Douglas, you are extrapolating from personal anecdotes the psychology of the entire culture. Let me predict that you will always find evidence to prove whatever theory you come up with.

Every now and then there’s something lighter here amidst the almost unrelieved heaviness of politics, psychology, philosophy, and discourse on the state of the arts.

And of course, men as so un-superficial that they never discuss the looks of women in politics.

Douglas, with women, being overtall (>5’9) is tough.I think female culture doesn’t overly encourage “stickouts”, and, by their height, tall women always do. This can lead to a host of bad behaviors — slouching, creeping movement patterns, and so forth — which are designed to reduce the notability of their height.

I speak as a man who has always found tall women attractive, and, if someone in their lives (father, significant other, husband) doesn’t act to make them realize it, I think tall women often believe it to be substantially detractive of their looks.

My HS sweetheart was 5’11, basically the same height I was at the time (I grew two more inches), and she was always ultra conscious of it. It took a good while of me building up her ego to get her to realize that, yeah, there WERE guys who wouldn’t like her for her height, but there were others, not just me but other guys, too, who thought she was attractive because of it. I think the thing that did it was one time, we were in the local Mall, and she was wearing shorts, which, with her long legs was getting her lots of wolf-whistles.

She never admitted to being 5’11, though — her DL said she was 5’10, and she insisted that was how tall she was… lol.

Luckily, the men’s clothing styles of the time allowed me to wear dress boots, which meant she could wear heels and not worry that she was taller than me. Since I liked dress boots back then, anyway, that was A Good Thing.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. While there are individual variances, there is a detectable and consistent set of rules which are applicable not only across racial lines but also cultural ones.

Show women from just about any culture in the world a picture of Denzel Washington (IIRC), and there is a detectable flutter of interest. The pupils dilate, the breath intakes, the face flushes lightly… There was an article or two about this a couple years back.

One of the key things is symmetry. Humans have an innate mechanism to value symmetry in human appearance. One of the first “cheap” ways to “uglify” a villain is to make one side notably different from the other — Two-Face, The Hunchback, etc., all inherently repulsive on a deep-seated level.

I haven’t bothered to check, but I’ll bet Brown’s face, on examination, is very symmetrical.

Hmm. Funny. I’m 6’1 give or take a fraction of an inch (depends on the time of day you measure it).

I live in a college town, and I really, really don’t think of myself as “tall”. But I go to another town and look around at the local supermarket, I realize just how short the rest of the people out there are. The collegiate sample that is my usual experience of “average height” is a skewed sample.

There’s an interesting correlation/causation to be investigated there — Are CEOs more likely to be tall because college graduates tend to be tall (and clearly, in this day and age, a CEO is almost always going to be a college graduate)?

Or are the heights of CEOs independent of the college matter?

And there’s another interesting question — what about female CEOs? How likely are they to be above average in height?

My personal opinion is that a lot of people found The Won physically attractive because they were told so often by the MSM that he was physically attractive.

And of course proper marketing can sell ice to an eskimo.

Combine that with a deep smoker’s voice that the population has been socialized into thinking is a mark of leadership and you have a lot of people convincing themselves this guy was handsome on an entirely different level.

Such sensibilities are rather shallow, as real leaders don’t always have that deep tone in their voice.

Patton, for instance, was reported to have had a high pitched voice, and I think Washington was likewise noted at least once to have a higher pitched voice when angered (along with a pale complexion that flushed red), and even FDR (of whom I am not a fan) didn’t really have a deep voice either to judge from the recordings I’ve heard.

I’m happy to report however that da wifey always considered Nobama to be skinny, gangly, and big eared.

😀

On the other hand, regarding Scott Brown’s appearance, I’d like to think anyone who carries any derivative of the name Scott is generally a good looking fella…..lol.

(at least the wife keeps humoring me on that probably mistaken belief – and yes she did make some odd sounds and had a strange smile when she first saw the Cosmo pics on the news!)

One of the photos was of a young Wehrmacht soldier who would have been sent to Russia had his superiors not recognized that he was perfectly fluent in English. The man’s name was Hans Scharff, and he became the Luftwaffe’s chief interrogator of downed Allied fliers.

Scharff’s record was unblemished, and it was so with a degree of Allied collusion. Scharff was a personably affable and friendly man who greeted his prisoners by saying. “Hello. I’m Hans Scharff. I’m your interrogator.” No Allied airman interrogated by Scharff failed to give him some information.

Some years after the war it was revealed that the Allies knew about Scharff from escaped POWs They understood that he extracted information from soht-down airmen and passed it on to German commanders who later used that information. What was not so well-known was that Scharff frequently defied the SS and the GESTAPO in order to defend his interrogees. He was more of an asset to us than he was to his erstwhile masters, and throughout the whole dirty business he maintained his humanity.

The other young smiling man with a cheerful mustache was Josef Mengele. Looks mean nothing. The Bible is correct when it says by the fruits of a man you will know him….

yes, I think that was a lot of it with Quayle. Compare him with Joe Biden. Biden says one dumb thing after another yet gets away with it. The reason is that he sounds like a professor and looks serious. That half of what he says is wrong and the other half doesn’t make any sense seems not to matter.

If you get a chance, check out his autobiography, Standing Firm. Its the most honest political autobiography I’ve ever read. He pulls no punches on himself. The media treated him terribly, but he’s not bitter about it at all. What a guy, I always liked him.