Pretty Vs Beautiful

They are two VERY different things...

This post could be conceived by some as me just objectifying women, and some of those criticisms may indeed be fair. But as I am discussing human sexual attraction in this post, (particularly what men find physically attractive in women’s faces), it is impossible for me to avoid talking about the superficial matter of physical looks.

So I was perusing Substack (as I am wont to do) and I came across this post below from

Lirpa Strike

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In the post, Lirpa presents two photos of characters from HBO’s Game Of Thrones & poses the question, whom do you find more attractive: Cersei (left) or Daenerys (right)?

This was apparently prompted by a disagreement she had had with her husband when he chose Daenerys, played by Emilia Clarke. Lirpa Strike said that she found Lena Headey who portrayed Cersei to be the more attractive woman, both then and still.

This post, and the comments that fellow Substackers left on it, got my mind fixating on something that I have always innately felt but never interrogated or articulated… I plan to do a little of both here. It has also manifested as a point of contention between ‘The Missus’ and myself several times over the years.

The innate feeling I am referencing is this: There are two kinds of attractive women (faces specifically) - Beautiful Women and Pretty Women.

Some of the other comments on the post allude to a similar conclusion with many of them (both men and women) stating that Lena Headey is attractive in one certain way and that Emilia Clarke is attractive in another way entirely.

I first made this observation during the first few months of courtship with my partner 20 years ago. We were teenagers then and still just getting to know each other.

She would stay over with me at my house share and do all the things that teenage lovers do: drink, party and all the rest. As I was a 19 year old lad living with other 19 year old lads in early 00s Britain, we had ‘lad magazines’ lying around the house.

‘Lad magazines’, like FHM, Loaded and Zoo, were essentially ‘Tits and Ass’ magazines that featured soft pornographic content aimed at heterosexual men. They don’t really exist in the same level of popularity these days because society decided somewhere along the way that the male gaze is evil rather than an innate & perfectly natural fact of human biology and profiting from it came to be seen as ‘patriarchal’ or ‘oppressive’. I digress.

On one occasion, my partner (who was 20 at the time) was perplexed at one of the women on the cover and said, I quote… ‘You think SHE’S pretty?’

I wish I could remember which magazine it was or the name of the model, but alas it escapes me. I did find her face attractive though. She had a uniqueness to her facial features that my partner innately saw as disqualifying, but I found added a certain character and mystique.

I was clearly not alone in my assessment as this model had not only been given the front cover of a monthly issue but also featured regularly and heavily in all these magazines for several years. Evidently, a lot of men found this woman attractive other than me; perhaps you could say there was even a consensus on the matter.

A month or so later, we disagreed again on the attractiveness of a woman, and this time I can remember who it was… Eliza Dushku [below], the American actress who famously played Faith in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We were watching her in the trashy slasher horror flick Wrong Turn when my partner caught me essentially purring every time she appeared on screen. ‘Really?!! Her too?’

After asking my partner what on earth was wrong with Eliza Dushku and hearing similar comments as before that were dismissive of her attractiveness, I asked ‘Who do you think is attractive… Who do you think men should find attractive?’ I really wanted to know as there was clearly something misaligned in our perspectives.

She said Kate Hudson, the American actress from Almost Famous and How To Lose A Guy In Ten Days.

Now, Kate Hudson is an inarguably attractive woman. Objectively speaking, she’s stunning, but she never really moved the needle for me. This fact perplexed my partner when I said it. Worse still, she was almost angered by my explanation when I described Husdon as ‘conventionally beautiful’ or ‘an obvious kind of beauty’. I avoided stoking her anger further by not telling her that I thought that Kate Hudson’s mother Goldie Hawn [below] was more attractive when she was her daughter’s age.

One commenter referred to Lena Headey as ‘sexy’ rather than ‘pretty’ like Emilia Clarke, and I think that term would obviously fit Hudson well too. But her sex appeal, like Headey, comes from her presence and the way she carries herself more than her looks, I would argue. I feel the same about Lady Gaga, I’m not overtly attracted to her, but something about her is sexy.

My partner, who has no such innate physical attractions towards women whatsoever, could conceivably only rely on her own intellectual reasoning when making a judgement as to who is more attractive. This was alluded to in Lirpa’s post when a lot of people claim that Headey would be the one typically judged by women to be the more attractive of the two.

I can see that Kate Hudson is attractive through what is essentially intellectual reasoning also; she ticks all the right boxes and has all the right stuff. But I don’t ‘feel’ the animal pull of sexual attraction to her as I did the ‘pretty model’ or Faith from Buffy. My mind knows that she is good-looking, but my body chemistry doesn’t innately feel it or react anywhere near like it did when I saw Eliza Dushku. I ended the conversation with my partner by simplifying it and saying, ‘She’s just not my type’.

And that’s what I feel about a lot of famously attractive women. They are conventionally beautiful, but just not my type. My type is more unique - attractive but with a certain unconventional quality.

