It’s not only our Western-women-hating MGTOW brethren who like to make obnoxious generalizations about large groups of women. A couple of days ago, London School of Economics evo psych prof Satoshi Kanazawa got more than a few people royally pissed off with a Psychology Today blog post that suggested black women were, well, ugly. (PT took the post down, but you can see screenshots of it here, and a bit more about him, and the controversy here and here .)
Looking at a study that purported to measure beauty “subjectively” and “objectively” – uh, really? – Kanazawa attempted to explain why black women were rated less attractive than women of other races. After calling them fat, then dismissing weight as a possibility (“Black women have lower average level of physical attractiveness net of BMI”), he offered this bit of speculation:
The only thing I can think of that might potentially explain the lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women is testosterone. Africans on average have higher levels of testosterone than other races, and testosterone, being an androgen (male hormone), affects the physical attractiveness of men and women differently. Men with higher levels of testosterone have more masculine features and are therefore more physically attractive. In contrast, women with higher levels of testosterone also have more masculine features and are therefore less physically attractive. The race difference in the level of testosterone can therefore potentially explain why black women are less physically attractive than women of other races, while (net of intelligence) black men are more physically attractive than men of other races.
So … good news, I guess, if you’re more of a misogynist than a racist; a bit of a mixed bag if you’re a racist who hates black men and women equally.
Evidently the fellow who posts as 6dutchman6 over on NiceGuy’s MGTOW Forum falls into the former category. Declaring that “Science proves Black women undesirable,” he chortled:
LOL, so true, black women are the most butch, ball busting, head weaving, lying, conniving, two faced, scum bags I have ever encountered of all the women, an that’s saying a lot when we’re talking about western wimmin folk.
I thought White Ameriskanks were shit until I met a big fat ugly “princess” with the most deluded mind EVARRR. An this is in Canada.
They are INCREDIBLY flaky, want to fuck you stupid one minute, yelling rape & loser the next. They are 3x more nasty than white wimmin so it’s no wonder black men have something to bitch about.
Now science steps in an say’s “yah, black women = shit” an the hissy fit shit storm kicks into over-drive.
Naturally, 6dutchman6’s MGTOW pals jumped in to agree with him. I don’t quite have the heart to tell them that according to Kanazawa’s, er, data, men of all races are rated uglier than black women.
And the amusing follow-up: after PT pulled the article, they put up a limp lament about how awful it is that “proponents” of diversity don’t want “diversity of opinion,” and how sad it is that now black women will be denied the knowledge that racism includes white supremacist notions of beauty!
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-how-and-why-sex-differences/201105/the-case-against-censorship-should-black-women-be-thanki
Yeah, I heard about that–it was on Pam’s House Blend and Pharyngula, too, and its a horrible piece of science. Besides the whole “objective” beauty standards that don’t control for racism, he manages to fuck up population genetics beyond repair by claiming that one reason black women might be uglier because they built up more mutations. While it is true that there is a whole lot more genetic diversity in Africa than there is anywhere else , the mutations have been building up at the same rate, and genetic diversity is generally considered an unmitigated good in population genetics. So that would be an argument for why Africans are superior.
I really wish I had something articulate to say about this. But as someone who is in a relationship with a Black woman, all I can really come up with is “RAAAAAAGE!!!!”
Also, Satoshi Konazawa basically just makes up sh*t, and Psychology Today is a joke.
This is political correctness to the extreme. This guy is merely speculating on possible reasons for objective attractiveness. Fucking get over it, fymynysts.
This is why I saw evopsych is nonsense.
say/is. Not saw/it.
Is it true, though, that blacks have a higher level of testosterone on average? And hey, I personally find most black women unattractive. I guess in our oversensitive, politically correct society that makes me a hate-filled racist.
Ion – No, that makes you a single person with singular desires. What makes this professor dude a racist is that he’s trying to claim black women are OBJECTIVELY unattractive. That’s crap because attraction ISN’T OBJECTIVE.
Hmm, true, it’s not like you can measure attractiveness by some universally agreed standard. Well, I guess you can talk about proportions and such, but personal tastes still differ.
@Ion The idea of personal attractiveness has been brought up many times. You are perfectly fine saying you aren’t attracted to them. But trying to say that that is because they are objectively less attractive is racist and just stupid. Just as stupid as saying that you must be attracted to them, may I add.
This came up a while ago. It’s the same as saying “Having a BMI over 25 makes you ugly”. That’s stupid. Saying “I’m not attractive to overweight women” is perfectly fine, you are allowed to be attracted to who you want. But trying to pass that opinion off as an objective fact is stupid. Especially when you try to say you can judge BMI be sight, like MRAL did.
Edit: should be ‘I’m not attracted…’ >.<
No, Ion it makes a normal person, with preferences. What would make you an idiot is thinking no black woman could possibly be attractive. What would make you a racist would be to argue there is an, “objective” standard of beauty that members of one group are incapable of meeting.
This moron just happened to “discover” that blacks are that group. Amazingly that means that yet another evopsych paper has had crappy data that supports the status quo.
