Attractive people are more likely to be rated as having higher intelligence, greater loyalty, more dependability, and stronger leadership skills than others, regardless of their actual qualities. Teachers are more likely to rate attractive students as diligent, engaged, hard-working, and intelligent, and students rate attractive teachers as more likable and appealing. Attractive job applicants are more likely to be rated as qualified and competent, regardless of their actual experience or skills. Once hired, attractive employees get more opportunities and higher salaries and are more likely to be rated as more knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and effective. Attractive spokespeople bring greater trust and better evaluations to a product, attractive political candidates are overwhelmingly more likely to be elected, and jurors are less likely to believe that an attractive person is guilty of a crime.

In the United States, physically attractive people are thought to be smarter, warmer, happier, healthier, more sociable, less lonely, and less anxious than others. They’re less likely to be identified as psychopaths or mentally unbalanced, and they’re thought to have better prognoses in the face of physical or psychological problems.

These expectations can fulfill themselves. For example, attractive people haven’t actually been found to be more intelligent than unattractive people, but they do tend to achieve more: “Since attractive people are perceived to have superior intelligence, they are likely given more opportunities, more support, and more encouragement, all prerequisites for short- and long-term success.”

(Rachelle M. Smith, The Biology of Beauty: The Science Behind Human Attractiveness, 2018.)

Carved into a hill in Dorset is the Cerne Abbas Giant, a 55-meter nude figure that carries a club and is rather obviously male. In November 1932 the Home Office received a letter from local resident Walter L. Long on which he’d sketched the giant. He wrote:

If this sketch offends, please remember that we have the same subject, representing a giant 27,000 times life size, facing the main road from Dorchester to Sherborne, and only some quarter to half a mile distant.

With the support of the Bishop of Salisbury, another Bishop, and representatives of other religions, I appealed to the National Trust, but this society exists only to preserve that which is entrusted to it, and consequently does not consider the obscenity of this figure is a matter on which I can act. In this figure’s counterpart in Sussex, Sex has been eliminated altogether; the other extreme.

Were the Cerne Giant converted into a simple nude, no exception would be taken to it. It is its impassioned obscenity that offends all who have the interest of the rising generation at heart, and I, we, appeal to you to make this figure conform to our Christian standards of civilization.

Archival records show that the matter was referred to one S.W. Harris, who debated what would satisfy Mr. Long. Should they call the police? Plant some strategic fig trees? He noted that the figure had stood without complaint for two or three thousand years, “or from 1/3 to one half the Biblical age of the Earth.” At last he sent this reply:

With reference to your letter of 14th November, I am directed by the Secretary of State to say that he has caused inquiry to be made and finds that the prehistoric figure of which you complain — the Giant of Cerne — is a national monument, scheduled as such, and vested in the National Trust. In the circumstances the Secretary of State regrets that he cannot see his way to take any action in the matter.

Seven years later Harris shared Long’s letter with a colleague, who wrote of the giant, “He is an old scandal, but he has stood there and scandalised for thousands of years and I hope [he] will do so for thousands more.”

(National Archives, In Their Own Words: Letters From History, 2016.)