Social Attractions Between Beauty And Money

Women like money, while men like beauty…I don’t think so!

In real-life dating studies, approaching genuine intentions, physical attractiveness and earning potential strongly predict romantic appeal.

While people prefer people who are like them in terms of traits like religiosity or economics, more is almost always considered better when it comes to beauty and income. Based on these “consensually ranked” traits, people seem to strive for partners who score higher than themselves. They don’t want a game so much as a jackpot.

The stereotypical example of this is known in sociology as the ‘beauty status exchange’ — an attractive person marries a wealthy or otherwise powerful person, and both win. It’s the classic tale of an elderly polymath billionaire who suffered overwhelming burns to his face, marries a swimsuit model who can’t find Paris on a map, but really wants to go because it’s romantic.

All you need is money or power, the idea goes, and beautiful loved ones show up for you for the taking.

When Homer Simpson once got 500 pounds of sugar in excess, his ideal instinct was to turn it into fortune and sexual prosperity. “In America,” he said half dreamingly after a night of holding the hill in his backyard, “you get the sugar first, then the power, then the women. This is a tribute to Scarface (in the movie the quote was “money” instead of “sugar”), and this is where Simpson and Tony Montana went totally wrong.

Elizabeth McClintock, a sociologist at the University of Notre Dame, has done extensive research on the idea that people exchange traits. Her work was published last month in American Sociological Review, which examined data from 1,507 couples at various stages of relationships, including dating, cohabitation, and marriage.

“The exchange of beauty status is consistent with the popular view of romantic partner selection as a competitive market process,” wrote McClintock, “a view widely accepted in popular culture and academia. She specifically referred to the gendered version,” wrote McClintock, which associates an economically successful man with a beautiful ‘trophy wife’, “as commonplace.

These guys who are associated with women who are more beautiful than they are simply because women are on average more beautiful.

But McClintock found that, outside of sick tycoons and Donald Trump, it actually doesn’t exist in the practical world. Where it happens it doesn’t last. The dominant force in mating is match making.

What appears to be an exchange of beauty for socioeconomic status is often, in fact, not an exchange, McClintock wrote, but a set of corresponding virtues. Economically prosperous women associate with economically prosperous men, and physically attractive women associate with physically attractive men.

Sometimes you hear really nice guys turn go for hot girls, but I’ve noticed that really nice guys go for nice girls. Being nice doesn’t really buy you money in terms of attractiveness. If guys are sexy too, then of course they can have a hot girl.

Because people of high socioeconomic status are on average considered more physically attractive than people of lower status, many correlations between the appearance of one partner and the status of the other have been misinterpreted.

Women spend a lot more time trying to look good than men. It makes a lot of mess in these data. If you ignore that, you actually see that there are a lot of these guys who are associated with women who are more beautiful than they are simply because women are on average more beautiful. Men join forces for attractiveness. And men earn more than women — we have this 70 percent wage gap — so women marry on a high income. You need to consider these things before you conclude that women are trading beauty for money.

It creates that circle of self-affirmation where we never even stop to ask if we see humans as beautiful. We’re just saying that she is beautiful, that he has high status — and that she is beautiful in part because the couple has high status.

The study concludes that women are not really looking for men who are richer than themselves, nor are men looking for women who surpass them in beauty. Encouraging people are more likely to look for … compatibility and companionship.

Finding these things is motivated by matching one’s strengths with a similarly endowed partner, rather than trading kindness for warmth, humor for conscience, cultural sense of the handyman, or graduate degrees for marketable skills.

At least in part, because physically attractive people are treated preferentially around the world, they enjoy better academic results, more professional success, and higher incomes. So these variables can be difficult to isolate.

It would be very difficult to separate class and attractiveness, because they are so fundamentally linked. I have no control over this, but I don’t see how anyone could.

Previous research has shown that physical attractiveness and education “helps a woman achieve upward mobility through marriage (defined as marrying a man of higher professional status than his father),” McClintock noted in the article. And help her marry a man of high professional status, in absolute terms.

But these studies routinely ruled out any assessment of men’s physical attractiveness, so they didn’t go into the simple fact that it might just be two attractive are people who are attracted to each other, probably in clothes, attractive in an attractive location, both of whom always sleep well. Every “exchange” was an illusion.

McClintock also found that the ubiquitous trend to classify people of higher status as more attractive appears to be continuing. “Therefore,” she said, “there is a tendency to find women who are married to high-ranking men — who are themselves high — more attractive.

It creates that circle of self-affirmation where we never even stop to ask if we see humans as beautiful. We’re just saying that she is beautiful, that he has high status — and that she is beautiful in part because the couple has high status.

Assuming the importance of beauty and status is gendered, researchers may overlook the attractiveness of men and the socioeconomic resources of women. In doing this, scientists mistakenly identify pairing as an exchange.

We can be inadvertently blinded by beliefs about how the world works. The studies that looked only at men’s income (but not women’s income) and only at the attractiveness of women (but not men) were problematic in that way, as was the peer review process that caused articles like this to be published with error.

Controlling the physical attractiveness of both partners may not eliminate the relationship between feminine beauty and masculine status, but it should at least diminish this relationship significantly.

Reference : https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/the-myth-of-buying-beauty/374414/