Female beauty

In „Dispelling beauty lies“ J.Salinac writes about what makes women beautiful. He starts with love goddesses from thousands of years ago and then analyses sex dolls and erotic paintings and cartoon figures. With dozens of pictures he hammers home the message that the „hourglass“ figure is where it’s at and that there are basically no diminishing returns to breast size. And in the context he creates this all makes a lot of sense and I was nodding along until I reached the end and suddenly felt that he had mischaracterized female attractiveness to a pretty significant degree.

To understand how this mischaracterization happened, we have to analyze the major components of female beauty.

There are at least three dimensions to female physical attractiveness. Women can be hot, cute and beautiful. Hotness elicits horniness in men, cuteness leads to protectiveness and beauty … I would like to say that it causes love, just because that has a nice ring to it, but I’m not quite sure, a type of awe certainly.

These three dimensions are largely independent and we see all kinds of combinations of them. A women can be very hot without being particularly beautiful or cute. If a person is very cute, but not at all hot, it is probably a child. Women who are beautiful without being even a little cute, seem cold. A combination of beauty and cuteness is usually called „pretty“.

But while these dimensions vary independently, there are still some interactions. A women who is very ugly has trouble being perceived as cute, not because the cuteness can’t be there, but because the reaction to ugliness covers it up. It is difficult to feel disgusted and protective at the same time.

Much more importantly, a women who is very hot is usually not perceived as cute for very much the same reason. It is difficult to feel (sexually) aggressive and protective at the same time.

So when J.Salinac uses fertility goddesses and sex dolls to gauge the „real“ preferences of men, he only gets the preferences in a horny context. And just as hotness elicits horniness, horniness demands hotness. And hotness is a simple thing. The hourglass figure, all right. So it is easily possible to turn it into a superstimulus. A sex doll is hotter than any women, just like a white piece of wood with a red stripe on it is more seagull mommy than any seagull.

So in the context of hotness there really are no diminishing returns to breast size. But before you follow J.Salinac’s advice and get implants, you have to be aware that turning yourself into a horniness superstimulus will at a certain point diminish you beauty, because beauty depends on balanced proportions and a superstimulus on unbalanced proportions. And it will also drown out all cuteness signals you might be able to send. And as cuteness triggers protectiveness while hotness causes sexual aggression (in the limit), this might not be the very best deal.