The Top 30 Most Physically Attractive Politicians, in Gayle's Opinion

Lately I keep getting into discussions with so many of you about who I find physically attractive, how and why it differs from who you find physically attractive, and the whole process whereby we acquire physical tastes. For example, I recently came across this icon on LiveJournal and was immediately struck by how completely not attractive whatsoever I found the woman in the picture to be (despite the all-caps word "BEAUTY" emblazoned across her to help clarify for us that we're supposed to think she is):



By contrast, I then came across this one by starionwolf that I fell so immediately and desperately in love with that I had to spend the next hour trying to find more information about her (rather unsuccessfully, since her journal has only one entry).



I think datagrok's latest entry summed up very well why this kind of thing happens:

I do not think that it has to do with body parts. There are hundreds of fine body parts milling about during my mandatory daily social interactions that do not cause me to kick into drooling idiot mode. (I take an elitist superiority-complex pride in the fact that I don't crank my head around to ogle the ass of every stereotypically attractive female that passes me in the hall.) I really think it must be a conveyance of a sense of deviance. I mean, the only common thread between the various people who have really sparked my interest is that my freak-radar starts going nuts whenever I'm in the same room with them.

Not just any old deviance attracts me, but the sense that someone has chosen to deviate in the same ways that I have certainly attracts me. In the first picture, the presence of makeup and in all probability hair bleach (hair that stays naturally that pale of blonde into adulthood is fairly rare, and the women who do have it genetically are drastically outnumbered by the women who have it by way of bleaching - plus her eyebrows seem to be a darker color, which can happen naturally but again happens more often when bleaching is involved) suggest to me that the person pictured is a lot more into modifying her face's appearance than I am, and that she modifies it to conform with extremely mainstream, racist and sexist beauty standards that say pale hair is better than dark hair and women should spend hours painting their faces every morning but men shouldn't. In the second picture, the person in the icon by starionwolf appears to be makeup-free, with unbleached hair and unremoved armpit hair. She conveys a sense of being very comfortable with the body she grew up in. I interpret this as a good sign of both radical politics and high self-esteem, both psychological traits that attract me. Of course, there are many other psychological traits that attract me that don't manifest themselves physically, which is why after seeing the icon I spent time reading her journal and userinfo page in search of those traits instead of just proposing marriage at first sight.

Not every trait that can physically attract a person is even as reliable a sign of psychological traits as these. The fact that someone was born with a different-shaped nose than someone else is highly unlikely to inherently correlate to any psychological differences. However, we learn our physical tastes from many sources, including personal life experiences and the mass media, and if the mass media chooses to consistently drill into our heads millions of images of people with a certain shape of nose being nicer or smarter or better in bed than people with some other shape of nose, unconsciously we may begin to associate these psychological traits with the physical trait of nose shape and proceed to behave as though the nose shapes of the people we meet are conveying important information about their psychology to us. If enough people behave this way, people with different nose shapes might even actually really acquire some different psychological traits due to the fact that they spend their lives being treated differently by most people.

But we can also learn our physical tastes from our personal life experiences. These tastes too can be skewed, if we just happen to have randomly not met anyone with a particular nose shape who didn't behave horribly to us, and then we subconsciously stop giving any more people with that nose shape an equal chance. The odds of our personal life experiences not being skewed are a little better than the odds of the mass media not being skewed, but certainly it can still happen.

pomobarney likes to make numbered lists with pictures of the top 20 or so celebrities he finds physically attractive, and remarked a while back about finding it interesting to see other people's lists. I've previously made lists of the people I find most attractive overall, when filling out various surveys, but physical attraction has hardly figured into my lists at all, and my lists have never been accompanied by photographs because there aren't even photographs available anywhere online of half of the people I find most attractive (obscure authors, historical figures, online friends, etc.), and I have no idea what they look like and I don't much care. If I like someone's psychological traits enough, they become part of the life experiences from which I learn my physical tastes, and I become very attracted to their body type (both on them and on other people who resemble them) as a direct result of knowing them. So it makes sense that I've never felt a need to make a list of people I find most physically attractive, because it's very changeable and for that reason, not very important.

But recent conversations with several of you about such things have caused me to realize that even though it is important not to overestimate the importance of physical tastes, it still is interesting to consider what physical tastes I've acquired so far. So I decided to make a list in which I would attempt to separate, as far as is possible (which it isn't entirely, because as I said, my physical tastes are affected by the psychological traits of the people who possess them), my physical tastes from my psychological ones.

However, if I just started naming everyone who came to mind as being pretty, the only people who would come to mind would be people I like mostly for their psychological traits, because I don't pay enough attention to popular culture to have all that many names in my head of people I'm not a huge fan of. Also, celebrities tend to have a very Hollywoodized look to them, so any list I made of them would be skewed toward that look even despite the fact that I usually dislike that look, simply because that look would be all I had to choose from. So I tried to think of a group of famous people whose photographs I could easily find online and who don't tend to all have a Hollywoodized look. And the solution I settled upon was . . . politicians.

Politicians are not a perfect solution at all, because they're still under pressure to keep their appearances pretty mainstream, which skews the list, and they also tend to be old by the time they're famous, which also skews the list. They'd skew the list strongly male too, but I solved that by searching extra hard for women to choose from. I also came up with hardly any bald men to choose from, which surprised me; now I wonder how many politicians use Rogaine. Anyway, I created a finite selection pool to choose from, by making a list of:

• All U.S. presidents who've been president during my lifetime (this includes Bush II, Clinton, Bush I, Reagan, Carter, and a few months of Ford, although I can't actually remember being told who the president was until it was Reagan - I do remember things that happened during Carter's presidency, but I don't think I knew what a president was yet), and their vice presidents
• All members of President Bush II's cabinet and President Clinton's cabinet
• All presidents, prime ministers, kings, queens, and governors general of all the countries that anyone I know or who reads my journal is from (I couldn't include all the countries in the world both because it would have taken too long and because it can be really difficult to even find pictures available on the internet of some of the more obscure ones); plus Kofi Annan from the U.N.
• All female former presidents, prime ministers, kings, queens, and governors general who I could find enough color photographs of to be able to get a clear sense of what they look(ed) like (this didn't fully even out the male-female ratio I had available to choose from, but it did help a lot)
• Two politicians who didn't fall into any of the above categories but whose appearances were so striking to me that I felt a need to include them anyway

This added up to about 100 people, and from that selection pool, I compiled my list of what I personally considered to be the 30 most attractive politicians. Actually, one of the most interesting things about using politicians for this is that you can easily tell how unable I am to fully separate my physical tastes from my psychological ones, because the politicians who made it to the very top of my list tend for the most part to not have terribly horrifying politics. I'm not at all asserting that this list is unaffected by my psychological tastes; I'm just asserting that it's not consciously affected by my psychological tastes. I made every conscious effort to base my list solely on physical traits.

And I'm not asserting that my physical tastes are the most P.C. in the world or least P.C. in the world, either. I'm just saying I have them, so since I have them, I might as well examine what they are.

( The Top 30 Most Physically Attractive Politicians, in Gayle's Opinion )