Thank you, Eoin Martin, for this lovely question!
There are lots of ways you could go about tackling it. I want to look a bit closer at the central concept: attractiveness. In my answer, I will be talking about how attractiveness works, what plays a role in determining how attractive someone is, in the hope that it will help you find an answer. I will talk about the importance of physical beauty, presentation, and personality.
The first, most obvious element in attractiveness is physical beauty. In fact, it is so important that we often use “attractive” to mean “beautiful” when talking about people. What makes somebody beautiful?
We have certain clear societal ideas of what is beautiful and what is not – you know what I am talking about. Sadly, those won’t really help us here, because they are so different for men and woman that there is really no shared standard of beauty by which we can measure both. Happily, our own personal ideas of beauty don’t always answer to that standard! That is the first step, then: looking at what you find beautiful in a person, and checking whether “men” or “women” come closer to fitting that ideal – that will help us find an answer. I personally think a certain kind of elegant sharpness in one’s features looks really good. Whilst men can definitely have that look, I think you see it more often in women; so, in my personal score-keeping, a point to them.
Secondly, the people we find beautiful often aren’t very much like the ideal just described; more often, I just find myself admiring smiling, cheerful people in bright clothing. It is not so much about the actual physical beauty though, as much as what their looks seem to say about their personality. When I see someone skipping across the streets, in well-fitting but unfashionable clothes, with shoulder-length curls, I immediately think, “they must be independent-minded, artsy, cheerful.” And those are all traits I find attractive, so I think they look attractive because they look like people who have those traits – even though they might not in reality. I call this “presentation”, because it is more about the kind of personality we present to the world, than the personality we actually have.
And this links us to a third important aspect of attractiveness. I would even say that it is the decisive one for most people: personality. We all find different kinds of personalities attractive. Are you more interested in chatty people or the strong, silent type? Intellectuals or sports-fanatics (not to say that one cannot be both)? Cheerful or serious? All of the above?
To sum up, we have found three elements that play an important role in being attractive: What kind of physical beauty do you find attractive? What kind of presentation do you find attractive. And what kind of personality do you find attractive? Once you have answered those three questions, you have a set of standards for attractiveness, whereby you may measure both “men” and “women”* to find your answer.
* How you define “men” and “women” makes a huge difference, obviously; but unfortunately I haven’t the space here to settle the question of gender.
What do you think? What do you find most attractive? Let us know in the comments.
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I am studying for a Master’s degree in Legal and Political Philosophy at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. I am mainly interested in existentialist ethics and politics. My favourite philosophical work is The Ethics of Ambiguity, by Simone de Beauvoir, where she advances the idea that human beings are characterised as individuals by the projects they undertake.