Oddly enough there was another paper (also with junky data) whichdiscovered who the most beautiful woman in the world is… Naomi Campbell
There is SO MUCH wrong with the Psychology Today article.
1) Claiming beauty is objective.
2) Trying to rate beauty objectively by asking people to give a subjective judgment.
3) Only asking the researchers of the experiment (sample size = ? It’s very possible that the only person in the experiment is Kanazawa)
4) Concluding this makes ALL black women less attractive.
5) Making shit up about testosterone or whatever.
I hate racists and misogynists, but also people like Sanazawa who really should understand statistics but don’t.
“At the end of each interview, the interviewer rates the physical attractiveness of the respondent objectively on the following five-point scale”
I really want to see how he manages to defend this statement. Does anyone know what the survey says? “please rate the following person’s attractiveness objectively”? Jeeze, how does that statement even make any sense?
Oh, wait wait, even better: “It is very interesting to note that, even though black women are objectively less physically attractive than other women, black women (and men) subjectively consider themselves to be far more physically attractive than others. In Wave III, Add Health asks its respondents to rate their own physical attractiveness subjectively on the following four-point scale: 1 = not at all, 2 = slightly, 3 = moderately, 4 = very.”
Soo, not only can they measure ‘objectively’, but they are somehow able to distinguish between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ measures? With the same survey? And almost the exact same scale, except they’ve omitted ‘average’ this time? Arg, this hurts my brain so much!
Has this fool never heard the expression, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”?
Nobby: He gets a bit of slack. Everyone rates themselves subjectively.
Where he doesn’t have slack is the idea of objectivity in beauty. One can make a case for a cultural standard of beauty (and if the Gdansk study had claimed that, they’d be in a better position). If one has that, as the working definition, then one can ask people to rate beautiful things/people, according to it.
But one has to “calibrate” the raters, which means teaching them the standards. That means the, situational, objectivity is only as good as the working model.
It also means the working model is the, “objective” standard. As such it’s a convenient fiction, and should not be used as if it were a universal truth.
The problem with most (if not all) evopsych is they do that very thing, use a subjective interpretation of things, and then present it as an objectively modeled truth.
Well, i never had a problem with him using subjective standards, the issue I had was him claiming he could differentiate.
Also, cultural standard /= objective, as I’m sure you’d agree.
As others have pointed out, it’s a personal matter who or what an individual is or isn’t attracted to. Also, while beauty standards aren’t subjective, many of them are universal within a certain culture — in other words, some things are popular (though not necessarily liked by all) and some aren’t (though not necessarily disliked by all). Trouble arises when pseudoscientists start using science to validate culture, as Kanazawa does. And let’s be clear — evolutionary psychology IS pseudo-science. Given its absolute rejection of the reality of social conditioning, its ridiculous centrisms (Western, white, and present-day), its pretense that cultures and attitudes that don’t fit the theory simply don’t exist, its claims that human nature is rigid and entirely hard-wired, and that EVERYTHING in human behavior is an evolutionary adaption, I wonder how his claim that African women are “objectively” unattractive fits into the general evo psych theory.
– Is he claiming that black women’s “ugliness” is an evolutionary adaptation against black men’s “rapiness”?
or
– Is he claiming that black women are evolutionarily inferior?
Sounds a bit third-reichish, doesn’t it? Hmm, Ion? For your sake, I really hope you see the difference between “I am not attracted to African women” and “I have scientific proof of Africans’ inferiority”.
I hate it when people like Kanazawa try to argue that beauty has been a constant throughout every culture. There are a few things that remain steady – a healthy appearance and facial symmetry, but apart from that, it varies so widely. In medieval Europe, fat women were prized as being healthy and prosperous. Send a supermodel back to the 1300s, and people would assume she was a famine victim. And back then, tan women were obviously peasants, while pale women were prized. Nowadays, tan women are seen as more attractive than pale women. Some cultures have liked boyish looking women. Old China wanted women to break their feet as children as a sign of beauty. Agriculturally based communities have valued women with large hips and a muscular frame. Red hair has pinballed from being considered beautiful to being a sign that the redhead was a witch. Hell, there are old tribal songs from Africa wherein the female singer brags about how big and accommodating her vagina is.
Nobby: I didn’t say that cultural standards = objective. I said one could come to an objective measure of a culture’s standards.
Speaking of Africa: Oh, the things some ladies do to make themselves look beautiful.
Wait, but by what objective scale are we measuring a culture’s standards? In comparison to what? Or do you mean a scale based on the culture’s standards?
Nobby: The scale is of the standards.
It’s only as valid as the data set, but we can make, for example, some pretty good guesses about what Greeks thought made for a good looking man. We have paintings. We have statues. We have written descriptions of what made this person good looking, and that person not (e.g. Socrates, who was described as ugly, in detail, by his supporters).
So on catalogues all the data, abstracts the things which were valued, and the “objective” (that is, comparable to a benchmark) standard is created.
It’s not the, “Platonic Ideal”, because no such thing exists. It’s not each person’s standard, because each person has a personal one. It’s the cultural mean.