The bell curve on that graph as well as studies 1-3 in that link. To summerize the reality of the situation: "Cishet" men tend to message anything higher than a 3-4. Women message 8-10s.
As I said, the bell curve from the
OKCupid study can't easily be used to indicate that women put higher emphasis on attractiveness than men. The researchers show that men selectively and strongly message the most attractively-rated women, whereas how women actually send messages actually follows something closer to a normal bell curve.
I don't see a numbered list of studies in the blog post you listed. If you're referring to three named studies regarding sex differences and attractiveness ( (1) Hadjistavropoulos et al (1994) ; (2) Weiderman and Dubois (1998) ; (3) Sprecher (1989) ), then the first one I can't even find on PubMed, though the blogger only seems to state that it shows that women lie/downplay the extent to which they care about physical attractiveness. That does not imply that they care about it more than men. The second seems to be more of the same, though the title and abstract clearly indicate it is about short-term relationships only. The third also states in its abstract that men and women value attractiveness similarly, but that women under-estimate the extent to which they value it.
Being on those sites you can gain the empirical evidence anyway. Most dudes women rank as '8-10' don't even need those sites tbh. I got messaged by sub 5s all the time and they probably thought I was at least an 8 or whatever.
Yeah, something like the top 10% of men on Tinder get like 90% of female attention iirc. If you're over 6 feet tall, white, athletic, and have a nice enough face, you can get get all the vagina you want. If you simply have a vagina, you can get all the penis you want. For some odd reason, this makes men very upset that women don't have the same low standard that men have. If Chad has sex with 100 women, then Stacy HAS to have sex with me or it's not fair, reeeeeeeee.
You'd think they'd just learn to become gay and have all the sex they can handle.
a woman's attraction to a prospective mate is also inextricably bound up in how said male approaches them, in my experience. a lot of dudes seem to cling to this rationalisation that they're being rejected/called a creep solely based on looks, but in actuality a 6 who approaches a woman in a confident, witty, experienced-seeming way is generally gonna do better than, say, an 8 who's overly aggressive or leery or awkward etc. or to put it another way, you can change your so-called attractiveness rating pretty significantly by how you chat a girl up - if you're a 6/10 guy and an 8/10 girl thinks you're being a creep, you're probably being a fucking creep. i'm not saying the same would apply for a 1 and 10, just adding to hbb's point that looks are hardly the only factor. and obviously, there's a major correlation between being less good looking and being less good at approaching women anyway as a lot of it boils down to experience of success and higher self-esteem etc, which is another reason people mistake the latter for the former.
Anecdotal of course, but yeah, I know a few guys in my graduate program that I'm fairly sure are below even me on most attractiveness scales (shorter, skinnier and/or chubby, worse posture, etc) that have very attractive girlfriends. They're also extremely charismatic though. Maybe in 10 years r9k/TRP will prove them wrong and they'll get married, cheated on by Tyrone, divorced, lose custody of their kids and all their money, and be forced to subsist on hentai for the rest of their lives, but I doubt it tbh.
Worst case scenario, it's something that describes middle/upper-class Western women. There's virtually nothing stopping men from dating and marrying foreign women, which is something that's taken off over the last few decades.
