This is something I haven’t seen anyone talk about even once, in all the years Internet-people have been obsessing over Christian Rudder’s dumb OLD studies (originally OKCupid, but he later replicated the result on Tinder and Match). If you don’t remember, the raw result was: women rate 80% of men’s OLD photos as unattractive, men rate 50% of women’s OLD photos as unattractive.

But isn’t the average woman widely considered cute, whereas the average man is widely considered... average? I don’t mean cute as in “guys want to fuck her” — I mean cute as in VISUAL golden-ratio feminine cuteness (and hotness), the kind that men selected for over many millennia. If the average girl is visually attractive, and the average man is visually average, why are men’s ratings of women’s attractiveness perfectly following a bell curve? Why aren’t they shifted higher than the mean?

One explanation I thought of is that both men and women are bad at taking photos for social media, and it hurts them both — shifting men lower than the bell curve, and women TO the bell curve. But I straight up don’t think that’s true. Women are not only better at taking photos, but they have more experience taking photos, and many know exactly how to look even better in photos than they do in real life — AND the product they’re selling is also inherently more visually appealing. Blame us men for selecting for that, instead of loyalty and honesty and attraction to nice guys. (Kidding!)