This assumes that Hollywood influences culture, not the other way around.
Women nowadays place more importance on how their guy looks because of Instagram culture and because they don't need to care about other things such as economic security.
I've been a student or professor on college campuses for just about my entire life - for the most part, there are very, very few unattractive co-eds. Yes, we still have the obesity epidemic in America, and obesity is unattractive, but the reality of the matter is that "conventionally attractive women" is a huge pool from ages 18-24. "Average guy gets hot girl" is not a fantasy, it is just about every couple on campus.
I think the error here lies in taking the Ten Point scale too seriously. It's an interesting tool for analyzing social media and dating app data, but it doesn't apply to reality any more than the 7-point liberal-conservative scale works to describe all your political opinions. When the whole bulge of the bell curve is filled with "cute mids," the idea of looksmatch doesn't fly in practice. These girls aren't settling. Statistically average girls are ending up with average guys. The average American man is 5'9". That's your hypothetical "5". When even your female "4's" are pretty cute in college, you're not seeing dating mismatch when the guy looks like Adam Sandler, Bruce Willis, or Mike Meyers.
What has changed in the last few decades are the male standards of attractiveness. The OKCupid dataset where 90% of men are rated as below average should be a flaming red flag. The comic lead actors in the video clip cited are not unattractive guys. When one of your examples of unattractive men is Tom Cruise, short or not, then you need to address the standard being used. The notion that women are "settling" is completely off base; what you're getting is an average or below-average woman insisting that she wants a 6 foot tall man (14% of the population) or a man with at least a master's degree (8.7%). That's a woman problem, not a young man problem.
Yes, that study a while back that found the vast majority of women on dating apps were filtering out men under 6-feet was a real eye-opener. They clearly have drastically-unrealistic expectations about height… so where else do they have them??
I've lived a long time, and for most of my life men have been portrayed as an inferior sub-species. It's not surprising that men feel ambivalent about the hazards of courship; but what does surprise me--at least sometimes--is that there remains numbers of women who even care about men.
Interesting read, but your penultimate paragraph seems rather anachronistic. The industrial revolution (with men leaving home for work) started a century or two before video games.
This assumes that Hollywood influences culture, not the other way around.
Women nowadays place more importance on how their guy looks because of Instagram culture and because they don't need to care about other things such as economic security.
Women may not care about economic security in the ways they did eighty years ago, but they also do not want a man who cannot hold down a job.
The juice has to be worth the squeeze, though. And it's very often not.
I've been a student or professor on college campuses for just about my entire life - for the most part, there are very, very few unattractive co-eds. Yes, we still have the obesity epidemic in America, and obesity is unattractive, but the reality of the matter is that "conventionally attractive women" is a huge pool from ages 18-24. "Average guy gets hot girl" is not a fantasy, it is just about every couple on campus.
I think the error here lies in taking the Ten Point scale too seriously. It's an interesting tool for analyzing social media and dating app data, but it doesn't apply to reality any more than the 7-point liberal-conservative scale works to describe all your political opinions. When the whole bulge of the bell curve is filled with "cute mids," the idea of looksmatch doesn't fly in practice. These girls aren't settling. Statistically average girls are ending up with average guys. The average American man is 5'9". That's your hypothetical "5". When even your female "4's" are pretty cute in college, you're not seeing dating mismatch when the guy looks like Adam Sandler, Bruce Willis, or Mike Meyers.
What has changed in the last few decades are the male standards of attractiveness. The OKCupid dataset where 90% of men are rated as below average should be a flaming red flag. The comic lead actors in the video clip cited are not unattractive guys. When one of your examples of unattractive men is Tom Cruise, short or not, then you need to address the standard being used. The notion that women are "settling" is completely off base; what you're getting is an average or below-average woman insisting that she wants a 6 foot tall man (14% of the population) or a man with at least a master's degree (8.7%). That's a woman problem, not a young man problem.
Yes, that study a while back that found the vast majority of women on dating apps were filtering out men under 6-feet was a real eye-opener. They clearly have drastically-unrealistic expectations about height… so where else do they have them??
I've lived a long time, and for most of my life men have been portrayed as an inferior sub-species. It's not surprising that men feel ambivalent about the hazards of courship; but what does surprise me--at least sometimes--is that there remains numbers of women who even care about men.
Re: The Lord of the Rings (Samwise Gamgee)
Well, that goes back to Tolkien's original work. And I don't recall Rosie being anything extraordinary. She was about the same class, etc. as Sam.
Interesting read, but your penultimate paragraph seems rather anachronistic. The industrial revolution (with men leaving home for work) started a century or two before video games.