Disney and expectations.

Re-reading Ben's blog, a cure for having nothing at all to do, I came across a point he made about a group on Facebook. It's called something the lines of "Disney gave me unrealistic expectations of men", aluding to the fact that the female characters in Disney movies always end up with handsome, charming, heroic, perfect toothed, charmasmatic men.

Now I bring this up for the point of arguing, admitedly, I know it's only a bit of fun, and is just a dig at men being, in general, a bit rubbish. Nevertheless, I'm sure there are some women out there who see some truth behind the statement.
Invariably, however, female characters in these Disney films are something special. Snow White, for example, is described as "the fairest of them all", so she is the most beautiful woman in the land! The girl in Aladin, I forget her name, I want to say Jasmine? That might be wrong, anyway, the girl in Aladin is an Arabian princess or something to that effect, and she's beautiful too.
Briefly, this brings me to another point I wanted to make. People often say "looks aren't everything", except that they definitely are. There was a test where people were given 40 photographs of wedding days, 20 men and 20 women, all seperated. Nothing about their personalities or wealthyness, just pictures of 20 grooms and 20 brides. And they were told to guess which couples were together.
Altogether they were correct about 80% of the time. 80%! Just on 1 photo.
The moral of the story is, you will end with someone roughly about as attractive as you are.

Now this clearly goes along with my Disney theory. The beautiful(1) women in Disney films end up with highly attractive men. And we can account for those other attrubites that the men have i.e charming, heroic, etc. from the fact that these women tend to come from privaliged backgrounds, i.e. princesses, something about them makes them not run of the mill.

I'm not for one second suggesting that anyone I know who are in these groups are not beautiful, or are run-of-the-mill (maybe thats an unfair phrase), but the point is that the Disney women are already in a position to find themselves meeting dashing, attractive, charming men.

It wasn't Disney that gave them unrealistic expectations, it was their lack of perspective about the situation.

Now, you could take this argument at face value. Or you could take it that I'm just unbelieveably bitter than I'm not handsome, charming, heroic, perfect-toothed and charasmatic like all the men in the Disney films, and have to make up for it by making snide comments about how that fact that I'm not attractive is all women's fault. I'll leave that up to you to decide.

(1) Isn't it interesting that we have the word "beautiful" that is applied to women (you can apply it to men but it usually means good looking in a feminine sort of way), but there is no word that can only be applied to be very attractive men.
"Handsome" and "pretty" seem to suggest about the same level of attractiveness, so thats one for men, one for women. But when we go above that level of attractiveness, there is no word that is exclusively for men. "Gorgeous" and "stunning" can just about be applied to men without the feminine connotation, but they are much more commonly attributed to women. But there is no male equivalent to "beautiful".
Perhaps it is the final confirmation that we needed that women are just much more attractive than men. I think we can all agree, women just look nicer.