F
Physiognomy Theory
Thesis: Your appearance, defined here as primarily your facial features/measurements but also your body shape and clothing/surroundings/postures/expressions, overwhelmingly determines what type of behavior people will expect from you and how they will react to your behavior around them. Deviations from this expected behavior will result in disassociation or shaming to make your behavior conform to your image.
Humans are visual creatures, and for good reason; visual stimuli is the most constant, stimulating, information rich sensory stimuli known, and humans have highly developed eyesight and visual processing areas in their brains. Humans are also arguably the most social species, and as such have evolved to address the problem of specialization of labor. Following the biological principle that bodily form reflects necessary behavioral function, certain percentages of humans developed different physical traits because they allowed them to perform their specialized social function with more success than humans with other combinations of features.
The subset of humans who are females have largely only one evolutionary purpose, to give birth and care for babies. Suffice to say for our purposes here that females' ideal mating strategy is to become fertilized by the alpha while she is at her peak in fertility, and then to trick a beta male into thinking her offspring will be his and extract resources from the cuckolded beta for raising the child. Her appearance, is she sexy, young and appearing fertile and able to give healthy birthed children, or not, advertised by her high hip to waist ratio, low body fat %, and youthful skin, is the main determinant of her value to males. Essentially the more attractive a woman is, the more men will want to fuck her, be willing to put up with her bullshit or demands to fuck her, and the more females will be envious of her.
The subset of humans who are males have evolved to fulfil many different evolutionary/behavioral functions and as a result are a less homogenous gender than females. The most important distinctions that society draws between men are those that are alpha and those that are beta. Alpha men are seen as valuable to society not just because of the behavioral role that they perform (ruling the society, leading, organizing and managing betas’ labor, resolving conflicts, being the strongest fighter/hunter/defender, etc.) but also “intrinsically” (akin to women) because of their higher genetic quality sperm with which to produce higher quality offspring descendants for the society. All an alpha male is expected and allowed to do can be boiled down to “being selfish”, simply because the alpha as the strongest and most desired man CAN do anything he wants. By being selfish, he will sleep around with women spreading good genes, defend women because he sees them as his property and children because many are his own cuckolded ones, control beta males and direct them to give resources to women because he wants the women he is fucking to stay alive without having to provide for them/their kids himself, etc. Alpha males, possessing the highest quality genetic material, reflect this in their appearance by being muscular, tall, and having masculine, sexually dimorphic and healthy, symmetrical facial features and skull shape; without taking too many of these dimorphic traits to a biological extreme so that they might induce too much fear in the woman to associate with him. Essentially alpha males look like they could kill someone in front of a woman and not only would she forgive them, she would get wet for him.
The beta male is seen as valuable to society only extrinsically for the material resources or functions that he is able to perform. He is seen as subhuman by essentially all women except maybe his family, and by most alphas, akin to a robot who is only useful as long as he can do his job. The beta is expected to work for the “greater good” (others, not himself), in exchange for occasional, reluctant prostitution contracts from women. Women only mate with him if they are economically dependent on him and cannot cuckold him without being discovered and abandoned (think Middle Eastern like countries) but always feel like they are settling and resent him for this. The beta male can be identified by his appearance of “not looking threatening like he could win a fight” because of lack of height, lack of muscle, smaller bone/skull structure, and has a more feminine, submissive, non-dimorphic face (bigger, more exposed eyes without strong brow, smaller nose, narrower skull, smaller jaw, less facial hair, etc.) that reflects his inferior genes. Because the beta appears that he cannot physically defend himself, he is assumed to comply with the alpha’s demands, and any deviation from this is met by scorn and ridicule by women to keep him in his place as a useful provider.
On sight, people automatically and subconsciously profile you according to your appearance and what you are wearing, etc. and assign you to the closest stereotype they have in their mind of you, and then respond to you and expect you to act congruent with that stereotype. They do not treat you like a special snowflake blank slate and attempt to create a highly accurate personality profile of you based on all of your behaviors, they simply do not have the time or desire to. A heuristic cognitive approach is much more time and energy efficient and in most cases just as accurate.
If you do not act congruent to their image of you, they will not know how to react to you and their brain will give them cognitive dissonance, they will want to stop interacting with you because you are contradicting their deeply held beliefs and they do not like that at all. This is why ugly beta males literally cannot be perceived as good, confident, charming, etc. because they are initially unconsciously assumed to be the opposite by anyone who meets them, and then everyone ignores any contradicting evidence if he acts differently because of their cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias (Failo effect). Similarly attractive people are unconsciously assumed to be better people and thus all of their actions are interpreted in the best possible light (Halo effect).
As a result of the Failo effect, people actually DO become more in line with society’s image of them because they become jaded and bitter at society and give up trying to be good, acting as a positive feedback loop to reinforce the stereotype that ugly people have bad personalities.
The Halo effect makes attractive people actually have “worse” (more selfish) personalities because they can get away with it in some cases, or makes the attractive people so happy that they are naturally nice and happy around other people so they actually get a “better” personality.
In conclusion, if you want to change how people treat you, you MUST change your image to be congruent with the behavior you want to be able to get away with so that you are being categorized as your desired stereotype to people and giving them “correct” information on what they should expect from you.
This is very bad news to me...
