OK, now that I’ve got your attention…

This article was derived from data from a social dating website called “OKCupid.com”.

This graph plots male messaging behavior correlated to the attractiveness rating of the woman being messaged.

This graph plots female messaging behavior correlated to the attractiveness rating of the man being messaged.

In other words, in both cases the data looks at how many times a person is sent a message by an opposite gender member of the dating site. The presumption is that the messages are attempts to get the attention and hopefully score a date with the message target.

There are some really interesting things demonstrated by the data. The most obvious one is how much the female attractiveness scoring follows a standard Bell Curve. Attractiveness is a value generated by averaging the rating scores of all the opposite gender site members who have viewed the target’s photo and rated it from 0 to 5. According to the results, men rate the majority of women in the “average looking” range and have a similar number of “hot” and “ugly” women. However, men focus 2/3 of their messages on the women in the top 1/3 of the attractiveness scale. Meaning that the women at the top of the “average” scale (which presumably includes a lot of women who would definitely qualify as “cute” or “nice-looking”) get very few messages. (Pro tip, that means if you want to get a date, target the chicks at the 2/3 hotness level and they will probably be thrilled to hear from you.)

But what about the other side? How do women rate men in attractiveness? It turns out that women rate a large majority of men as “below average”, giving almost 60% of men a “0″ or “1″ rating, and rating fully 80% of men as “below average”. However, women are far less discriminating in their message targets, with women being seven times as likely to send messages to a “0″ or “1″ rated man than they are to send a message to a “4″ or “5″ rated man. That’s downright bizarre when you consider that men are roughly TEN TIMES more likely to message a “4″ or “5″ rated woman than a “0″ or “1″ rated woman.

But as much as I would like to dive down into the cultural, social and psychological rationale behind this bizarre discrepancy between the sexes, instead I’m going to focus on the more fundamental and perhaps surprising observation that women don’t find men particularly attractive! I mean if we use a rather arbitrary standard of being rated at least a “3″ to mean that you can call yourself even mildly attractive, women are twice as likely as men to be considered attractive. And if you look at the other end of the chart, if we consider a “0″ or “1″ to mean “ugly” then women find nearly 60% of men “ugly” while men find a mere 20% of women as “ugly.”

But women message ugly men, while men don’t message ugly women.

Weird, huh?