The Belle Curve

The average woman has average looks. The average man is unsightly.

By JAMES TARANTO of the Wall Street Journal

The online matchmaking industry turns out to be a great boon for students of human sexuality such as your humble columnist. Don't get us wrong: Our own social life centers on physical venues rather than virtual ones. But dating sites collect large amounts of data about their users, and at least one of them uses that information to produce some interesting amateur social-science work.

Our Valentine's Day survey of sexual social science prompted a reader to send along a 2009 blog post by Christian Rudder of OkCupid.com. The post delivers an obvious bit of advice: that an attractive photo is an important part of a successful online dating profile. "We all know that beautiful people are more successful daters, but let's quantify by exactly how much," Rudder writes. In doing so, he sheds light on the differences between the sexes.

OKCupid.com

OkCupid asks male and female users to rate the attractiveness of members of the opposite sex on a six-point scale, in which 0 is the least attractive and 5 is the most. The light line in the nearby chart shows the distribution of female attractiveness as rated by men. As you can see, it is close to a normal distribution--call it the belle curve. That is, the average woman's looks are "medium," or 2.5; and so are the median woman's, as there are approximately the same number above and below the midpoint, with the numbers declining more or less evenly approaching either extreme.

 

"Given the popular wisdom that Hollywood, the Internet, and Photoshop have created unrealistic expectations of how a woman should look, I found the fairness and, well, realism, of this gray arc kind of heartening," Rudder writes. We'll give him realism, but there's nothing especially "fair" about a normal distribution.

To see why, consider the most famous bell curve--the one depicting IQ scores. It was the subject of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's 1994 social-science classic, "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life." The authors argued that postwar American society had become far more stratified by intelligence, a situation they regarded as unfair and dangerous to social stability. Murray came under vicious attack from the left (Herrnstein died before publication), which argued that it was unfair even to measure intelligence unless the results were equal for all racial groups.

What the belle curve suggests is not that men are "fair" in judging female beauty but that female beauty is a natural phenomenon as opposed to a social construct. "It makes sense that most things will be arranged in bell-shaped curves," write Herrnstein and Murray in an appendix designed to serve as a primer on statistics:

Extremes tend to be rarer than the average. If that sounds like a tautology, it is only because bell curves are so common. Consider height. . . . Seven feet is "extreme" for humans. But if human height were distributed so that equal proportions of people were 5 feet, 6 feet, and 7 feet tall, the extreme would not be rarer than the average. It just so happens that the world hardly ever works out that way.

But OkCupid has found an instance in which it does. Male beauty turns out to be distributed quite abnormally.

OKCupid.com

The second chart is the same as the first, with the sexes reversed: The light line shows the distribution of male attractiveness as rated by women on OkCupid. The average gent, it seems, is quite unsightly. More than a quarter of men are 0's, and it appears a majority rate 1 or below. "Women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium," Rudder notes. "Very harsh."

 

What could account for this disparity? One possibility is that women are simply pleasanter to look at than men. That certainly rings true to us, but this would be a rare occasion in which it would be pertinent to raise the possibility that we are biased by virtue of being male and heterosexual. It would be interesting to see how women's ratings of female beauty compare with both sets of opposite-sex ratings. (By contrast, asking men to rate men's looks would be both awkward and unenlightening.)

The OkCupid ratings measure how men see women and how women see men. That is, the chart of female beauty is a measure of male psychology and vice versa. The heavy lines in the two charts measure the behavior of the rating sex. They show the distribution of messages received by average attractiveness rating. The best way of understanding this is that the heavy lines would be the same as the light ones if everybody received the same number of messages regardless of attractiveness rating.

The heavy lines are skewed to the right of the light ones in both cases, which shows, unsurprisingly, that better-looking people of both sexes are more popular. But Rudder draws some additional conclusions:

Site-wide, two-thirds of male messages go to the best-looking third of women. So basically, guys are fighting each other 2-for-1 for the absolute best-rated females, while plenty of potentially charming, even cute, girls go unwritten.

The medical term for this is male pattern madness. . . .

On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys' pursuing the all-but-unattainable. But with the basic ratings so out-of-whack, the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren't good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.

This seems badly confused. For one thing, these charts tell us nothing about the behavior of the average-looking woman (or man); the second chart depicts the perceptions and behavior of all women. For another, the ratings are averages of those given by all members of the opposite sex, not those who send messages. A man whose average rating is 1 may score considerably higher among the subset of women who send him messages.

And what the divergence between the charts really shows is that looks--defined narrowly here as that which can be depicted in a photograph--matter far less to women than to men. That women remain interested in men at all, despite finding most of us aesthetically repugnant, suggests that the attraction has some other basis.

That's consistent with anthropologist Heather Remoff's finding, noted in our Valentine's Day column, that women's evaluations of male appearance are idiosyncratic and reflective of other valuable male traits: "Every woman responds to a man whose looks correspond to her particular stereotype of power." It is men's looks that are socially constructed, while female beauty is a force of nature.

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Dave Wooden, Eric Jensen, Michael Nunnelley, John Bobek, Keneth Johnson, Michele Schiesser, Becky Perry, Pat Rowe, Jeff Bliss, Chris Papouras, David Hallstrom, Tony Lima, Raymond Hodnett, William Thode, John Brewer, Miguel Rakiewicz, Dan Goldstein, Kris Tufts, John Williamson, James Eckert, Bruce Goldman, Michael Smith, Kyle Kyllan, T.K. Smyth, Andrew Terhune, James Benenson and Ethel Fenig. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)