Does anyone else (particularly Millennial men) feel men were told for a long time to critically examine their looks standards for women, only for this messaging to suddenly and silently disappear when it was discovered circa 2012 that women are no less looks-focused than men?

alter_furz · 2026-04-16T20:36:27+00:00

pre-2012 men were shamed for having standards

post-2012 men are shamed for having standards

as long as shaming language is used in this context, it means the society isn't (yet) ready to be fair about the topic

AdOtherwise3824 · 2026-04-17T04:21:09+00:00

I agree that body positivity/ "men stop with unrealistic expectations of women" was insanely prominent in the 2000's. That has moderately dropped off, but I think there's still a lot of that around. One thing I have noticed different is that actively doubling down on "women aren't superficial" has, from my experience, increased a lot. 2000's discourse there was some capacity to acknowledge vanity, even if it was pointed only at the Jersey Shores type girls.

But nowadays it really feels like ANY acknowledgement that women can be vain is automatically shut down. At least, that's what I experience more of.

Langland88 · 2026-04-16T21:44:03+00:00

I vaguely remember some of the scrutiny I dealt with because I had a thing for shorter brunette women. But I also remember some time around 2018 when that scrutiny slowly went away. What has bothered me more is that all the things that Gen Z men are (rightfully) complaining about with the dating scene with the impossible standards that many women have placed on them, I went through all of that. Yet back then, to call it out, was only met with dismissal and backlash. Now it feels like more Gen Z men feel safe enough to call out the nonsense from women. I am kind of frustrated that I went through all the scrutiny only to be vindicated at the end but only about a decade late though.

brainhack3r · 2026-04-17T22:24:24+00:00

When money isn't involved, women are FAR FAR more looks focused than men.

We're rookies by comparison.

whoisaname · 2026-04-16T21:26:02+00:00

Being on the elder millennial side, I think there was a shift in the 90s for everyone (I am not sure if this was just directed at men) to be more...lenient...on primarily physical fitness. That there shouldn't be an expectation that women be fit/the presented idea of fit in media wasn't real life or was unrealistical unattainable. I think this then got expanded into the "body positivity" movement (mostly solely for women and not men), which in turn almost shifted into fat positivity.

Looking at data, there has been a big shift from '94 to 2011 that the average weight of a woman went from 152lbs to 169lbs, and the plus 200lb category increased from 5% of the population to 18%. (based on a height of 5'4"). This is population average BMI going from 26 to 29.

To be fair, in this time, men also increased, but not by as much. In the same time frame, the average weight of a man went from 181lbs to 195lbs, but spread over a 5'9" frame. This is population average BMI going from 26.7 to 28.8.

I do feel like men were shamed more for being unfit with this weight gain, while women were shielded as it being body positive and what a natural/average woman is like. And I don't think this dynamic has really gone away.

ChaosCron1 · 2026-04-17T14:39:55+00:00

Zillenial here (b. 1999).

I've seen this discourse online but fortunately I've never actually had to experience first hand. So I do want to make a note that yes I do think the messaging disappeared by the time I was at that part of my development.

On a side note though, beauty standards are ridiculous. You're attracted to what you're attracted to, don't worry about a cultural standard that has its roots in consumer exploitation.

Hall_Effekt · 2026-04-17T08:58:06+00:00

I was always told that men are mainly attracted to looks, driven by some kind of animalistic instinct. We were never really taught any other standards. At the same time, women were often portrayed as almost non-sexual, as if they do not find men physically attractive in the same way men find women attractive.

In reality, attraction goes both ways. Women can also feel intensely drawn to certain physical features, especially when they feel safe and emotionally comfortable. As a man, however, I learned to value women not only for their appearance, but even more for their empathy, emotional intelligence, and a stable personality.

OrcOfDoom · 2026-04-17T00:10:54+00:00

The body acceptance movement for women was driven by many things.

One of those things was companies wanting to market to women of different body types. Because of the companies promoting this idea, it was everywhere.

Another thing is the toxic body standards that actually did exist. Thinspiration and pro-ana content was still popular in the late 00s. This was combined with the conversation that Barbie had ridiculous proportions.

And then there's the discussion that you're talking about. I agree that women have not had this same discussion, this same amount of self reflection.

Men have had to come to grips with the idea is masculinity as a whole, but women are not comfortable confronting their ideas of feminity.

Women police femininity as much as men do. Talk about the idea of even cutting your hair short and women will freak out. Talk about foot size and they will be triggered.

