Dispensing with slavish Pareto Principle orthodoxy to the 80/20 rule, it is clear that female attraction to men does not follow a normal distribution pattern. It is highly biased towards some men being attractive and most not being so at all.

In discussing this with women, men and even gay men, it occurred to me that this may not entirely be a product of female subjectivity and selectivity, though clearly that could be a major factor.

Could it be that in some intrinsic sense, the attractiveness of males--particularly physical attractiveness--roughly matches the female subjective estimation of male attractiveness? This is to say that far fewer men are attractive than women, and that the gap between those who are attractive and those who are not is quite large?

Trying to look at men objectively, as a straight guy, this abnormal distribution (as opposed to a bell curved distribution) of innate male attractiveness seemed pretty accurate. Gay men seem less picky than straight women in some sense in terms of what they will settle for if there are no better options. But gay men I have talked to seem also to view male attractiveness as less evenly distributed than female. Conversely, lesbians do seem to judge women with a fairly normal distribution pattern similar to how men judge women.

If this hypothesis is true, and the innate attractiveness of men follows a similar pattern to women's subjective evaluation of it, how did this confluence emerge? Is the uneven attractiveness in males truly innate (primarily genetic), or more a result of male appearance maintenance efforts? Did men somehow evolve to match women's subjective evaluation caused by greater selectivity? Or was women's subjective evaluation always based on an objective reality? Or some combination?