Men no longer have go through the drudgery of determining whether or not chix are hawt. We can now have the computers do it for us:
"The computer produced impressive results -- its rankings were very similar to the rankings people gave." This is considered a remarkable achievement, believes Kagian, because it's as though the computer "learned" implicitly how to interpret beauty through processing previous data it had received.
I wonder what units it used to judge? Millihelens (that amount of female beauty required to launch a single ship)?
Of course, that was the easy part:
Kagian, who studied under the Adi Lautman multidisciplinary program for outstanding students at Tel Aviv University, says that a possible next step is to teach computers how to recognize "beauty" in men. This may be more difficult. Psychological research has shown that there is less agreement as to what defines "male beauty" among human subjects.
No kidding. I've sure never been able to figure it out. Maybe it can just check his bank balance.
Which brings up an interesting (and potentially politically incorrect) point. I think that women are clearly much better at determining whether other women are attractive to men than men are at figuring out whether or not other men are attractive to women (at least physically). I suspect that this is because physical attributes are (for evolutionary reasons, unfortunately) where women primarily compete, so they have to be more attuned to it. I also think that this is why women tend to be more receptive to same-sex relations than men, even nominally heterosexual women (hence the concept of the LUG--lesbian until graduation). In order to be a judge of feminine pulchritude, it helps a lot to appreciate it, and it's a shorter step from there to wanting to experience it up closer and personal than it is for a guy. Particularly a guy like me, who finds men disgusting, and is eternally grateful that not all women do.
Last I checked, the problem wasn't determining whether the woman was beautiful or not, but obtaining the woman in the first place.
Beauty in women is cultural. I'm not surprised that a computer can determine if a women is considered beautiful because, like a lot of things in this culture, the characteristics have been reduced to a surprisingly small symbol set.
When fertility was prized, the standard of beauty consisted of a woman of curves. Now fertility has been deemed at best an accessory and at worst a menace to the earth gods. Hence, in the name of Gaia, gay fashion designers and the metrosexual male, the ideal woman is presented as an effeminate young boy with artificially enhanced mammaries. Sort of the Platonic Greek ideal with frankenboobs.
Personally, I think the "obsesity crisis" is in large part due to a body image counter culture "returning to the land" so to speak while rejecting the fashion fascists.
If you need a computer to tell you if she is attractive, you have bigger problems.
Rednick wins this one! :-D
K, I disagree with your comment about beauty being simpler in today's culture than in the past. The representation of beauty in art has always been simple. For example, a "curved" woman is no more complex artistically than the thin ones of today. For example, there is a room in the New York Metropolitan Musuem of Art filled with paintings of the Virgin Mary. While the art tended to get better, there really isn't that much difference in form from the oldest representations to the more recent ones of the late Middle Ages. And of course, the Virgin Mary was drawn to be beautiful. There was a formula, a "small symbol set" if you will, for portraying this. The Virgin Mary may have had a more natural appearance, but I don't see it any less stilted than the representations of womens' beauty in today's cultures.
If one looks at actual women, instead of the media's simplified representation of them, you see that there are new forms of beauty as well. For example, piecings and tattoos (remember most people don't get those to make themselves ugly!). And of course, the massive mixing of cultures that has taken place over the past few centuries.
I question the thinking on other topics of any grown man who prefers the waif thin, give 'em a burger before they fall over, looks like a 14 y /o boy, "beauty" of the late 20th and now 21st century.
In a word, Rubenesque.
Women are supposed to look like women, they should NOT look like young boys. It is my contention that the current ideal of beauty has been foisted on western men via the people who control and create womens fashions.
And who would that be? Homosexual men mostly.
And what turns them on? Evidently, THEY LIKE 14 to 17 y/o, thin waisted boys. Because THAT is what most models and actresses look like now.
The exception to the rule in the west, of course is the Spanish men. They have not bought into this thin chick horsecrap. Ever seen a Mexican Soap Opera? Or a female newscaster on TeleMundo or Univision? Ain't no curveless, huge fake boob, need a meal before they pass out from malnutrition, media babes south of Texas.
I think Larry Flynt pretty much nailed which part of a female that men think is attractive.
Josh,
that's not a body type, it's a necessity!! Like air or water!!!
A millihelen is an inconveniently large unit, very few women reach that. Microhelens would be handier. What would a microhelen launch? A toy boat?