Growing up I was obsessed with Christina Ricci and I have never been more attracted to a woman on screen than I was to her in Sleepy Hollow when I first saw it as a 14 year old boy. A close second is her appearance in Black Snake Moan but that’s a whole other thing.

Sure, the gothic horror feel of Tim Burton’s movie set in pioneer times U.S is a kind of vibe I am historically drawn to (Arthur Miller’s Crucible, The Witch, etc) but it’s more than that. Christina Ricci has always just captivated me.

Christina Ricci’s face is undeniably unconventional but again there is no doubt that people find her attractive. In her younger days she was cast in roles where her sexuality is both integral to her character and the plot. She played a femme fatale in The Opposite of Sex where the whole plot revolved around her seducing a man with her beauty.

She also featured in plenty of magazines in the early 00s akin to the glamour model I referenced earlier: posing in bikinis and revealing clothing to appeal to the male gaze. I know this because 19 year old me had all of them cutout and pinned on my bedroom wall before ‘The Missus’’ made me take them down.

And somewhere along the way I arrived at a theory. There are beautiful women and there are pretty women.

Beautiful women are conventionally attractive. Handsome in the feminine sense. Symmetrical & well proportioned facial features that are clearly defined (Lirpa states that one commenter referred to Headey’s face as ‘too pointy’). Strong and well defined bone structure (but still overtly feminine). Piercing eyes that (to me, at least) seem to stare you down in a predatorial fashion.

Pretty women have some facial features that on the face of it may seem irregular or unconventional but are still symmetrical enough to work. This adds the uniqueness I have hinted at throughout. As one commenter remarked, they have ‘softer and friendlier’ faces. Large eyes and fuller cheeks are other commonly referenced features of pretty women.

Lirpa Strike also recently published a post where she makes reference to four noted categories of attractiveness in women made on a podcast she heard. They were the ‘Beautiful’ & ‘Pretty’ categories that I mention, as well as ‘Gorgeous’ & ‘Hot’. I dismiss ‘Gorgeous’ as synonymous with ‘Beautiful’ because I find it hard to make any meaningful distinction between the two. ‘Hot’ is interesting, though and I definitely think it is valid. But to me it’s the same as ‘Sexy’, which I view as being more about wholistic sex appeal of a woman, rather than a description of how good-looking her face is. And in this piece, I am primarily concerned with men’s innate attraction to faces.

I think some men are genuinely more attracted to women from the first category, (the ‘Beauty’ side), but I legitimately believe that the reason that so many more men will pick Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys in Lirpa Strike’s poll is because men typically favour ‘Pretty’ more.

Substacker

Kryptogal (Kate, if you like)

hints at something profound that it would be remiss of me not to touch on. Kryptogal said and I quote ‘this is basically ‘adult face’ versus ‘baby face’. Dany has perhaps the most exaggeratedly baby-fat/round/giant eyed looking face I've ever seen on an adult human’.

As unsettling as it may be to think about too deeply, I feel that part of this does come down to an uncomfortable truth about our evolutionary biology: Men are attracted to youth and beauty (Esel, E & Esel, G. 2017. Part 7).

Human males are programmed by billions of years of unthinking and probability based evolutionary selection to be attracted to signs of fertility in women, and one of those signs is youthfulness.

I think ‘pretty’ describes women with more obviously youthful features like big round eyes, fuller cheeks, etc. And I think that man’s nature to seek out youthful fertility explains our innate attraction to ‘prettiness’ as a quality, as opposed to the more ‘adult face’ woman, as Kryptogal puts it.

My partner loves the Gilmore Girls [below] and I have always felt the faces of the two lead actresses summed this distinction up quite well… Lorelai [left] and Rory [right] are both attractive women but have very different facial features. Lorelai is a beautiful woman and Rory is pretty.

But it’s not a hard and fast rule, as some of the women I am most innately attracted to physically are women that I would put in the beautiful category. Women like Scarlett Johansson, Rebecca Furguson, Gal Gadot and Margot Robbie are all women that I would deem as ‘conventionally’ attractive yet they draw my eyes to them as much as any ‘pretty’ woman.

But I will still always prefer the pretty ones like Emilia Clarke, Ana de Armas, Mila Kunis, Emily Ratajkowski, etc as they are just ‘my type’.

That’s my theory and my explanation for the results of Lirpa Strike’s poll. Take it for what it's worth.

Men! Do you agree? Let me know in the comments.

Women! Do you think I am a misogynistic, chauvinistic pig? Let me know in the comments. (All engagements help my Substack grow so shout at me all you want).

To anyone who wants to call me an apologist for pedos! I never argued we should lower the age of consent (if anything, I think we should probably raise it in the UK), I was merely stating the biological fact that male mammals are attracted to signs of youth in females as it signals high fertility. If that upsets you, well maybe you can find a colouring book to occupy yourself with in a ‘safe space’ somewhere.

Thanks for reading… The Common Centrist