Their own ideas about their own beauty standards are barely up for discussion. Women still freak out about the size of their arms when they are thin.

They are not ready to confront the standards they have for men at all. This isn't just physical beauty standards, but hierarchal standards. Attraction is not based on just physical qualities, but on social status.

They aren't ready to analyze this.

ExternalGreen6826 · 2026-04-18T19:09:31+00:00

I feel like this and I’m gen z 😵‍💫😔🥲

Trancetastic16 · 2026-04-19T01:27:13+00:00

I’m Older Gen Z, and yes.

While it usually wasn’t specifically targeted towards men, there was public campaigns in school, in advertisement and government campaigns, about the unrealistic standards that extremely thin female models in magazines, on Television, in movies, and Barbie dolls, that placed unfair expectations on young women.

The body positivity movement and push for Plus-Size models is one example of this.

Now that recent research indicates that young women are just as shallow as young men, such campaigns have completely dried-up (even the one’s for young women!).

It’s almost as if mainstream Feminist messaging stopped pushing for it once they realised they were asking for hypocritical one-way changes to these societal norms.

Now there’s not only no apology for the double standards that mislead Millennial and Gen Z men, but also gaslighting that it was never the case.

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Flashy-Presence-2467 · 2026-04-20T18:02:27+00:00

Everyone who looks bad copes about their looks.

This isn't so much a gender issue as it is a status one. Expectations for gendered atttactive presentation used to be stronger on women. Instead of reducing the selection pressure on women, we've increased it on men.

Whatever. This is one of the few things I'm more of an essentialist on. People aren't going to wake up one day and start finding you attractive, even in a more egalitarian world. If you are bad looking, you probably won't get as many dates. Sorry. Shore up the couple of areas you can improve and then deal with whatever "league" you're in. That's life, fr.

Odd-Reindeer-2277 · 2026-04-21T04:34:25+00:00

My Gen X male 2 cents: I never knew women had any physical preferences. I was always led to believe that women chose on the basis of niceness and personality. I also remember women were all avg. except the top 5% and even they were accessible to an extent. I remember absolutely beautiful girls almost bordered on tom boyish behavior. It was like girls wanted to with the boys as if it were almost a privilege to be accepted by us. We in turn teased them and treated them like they weren’t good enough and the girls accepted it. Back then every girl wanted a boyfriend and hoped to be proposed to! Now it seems like every woman is her own mini celebrity. You can’t get close to them and they want nothing to do with 95% of men. I met my ex wife in 2000. I’m a little above avg looking. She was a 8/10 in looks and Asian! Asian girls back then acted like they were the bottom of the barrel! They were literally looked at as ugly ducklings and weird looking. I can say with certainty if I approached my ex now I couldn’t get within a mile of her! As Asian women have become almost the most sought after group! Their attitudes are night and day different! But in general all women have become almost completely unobtainable for most men! I blame Instagram!

BloomingBrains · 2026-04-23T19:51:09+00:00

I remember being told countless times that I was unfair for wanting only the most attractive 10/10 women and only caring about looks (I don't). These people also accused me being of being ugly (I'm not, but according to their worldview it shouldn't matter) by saying they were "out of my league" and I should just looksmatch by dating a fat/ugly woman.

So apparently its wrong for men to want an attractive partner, but its okay for women to not want that. It's also ok to use supposed "ugliness" as an insult towards men even when they know nothing about me as a person. They literally just made that up.

If women really were these morally superior beings who fall in love 100% based on personality, it should be perfectly possible for one us "basement dwelling cave trolls" to get with a supermodel. But how often do you see that actually happening?

Salty-Map-942 · 2026-04-24T14:26:44+00:00

I haven't personally felt this, but in some ways I feel like I agree with you, but in a different way: has that even changed at all now? Like that meme of a woman pointing at lots of different shapes of women going "there's beauty in every size" with a fat guy then going "even me?" Before the same(?) woman goes 'eww, no'

I also feel it wasn't coincidence when the vast majority of fat acceptance activists and 'plus sized models' not only tended to be women, but I felt insane that I seemed to be the only guy in the room who noticed our male models stoll resembled the practically 'Captain America' look, so if anything for a time WE were the ones in a sense, who had harsher beauty standards put on us, compared to women (not including women amongst eachother, they're very harsh with eachother) and the fat acceptance movement has only really died down in the last couple of years.

