is beauty in the eye of the beholder ?

Post Reply New Topic

^^ yes , then how you can explain when a whole bunch of guys(or girls) agree about the attractiveness of someone in specific ?

Like these bunch of girls i know at work , during the lunch break ( i was just eating and listening without participating in the convo ) one of them was talking about a specific co-worker guy and how much she finds him hot (and he's really apparently attractive in fact , he 's handsome , tall , muscly and charismatic ) and the 3 other girls agreed with her and they kinda melting when they were talking about him .

Same thing for guys , i remember that when bunch of guys at school and at univ talk about girls (usually girls of their own class) which is a very common conversation between guys when they are together and always seem to agree on the same girls as most hot girls of the class or of the school . I am sure that you saw such phenomenas before .

Never notice at bars or night clubs that the guys there usually float around the 10% of the girls there and leaving the other 90% girls?

Never notice that in real live shows like Big brothers , Star academy or Perfect Bride ( these shows are not my fav at all but my sisters watch them all the time ) usually the girls participants are drawn to 1 or 2 guys ? or better never notice that the girls of the audience usually applaud for 1 or 2 guys of this show and they are usually the most handsome ones ? (like in perfect bride for ex) ?

there's million of examples that show that beauty is not in the eye of the beholder ....or maybe this beholder represents the majority?

Beauty is an agreement we make that this or that, for now, is what's beautiful. But there is a minimum of symmetry required within each paradigm. Of course, if you really, truly march to the beat of a different drum, then yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But very few people are unaffected by what's thrust on them on a daily basis. And different cultures have different paradigms. When I lived in Europe, my natural body, which is slim but muscular, was considered very beautiful, and I ended up being photographed a lot. In California where I live now, I have to work out at the gym a LOT and take all kinds of supplements in order to be considered cute. Everyone here is obssessed with bulky muscles and it's very hard to stick to your guns, pardon the pun.

Of course, I'm sure that someone out there likes fat women with hairy legs and tons of cellulite, but it's not the majority. Angelina Jolie, for example is a woman very few men or women would disagree is strikingly beautiful and sexy. And if you don't think she's even pretty, you haven't seen her in person. Jaw dropping, and I'm gay!
But maybe in the 20's, when big lips were considered ethnic and therefor undesirable, she would have been thought of as rather, well, ethnic looking, and her breasts too big...

I don't really agree with the media and sheep theory , after all the beauty traits that are showed on the media are based on real preferences of the majority .


Final Conclusion : Beauty IS in the eye of the beholder BUT the beholder represents the majority of people .

http://www.phil.ncl.ac.uk/book/2005/umpleby.pdf

how many girl in the world would see this guy as attractive?

edit : http://writings.kennypearce.net/beauty.pdf (the link was wrong)

interesting part :

These sorts of things present all sorts of problems for subjectivist accounts of beauty. Such accounts are simply contrary to the intuitive, common sense beliefs we as humans hold. “ The judgment of taste,” as Kant says, “ ascribes assent to everyone, and whoever declares that something is beautiful wishes that everyone should approve of the object in question and similarly declare it to be beautiful.” 3 There is, then, a prescriptive element to judgments of beauty. To call something beautiful is to demand agreement from others. If others contradict our judgments of beauty and we fail to tell them that they are wrong, it is not because we actually believe that their opinions are equally valid. Rather, it is merely a social convention developed to maintain civility because it was decided that judgments of beauty ought not to be the cause of brawls, as in our earlier example. Our instinctive words and actions, on the rare occasions when they are unchecked by social conventions, show that our actual belief is that when a person makes an erroneous judgment of beauty they may as well have made an erroneous judgment of
color, and one who lacks this faculty Kant calls “ taste,” the ability to judge beauty, is just
like one who is completely color-blind.This person is unable to sense a property which is a very real part of the perceptions of the world common to other human beings.
It is with regard to this that Kant goes wrong. On Kant's account, beauty is not a part even of the representation (the mind's perceptions of the world), much less the “ thing in itself.” Rather, beauty is a power to cause the mind to operate in a certain way. This operation is rather complex.

Babies are the most honest creatures and they can tell us a lot about our extincts :

http://sci-con.org/2005/09/baby-study-s ... e-beholder