Also if someone has their priorities right, then I would think that whether or not they consider someone attractive will involve the person’s personality and middos as much as her looks. Okay, I realize that I am a girl so it’s different. But I do know boys like that, so it’s clearly possible for a boy to be that way.
Also, usually when boys are makpid on looks, they are davka into thinness. This comes from society and is not something natural or objective.
I was trying to find something about the latter, and Google put
up a quotation from Wikipedia relevant to this whole discussion:
“Interpersonal attraction, the process, is distinct from perceptions of physical attractiveness, which involves views of what is and is not considered beautiful or attractive.”
Also, there’s a study (P. W. Eastwick and E.J. Finkel, ’08) which found that
“[D]ata revealed no [gender] differences in the associations between participants’ romantic interest in real-life potential partners (met during and outside of speed dating) and the attractiveness and earning prospects of those partners. Furthermore, participants’ ideal preferences, assessed before the speed-dating event, failed to predict what inspired their actual desire at the event. Results are discussed within the context of R. E. Nisbett and T. D. Wilson’s (1977) seminal article*: Even regarding such a consequential aspect of mental life as romantic-partner preferences, people may lack introspective awareness of what influences their judgments and behavior.
So it seems that most if not all people, both male and female,
are that way, and may be even if they don’t think they are.
(If you’re interested in the exact details of the study, though,
you’ll have to pay the APA 11.95 for the privilege of reading it.)
*I looked it up. It sounds interesting, too:
Nisbett, Richard, & Wilson, Timothy. (1977). Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review, 84, 231-259.
Although people can usually produce an explanation for their behavior, that explanation may not be accurate because people do not have direct introspective access to many (if not most) of their mental processes. “Telling more than we can know” refers to a potential problem with using self-report methods to study mental processes: Participants may be telling the experimenter more than they could be expected to know about themselves. Nisbett and Wilson review several studies that provide evidence supporting this claim. The basic methodology in these studies is to experimentally manipulate the cause of a participant’s behavior, ask the participant to explain their behavior, and find that the participant produces an explanation that does not involve the experimental manipulation.
This article is considered a classic in social psychology and foreshadowed contemporary research on automatic processing.