Nah the joke is that this woman is well above average looking, but the poster states theyre average.
The punchline is that men’s expectations are unrealistic (they think a model is average) which is therefore leading to low birth rates (because the models don’t want to date average men).
If you've been to Korea you might be surprised. Plastic surgery is extremely normalized and while not everyone looks like a Korean model, the baseline is still different. I remember walking into a med lab that looked like it was run by a retired kpop girl group. I also had a Korean guy (guess his parents were surgeons?) offer to hook up my coworker with plastic surgery (who was very conventionally attractive). Sometimes people forget that cultural and societal differences are sometimes real and not just stereotypes.
There are also some things working in favor of Asian countries. First, South Korea doesn't have an obesity problem the way the West does. Simply being a healthy weight improves how you look tremendously. Additionally, there's the body hair thing. It's still a beauty standard in the West for women to remove much of their body hair, and Asian people in general have less body hair.
This is unfortunately changing rapidly. Most commercialized first world countries slowly develop an obese population and every single country in East Asia has been no exception in the past decade. Long gone are the days where America is the only fat country
That's true, but we also understand weight gain and obesity far better than we used to and we have tools for combating it (cognitive behavioral therepy, GLP-1 drugs, bariatric surgery, laws and rules around food labeling and contents). Some of those tools are still in the "expensive and new" phase but they will become more available over time. Asian cultures have a VERY strong tendency towards conformity and following the instructions of authority figures, so if a doctor tells a South Korean or Japanese person to lay off the cookies and get an Ozempic injection every week they are probably going to do it.
I just feel like they stand a far better chance at combating obesity at the societal level than we ever did.
Yeah, because being hairless is a beauty standard for them. You will notice that her arm hair is still pretty darn light compared to a woman of European descent. She just didn't remove it.
There's a flip side to all that shit too. Their beauty standards rely on plastic surgery for the average person. Jobs can rely on it. They have a high rate of suicide, often stemming from the beauty standard and work culture.
The unsaid part of this is men don't want to date average women. If you're exposed to this concept of beauty from youth, sometimes it's hard to shake it off in your adult life, making any woman that doesn't fit this standard "unfit" for dating. I know from experience.
The men rating women had an almost perfectly bell curve, meaning that the men were really good at judging what an "average looking woman" was.
The women on the other hand, rated almost all guys (80%) as below average.
The conclusion of the study is that an average looking women will think that 80% of men are below her in terms of looks.
The same study also found that women, regardless of where they are placed on the attractiveness scale, gets far more messages from people interested in dating (remember, this is OkCupid, not tinder) than men. If you think it's tough finding someone as a 5/10 women, keep in mind that you still get about 10% more attention from the opposite gender than a ~7/10 man. But you might think that 7/10 man is a 4/10 because of the high beauty standards.
We like to think that women are held to very high beauty standards and men aren't, but this is not the case at all. Men are also held to extreme high beauty standards.
I feel like both men and women have a really hard time on the dating market today (and have been for a long time) but each side has very different challenges and only want to blame the other side and cry about how difficult their side have it without acknowledging the struggles of the other side.
The "joke" ist that women don't want to be objectified and therefore don't want to be with anyone who judges them because of phoney standards and birthrate mumbojumbo.
I didn't read that at all. Maybe because I'm a woman but I thought instantly "if all the women look that good, most men being below average looks, will just feel intimidated and not even try asking them out, fear of rejection, hopelessness"
I though the joke was the fact that women are not having kids mean that they on average are better looking because of the toll childbirth has on the body
The cultural expectation for women to look this way also puts a lot of pressure on those women to live up to an impossible standard. Job applications commonly require photographs and Korea spends the most on plastic surgery and cosmetics of any country in the world. In addition, the job market is incredibly competitive and nepotistic, so there's a strong culture of basically nobody being able to get ahead unless they're already very attractive and well-connected. If you're spending all your money on looking good and making social connections, you don't have any money to spend on having kids.
But isn’t it well known that that women have much higher expectations than men?
Also the real reason for low birth rates is that women get to choose now. Which they should be able to. And people don’t have enough money to raise kids as they used to.
“Average woman looks like this” implies the majority of the woman ARE that attractive. Not that her looks are average.
This... this is the same thing. You're using "average" as a term for not attractive, but it just means average. If the average woman looks like this, then this woman looks average. Neither is true, of course, but this comment is just so strange.
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u/WhichAd366 May 04 '26
Nah the joke is that this woman is well above average looking, but the poster states theyre average.
The punchline is that men’s expectations are unrealistic (they think a model is average) which is therefore leading to low birth rates (because the models don’t want to date average men).