Psychology Today Pulls Asinine Article On Why Black Women Are Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women

Psychology Today has removed an article on  “Why Black Women Are Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women,” but many – us included – are wondering why it was published in the first place.

The entire article is no longer available on the Psychology Today website, but has been screencapped in its entirety at Buzzfeed. Aside from the blatant racism, what we really have a problem with is the junk science behind the “study,” and the fact that no editor at Psychology Today saw fit to withhold such a controversial article in consideration of the fact that the entire study is based on very subjective opinions. Let’s go through a few, shall we?

To start with, the supposedly “subjective” rating of attractiveness is done by interviewers of undetermined racial backgrounds. Assuming these are all totally open minded interviewers, there’s still not much that can be done to make preferences objective. Beauty is and always has been in the eye of the beholder, and statistical procedures don’t change that at all.

So already this “study” is treating the opinions  of three people as fact. As non-scientists, that seems like reason enough to discard this article at the outset, but let’s continue on for more of  Kanazawa’s gems.

Then there’s the interesting note that Black men and women consider themselves more attractive than the interviewers do. Which is again the problem with this junk science in the first place. If you poll 3 Republicans about President Obama’s job performance, you’d probably get different results than you would if you polled 3 Democrats. This is no more “interesting” than noting that Democrats subjectively think liberal policies are better for the country when holding Republican opinions up as the “objective” base point.”

Not one single chart presented proves that black women are “objectively” less attractive than anyone else. Continuing on the basis of the opinion of 3 people – we assume none were black women – as fact makes everything else pretty worthless.

Then there’s the full on racist crap. The first paragraph posits that black women are comparatively fat and stupid compared to women of other races – but don’t get down on yourself about that black ladies: your unattractiveness isn’t tied to either of those!

It’s also not to the mutant African genes that black men and women possess. So that just leaves the “fact” that black people have too much testosterone which means men and women look more manly, and it doesn’t work in the favor of black women. While we’re on the subject of facts, we should also note that African and black are not always the same thing. Moroccan, Tunisian and North African people look different than those in Western Africa, who look different from those in East Africa, who look different from those in Southern Africa, and black people in America and the Caribbean (among other places) can look like a combination of all or none of the above. Thus making this ridiculous bunch of crap even more ridiculous.

There are fat, unattractive people of all races, and last we checked there’s no single race that can claim ownership of androgyny or women with masculine features.

While this study is offensive, it’s even more offensive that not a single person at Psychology Today thought that publishing a glorified Hot or Not survey based on the opinions of three men who aren’t that into black women as a factual study on the attractiveness of black women as a whole was a good idea. Note for the future: charts do not make idiocy scientific or factual, they just highlight the fact that even highly educated, supposedly scientific people can be idiots.