesn't depend on any type of attractiveness, and certainly not on social information. In fact, it seems this is always determined by the girl and not me.

3. The decision to get into a relationship is based on the outcome of the observation game only.

If you want to use a different form of "attractiveness" that is connected to the NT courtship, then please label it as such.

Anything other than how you form relationships isn't connected to the NT courtship, making claims like that makes it seem like you're trying to speak for all on the spectrum based on only your personal experience. I would never have been able to form a relationship by staring....but that doesn't mean I went about it like a typical neurotypical either.

Maybe not, but forming connections with sex is definitely an NT preference, and I see it highly likely that sexual attractiveness is strongly connected to that. Which makes it all NT behavior.

You really don't need to form relationships by staring, which really is a misnomer anyway (I call it the observation game nowadays). As long as you don't form connections with sex, you are not NT in this area, and then sexual attractiveness becomes an obsolete term with no meaning.

If I stare, I'd more likely get my butt kicked than achieve success with girls.

i think this is the point. your generalizations often extend to things you just can't relate to, and you don't seem to take that into account as much as you would need to in order to form sound theories

I think it is the reverse. It's your extensions of known things (in this case attractivity) that are generalizations that cannot be applied to everybody, and thus are invalid. I made no generalization whatsoever but instead claimed that we should keep attractivity as "physical attractivity", as this is something that everybody can understand and not undermine it with "sexual attractivity", which a considerable amount of NDs cannot relate to. At least you could use the term "sexual attractivity" when you mean it in that sense. That way I would know that you are talking greek at least.