Partially same with this projecting on us now that "if you don't like women who wear nose rings or tattoos, ThAtS a SuRe FiRe SiGn YoUrE a PeDo" simply because only adults can get those done, and therefore apparently this otherwise pretty innocuous preference is now pedophilic according to them... Once more, I haven't noticed the alternative of what they think to women who don't like men with tattoos, or male piercings though, funny that...

Or more broadly, also only really dying off very recently, the obsession with androgyny and gender fluidity, though I say that because again they seem to have a particular animosity towards 'male heteronormativity' and male preferences, I'd argue partly leading to the nose ring thing.

So really, I don't think it ever ended, just became an obvious double standard I suppose? I could guess they make that double standard, because they claim at least, women are enforced with more beauty standards than men, which I'd probably say is true. However, like slut shaming, it's almost always women themselves policing other women, and in some ways kind of makes sense for a motive why too (stopping a woman taking all the men they like probably) and it sure as shit isn't often men calling a woman 'fat' in the schoolyard to the point of the victim gaining an eating disorder...

MonochromaticPrism · 2026-04-16T21:52:34+00:00

Young Millennial here (1994).

It's clear that attitudes have changed at this point, as it was fairly broadly accepted that this claim is/was untrue around the late 2010s / early 2020s, but I don't think the shift away from it is specific to 2012 or there-about. There are multiple contributors here and the ones I am aware of don't exist along the pre/post 2012 divider.

For one, the fat positivity movement was more prevalent both before and after 2012, only for it being falling off in the late 2010s and eventually be killed entirely by the rise of Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs, which makes the whole thing look very much like a successful campaign to justify/normalize a reality that no one actually wanted.

The rise in public familiarity with the data sets coming out of OLD services is also a major contributor, like the OKCupid data set and subsequent analysis of female preferences, was also very revealing and did a great deal to undermine the previous view. However, most of those became public after 2012 (ex: the OKCupid data released in ~2015, following up on data released a decade prior, and was taken more seriously as the results were consistent with the prior data).

Even "Hey men, sorry [...]."

This would be nice, but with the way things work on a societal scale something like an apology (for anybody) is exceedingly rare. Generally the best anyone usually gets is that writers and columnists 10-20 years after the event discuss how nonsense X was, and hopefully it counts as a meaningful stain on public figures that really leaned into X.

In the public realm these things are ultimately victory and defeat, and men (as a whole) resisted the unreasonable until it lost steam and collapsed. Not a particularly satisfying victory, but a victory none the less.

.........

We were told that women did not judge our looks with the same harshness with which we judged theirs, so we had a moral obligation to attempt in good faith to lower our standards to protect the feelings of these morally superior beings who primarily cared about what was in our hearts.

One point of disagreement on this one. When it comes to actual IRL extended interpersonal interactions, and their use as a basis for relational interest (aka, how 90+% of long term relationships used to initiate), women are more forgiving of a guy being less relatively attractive (due to extended interaction leading to other individual aspects being weighed more heavily). This difference is mostly irrelevant in absolute terms, as men find a higher proportion of women to be attractive in the first place, but prior to the knowledge of that difference being more broadly known the whole "why are men so beauty obsessed" critique was harder to dispute.

PositionStandard6089 · 2026-04-16T22:43:16+00:00

in the 80's 90s 2000s the societal beauty standards for women were much higher and more complex than for men. it created many cases of body dysmorphia and eating disorders.

the body positivity movement asked everyone, women and men, to examine those standards. to understand that make up, photoshop, airbrushing, etc were utilized to make women look perfect. to take these images of perfection with a grain of salt because humans are much more varied and flawed than those unattainable standards would have us believe.

but you're saying you're mad because you think it was a waste of time to examine those standards and protect women and girls from low self esteem and body dysmorphia? and you thought that what you, as a man looked like, didn't matter at all to any woman looking for a partner?

it sounds like from what you've written you took this all quite literally. you didn't have examples in your life of kind women, cruel women, funny women, boring women? like...someone told you women were all beings of light with hearts of gold and you took that as an absolute truth? and now you're upset to learn that looks can definitely be a huge factor in attraction for women?

edit to add -- also, framing this as some kind of hardship is kind of hilarious: "If a D cup was our ideal boob size, we were told that we should seriously assess whether we could be okay with a C cup, a B cup, or even an A cup, for example." oh dear god no!! call the police. i mean...

Mountain_Collar_7620 · 2026-04-17T00:02:28+00:00

Why do you care what “they” think? They are Donuts 🍩. Empty holes with a bit of filler around and if fortunate bit of choccy and sprinkles.

You wouldn’t care what a pastry 🥐 thinks of you would you ?

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