Tweet of the week goes to Alexis Nicole James. 'Cristen Conger almost 100,000 subscribers.
Woot woot!' Woot woot indeed because hopefully by the time this video reaches your eyeballs
it will 100,000 subscribers in which case 100,000 thank skews. Thank skews, I just
said thank scuse and now I just said thanks scuse. If it's not 100,000 yet well 100,000
thanks skews anyway. I got a gratitude attitude.
I hope everyone had a wonderful Halloween, please tell me what you dressed up as. I dressed
up as sexy Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and here is my gavel to prove it.
This week on Stuff Mom Never Told You I first looked at how often men really think about
sex. Followed up with how people tend to react differently to male celebrity feminists versus
female celebrity feminists which makes me go hmmmm. Then on Friday to celebrate Halloween
it was '5 wicked facts about witches'. Broomsticks will never be the same. Now onto Ask Cristen
first of all thanks to everybody who watched and commented on last week's Ask Cristen video
'Why do girls wear makeup?' I was curious to hear from trans people about their thoughts
on makeup and how it relates to gender identity. Cameron Williams said, 'I'm a trans man and
I almost always wear at least some makeup. Now I've transitioned to the point where nobody
thinks I'm a cis woman day-to-day and I don't have to worry about "passing" so I wear it
as often as possible. Additionally on hormone replacement therapy, trans men tend to get
quite spotty and although I never broke out very badly at least a little concealer was
vital day-to-day.' Thanks Cameron. Enurvack said, 'As a Genderqueer person who doesn't
have much access to women's clothing in my size, makeup tends to be the only way for
me to outwardly express my gender. I love how different I can make myself look like
any other sort of body modification except I can wash mine off at the end of the day.'
I think that is a lot of why women do enjoy using makeup and experimenting around with
makeup because it is a type of body modification that you can change up. Along similar lines
this week's Ask Cristen question is coming from Mish Shell, 'Can you talk about how people
automatically assume that just because someone is good looking that he or she is stupid?'
What's interesting about this question of why do we think that really attractive people
are really not-so-intelligent is that when it comes to psychological studies and peoples'
perceptions of attractive people, it's actually just the opposite. We tend to ascribe more
positive traits including intelligence to the more attractive folks around us and this
is something that psychologists call 'the halo effect'. We extrapolate these lovely
features that we see onto things that we cannot see, such as having social skills or being
really good in school or being really great in the business world. Which is why there
is this thing called 'the beauty premium' that economists and psychologists talk about
in terms of how statistically hotter people do better in the workplace. There is one study
I found which did come out in the eighties so it is a little bit dated. But it found
that there was an attractiveness ceiling for this kind of halo effect. When people are
super-duper hot, like---we're likelier to downplay all of those other attributes around
them possibly because we are maybe a little bit jealous. It might also be notable that
this question is coming from a female viewer rather that a male viewer because there was
a recent study that came out in June 2014 which found that while people are pretty good
at judging a guy's intelligence based on what his face looks like, when they did the same
experiment for female faces, we had a lot harder time and I'm saying we as if I was
all of the participant's in the study assessing a woman's intelligence based-off of her face.
I wonder if this has something to do with something that another researcher in a separate
study called the dumb blonde hypothesis and what this separate study did was examine how
successful people's job applications were when they included photographs of themselves.
If super handsome guys included photos of themselves with their job applications they
were much likelier to get a callback whereas if really attractive women included photos
of themselves with their job applications they were much less likelier to get a callback
because of what that researcher termed the dumb blonde hypothesis, that assumption that
Mish Shell is asking about. I do think that there is a very similar stereotype focused
on men but I think that it's not so much the hotness of his face but rather the muscularity
of his body that can incite a similar kind of dumb blonde effect in our brains. Most
surprising to me was that the research upheld just the opposite rather than confirming oh
yeah yeah yeah totally this dumb blonde and/or meat-head effect is in full swing when we
see really attractive and really fit people but rather it was all about this connection
between beauty and brains. Keeping in mind that there have been studies confirming that yes in fact
more attractive people are more intelligent but those studies have been called into question
and this most recent study in pLos one that I just referenced from June 2014 found no
relationship whatsoever between those morphological traits i.e. how our face parts are all put
together and actual intelligence. Keep in mind too that this does nothing to address
the other stereotype of the unattractive nerd. Now I need your help to unpack all of these
stereotypes about perception and attractiveness and intelligence. Let me know your thoughts
in the comments below and as always ask me your questions so me and my shirts covered
in panda bears can give you some answers.