Well to be fair I can see what they mean. Looking around on a night out, there are very very few people that stand out as attractive, however I just thought it was because I'm straight and thus had no interest in finding good looking men. Most people in general are pretty plain, but maybe that's just desensitization after a lifetime of hollywood and the media in general.
"... I don't want you to play me a riff that's going to impress Joe Satriani; give me a riff that makes a kid want to go out and buy a guitar and learn to play ..." - Ozzy Osbourne
80% of me doesn't give a toss whether women find me attractive or not. I don't plaster shit all over my face to make myself better looking before I leave the house. Just shows how image obsessed women are becoming these days.
It should be noted that men's reaction to physical attractiveness wasn't a bell curve.
The most attractive women received 11x as many messages as the average ladies, and almost 30x as many as the least attractive women.
For the reverse, that was actually almost an approximate bell curve.
So women were more likely to judge a guy as less attractive, but more forgiving of such.
In contrast, here's the same chart for men.
Approximately 2/3 of all the men on the site would fight over 1/3 of the women.
Duh. I'm just pointing out that while women were superficially more shallow, they were less likely to act on that superficiality.
Men seemed better at actually creating a natural distribution, and then threw logic out the window to try and get the hot ones.
Not that I blame them. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
Except attraction doesn't work that way. "Average" here is not used in a mathematical sense. It's a qualitative statement.
For example, if you took 20 overweight people in the room it wouldn't make sense to say that only 50% of them could be "above average" weight. They'd still all be fat.
As a gay man myself I would agree with the ~80% figure. Compared to women, most guys put little to no effort into their physical appearance. They don't work out, and they tend to wear loose/baggy clothing that doesn't help accentuate their good features. Straight guys are told that they just need to be "confident" and flash some money around and everything will be okay.