"Privilege is invisible to those who have it."
People have stereotyped ideas of beauty.
I discovered this growing up and realizing that 9 out 10 of my male friends thought features that I found attractive in women were repulsive:
Freckles, "horse face", long noses, bug eyes, no boobs but a nice backside, average looking girls in general.
Eventually I would just name all the features I thought were stigmas just to see what dudes would say and it's pretty obvious they all draw from blonde bimbo stereotype or the nubian queen or the latina firecracker or the traditional asian, since they all rule out the same stuff everytime and all find the most typical stuff attractive (big boobs, pretty, flawless skin, straight hair, perfect proportions all around, trendy perfection).
I mean not every guy is like that obviously, but you see it a lot.
Ugly/attractive is often decently subjective, so what you find attractive someone else might not.
But there's a difference walking around calling people ugly, and someone wanting to know IF they are considered attractive or not.
One of them is just spewing vile shit and being toxic for no reason, the other one is giving them the truth when they ask for it.
Beauty has been always in the eye of the beholder.
For years, classical Greek sculpture was believed to be a perfectionist fantasy - an impossible ideal, but we now think a number of the exquisite statues from the 5th to the 3rd Centuries BC were in fact cast from life - a real person was covered with plaster, and the mould created was then used to make the sculpture.
For the Greeks a beautiful body was considered direct evidence of a beautiful mind. They even had a word for it - kaloskagathos - which meant being gorgeous to look at, and hence being a good person.
Beauty was frequently a competitive sport. Beauty contests - kallisteia - were a regular fixture in the training grounds of the Olympics at Elis and on the islands of Tenedos and Lesbos, where women were judged as they walked to and fro
There was even a contest in honour of Aphrodite Kallipugos - Aphrodite of the beautiful buttocks, where women were judged based on their butts
Let's try Ancient Rome! Beauty masks and makeup :
To keep their skin beautiful, women put at night a mask called tectorium (traditionally invented by Popea, Emperor Nero's wife), which they would remove the next day with milk. They exfoliated their bodies by smearing olive oil and then applying calcium carbonate or with pumice stones. Then they rinsed the mixture with water or with scented oils (cedar, myrrh, pine, lily, saffron, quince, jara, violet or roses). Women had to be careful with cosmetics because applying them too much was considered only proper for lupae (prostitutes)
The most used cosmetic was colour for the cheeks, which was considered healthy (although Plutarch advises to not use too much)
Long eyelashes were considered very beautiful (from the writings of Pliny, some women were totally obsessed with them). Eyes were shaped as big as possible with black antimony powder
Anything sounds familiar?
I stand by the statement. Not much has changed the last 2000 years
and the geek shall inherit the earth