Too much exposure to hot people is warping our dating standards

The internet is a sea of hot people. Conventionally attractive influencers monopolise social media via algorithmic bias toward young, symmetrical faces; we’re served constant behind-the-scenes content of beautiful celebrities; and porn and AI favour the de-facto toned, young hot person. Even those close to us are rendered preternaturally flawless via filters, Facetune, and the artful mastering of lighting and angles.

It’s been well established that the digital ubiquity of “unrealistic beauty standards” is whittling away at our self-esteem and mental health. What has been unpacked less exhaustively, however, is the impact it’s having on our dating lives. Online, men are calling Sydney Sweeney and Margot Robbie “mid”, rating the latter a seven out of ten on the universal scale of hotness, and a lot of my gorgeous friends lament never being hit on in real life. “Back in the olden days they [men] would see like 200 baddies in their whole life and now it’s like, they are desensitised to it,” posited influencer Tinx, to resounding agreement on TikTok and beyond. Over half of US adults say dating has gotten worse over the last ten years. Has overexposure to good-looking people skyrocketed our standards?

It’s a theory that carries scientific backing. We know that what we find attractive is shaped by cultural forces as well as biology, with the media pickling our brains in beauty standards that have a knock-on effect on who we’d like to date. But while historically we would happen across one percentile beauty standards only rarely – in films or in magazines – every beautiful person with internet access now lives in, and is pushed by, our phones.

A 2014 study conducted by Carlota Batres, assistant professor of psychology at Franklin & Marshall College and the director of the Preferences Lab, found that participants with access to the internet favoured more masculine men and thinner, more feminine women. “The internet influences our perceptions of what it is that we find attractive,” she tells Dazed. It’s a theory bolstered by a later study by Batres, which found that our visual diet – or the faces we see most (on or offline) – shapes our perception of what’s beautiful. It’s no wonder that a dissonance is occurring when we step out of the lacquered digital realm into the real world of idiosyncrasies and textured skin, where we’re illuminated by fluorescent overhead lighting instead of ring lights, and you see every angle of someone’s face.

It’s a take echoed by psychologist and researcher Michelle Drouin: “I think you can put it down to basic habituation. We have now become habituated to the images that we’ve seen online and we think that that’s our reality… Physical attraction is what makes someone walk across the room for someone else. And if you don’t have that initial prime [attraction], because you’re so habituated to all the beautiful, perfect images that you see online, then what’s the trigger that makes you walk across a room?”

Not only does the internet put hotness on tap; it tricks us into believing those who yield it are within reach. Attractive content creators propagate an illusion of accessibility by engaging with followers, while dating apps proffer a smorgasbord of carefully curated profiles, stoking an illusion of endless choice. As argued by sex writer Magdalene Taylor in the New York Times, “We never should have been exposed to what the apps originally provided: the sense that the dating pool is some unlimited, ever-increasing-in-quality well of people.” Even Hinge itself acts as a microcosm of the wider problem: when you retreat from the “standouts” (heavily-liked people you need a premium subscription to match) back to the main algorithm, your options don’t seem quite as desirable.

Porn, unsurprisingly, compounds the problem: while there’s been a lot of moral panic surrounding its impact on real-life sexual behaviour (with good cause), we haven’t reached a consensus on whether or not consuming content of good-looking porn stars influences who we’re attracted to. Rob Weiss, a clinician specialising in digital-age intimacy, is sceptical that overexposure to porn has the power to overhaul one’s type. He does, however, believe it can incite us to seek out a more attractive version of that type in real life.

“I may be attracted to women with large breasts and big butts who are 200 pounds. Would I see some that were more attractive online? Same woman, body type, but she is more emblematic. You know, her face, her skin, how perky her boobs are, whatever that is. Would I be looking more for that? Sure,” he explains. It’s a shift in standards that can even impede real-life intimacy. “One of the problems we have with men who are extremely compulsive sexually with porn, looking at it over and over and over again – the younger men – they don’t get aroused when they’re with a real woman… When it becomes a norm, whether it’s the beauty, however I define beauty, I’m going to find the real world not as interesting because the super stimulus is my norm.”

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Theoretically, the standard warp (as I’m coining it) can befall all sexes. But heterosexual men are arguably more susceptible to it: the ever-present male gaze means that images of adherent women are everywhere, while women are more likely to be content creators and therefore consume ‘For You’ pages. It even harks back to basic biology: “evolutionary theory says that men are [more] interested in physical attractiveness,” says Drouin. There’s also a higher prevalence of pornography use and online sex-seeking among men, meaning they spend more time consuming such content. Meanwhile, while in pre-internet times the traditional buff jock might have been the paradigm hot guy, these days, women often lust after quirkily attractive men (see the rodent boyfriend trend and popularity of ‘dad bods’). Women, however, rarely get the same grace, with thinness, youth and femininity still being prized above all else. In other words, not only is women’s self-esteem likely to suffer due to online content, but men may be less likely to fancy them because of it.

So how do we reset our beauty detectors and get back to appreciating potential partners – and their personalities, which is, afterall, just as important – in the flesh ? While unplugging from the hot matrix entirely may be impossible, thinking critically and limiting your time in it could help loosen its grip. “We should try to be more mindful in terms of our social media usage, in terms of trying to think about how these technologies that we’re interacting with might be affecting us… If we’re not really aware or understanding it, then I think that’s where it’s going to have the greatest effect on people,” advises Justin Lehmiller, a social psychologist and research fellow at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. “When it comes to a lot of technology, social media, porn use, and so forth, using it in smaller doses is usually better,” he continues. “It does go away, however, if you take the porn away from men,” parallels Weiss.