[CW: Partial nudity]

I'm a straight man. If you're a straight man who befriends other straight men, you will occasionally have conversations that sound like this:

• A: I hate how Hollywood is pushing all of these unattractive actors lately. I want to see more people like [Celebrity Name].
• B: God, [Celebrity Name] is so bad. I would let [Celebrity Name] choke me to death with her thighs.
• C: Dude, I would shave my face off with a cheese grater just to sniff the feet of [Celebrity Name].
• D: [Celebrity Name] is kinda mid. But I would do that for [Celebrity Name 2] though.
• C: You're full of it. [Celebrity Name 2] is the one that's mid.

These conversations are fun, but I've always found them a bit weird. Not because I have different picks, or because I'm unfamiliar with the level of horny that would compel a man to reach for the cheese grater, or even because I'm that stereotypical rationalist who is oblivious to the social protocol of exaggerating disagreements for banter. The premise just doesn't really make any sense. There are no "extraordinarily" attractive women. The ceiling for female sexual attractiveness is not very high.

That's not to say there aren't contextual circumstances which can elevate attractiveness of an ordinary woman in that moment. Makeup matters a lot. BMI and general physical health matters a ton. The clothes a woman chooses to wear matter, as does her personal presentation and how much she's signaling sexual availability. Start tuning all of these factors together, and of course one can craft a superstimulus like this:

But that's cheating. Men aren't getting the awooga reaction from this image because the model is prettier than all of the other 25 year olds, they're getting it because she's in lingerie, striking a pose that accentuates all of her curves, in a suggestive setting. 

If you instead check out candid or semi-candid photography of famous sex symbols, they just look like... Normal young women. Even when she's in professionally done makeup, I'm kind of skeptical that the average man would clock Sydney Sweeney as worthy of distinct adulation:

Not to pick on her, here are some other pics of Known Quantities in similar venues:

All of these women are attractive, but as far as I can tell they're only as attractive as the pretty women one meets in real life. It's when they have good makeup on, in front of a professional photographer, striking a flattering pose, that they become something else. But that amount of effort would be sufficient to elevate most women who have similar ages, similar BMIs, and a face in the top quartile.

Am I just unusual? I could be, but I don't think so. Biographies about famous sex symbols often bear the same thing out, that these women's beauty is the result of obsessive optimization, and that even so, before the woman becomes a celebrity, she's treated as just kind of pretty:

Perhaps all of this is quite obvious. But this is not how people talk about female sexual attractiveness! People, especially women, talk about it as if there's a significant, native difference in supermodels' broad appeal. They speak as if Marilyn Monroe were genetically gifted in inspiring romantic affection, above and beyond any woman you were ever likely to meet. She's an outlier, but an outlier in the sense that someone who's 6'2" is an outlier, not an outlier like Michael Jordan is an outlier.

So what's going on here? Well, I think I understand the reason men do this. Having the conversation this way is funny, everybody participating knows what celebrities look like, and men obviously have different personal preferences, so it can go on forever. The reason women talk like this is true is more mysterious to me, though. I can think of a few reasons:

• Women just get negged by men about this all the time. Having really strict preferences is attractive to women, and one extremely common way to do that is to pretend that it's very important to you that your partners are 9.9/10 and not 9.8/10.
• There are artificial barriers preventing "merely" 8/10 women from competing in certain industries (modeling, acting, Instagram) that make differences at the high end professionally significant even if they're not relevant in courtship.
• Maybe women's sense of each other's beauty is more discriminating than men's.
• Maybe the small differences in sexual attractiveness at upper echelons compound over the course of a woman's life, and so to women these differences are salient, even though to men they don't actually matter that much.
• Some women probably don't distinguish a sex symbol's actual physical attractiveness from the other characteristics that would make her rarely and especially appealing to women (like fame, wealth, etc.), and they're neglecting to account for these factors being less salient to men.
• I'm guessing also that a lot of women want to believe that sex appeal can go to 11, because it would mean women as a class have more power than they actually do.

I don't have a good conclusion on which of these is more plausible than the others, but I'd be interested in finding out.