Linda Riss, Burt Pugach, and the Myths About Attractiveness

Before hired goons disfigured her face, Linda Riss was very attractive. Linda had taken in amphetamines as a supplement to sculpt herself into a curvy size 6. Her eyes were milky blue. Her dark hair was curled back from her face. And at 21, she was usually seen in sleek dresses or off-the-shoulder sweaters. Fashionable, dark-haired, and young, like an East Bronx Liz Taylor. If it sounds gross for us to sexualize Linda this way, it very much is. But we have a point to make here. These are all the direct quotes from news articles, documentaries, or Linda herself about her attractiveness in 1959.  Just before three attackers threw lye in her eyes, leaving her scarred for life and almost entirely blind. The man who hired the goons to blind her, Burt Pugach, had sexualized Linda to the point of obsession. Burt was 32, and he already had a wife and daughter, but he pursued Linda nonetheless.

Burt sent Linda flowers, took her out to fancy meals, and he flew around his single-engine plane. Burt was smitten. When Linda finally found out about Burt's wife, she asked him to file for divorce. When he refused, Linda broke things off. Then she got engaged to another man, and Burt didn't take this well. Burt told her, “If I can't have you, no one else will have you. And when I get through with you, no one else will want you.”

He made good on his threat, too. He used his money to hire the men who would disfigure her. Burt was later convicted of masterminding the attack and spent 14 years in prison, writing obsessively to Linda. He would write her flowery love letters, telling Linda how attractive she is and how he would marry her when he got out of prison. What a lunatic, right?

Except, if you kept up with the tablets in the 1970s, you know where this is going. Linda, with her one good eye, saw how fit Burt was getting in prison. She told friends and newspapers that she found him much more attractive with a bit of meat on him. And when Burke got out of jail, she took him up on the marriage proposal, and Linda married the man that blinded her.

Physical attraction is a funny thing. We all want to look better, to knock people’s socks off when we enter a room. But at the same time, ridiculously good-looking people become targets of jealousy and anger. And according to the BBC, being too stunning can make people judge you as less competent. Because we all assume, if you're attractive, you must have skated through life on those looks. So today, we're getting the science of attraction and how much of it are pheromones, how much is a personal preference, how big of a curse is attractiveness, and to help guide us through this research of attraction. We have three myths to bust.

Myth 1: Physical attractiveness is simple. Women want men with hulking biceps, and men want pretty faces and big bust. What's there to figure out?

We are starting with how the basics of attraction work, how we find each other attractive, and how we become attractive to somebody else. There's a lot of components, and much of it is stuff that either people are already aware of, but it builds into something bigger, like what happened to Linda. First up, the one everyone knows about is pheromones. We see it get tossed around in pop science and on TV. You can't necessarily smell them per se, but we're aware of it.

Do you think mentally, you'd be able to smell someone who is attractive or ugly? In a pheromone study for men, they had women trying to detect men's sweaty undershirts. The guys would give over their shirts, and the women would smell them. Then they would rate them on how symmetrical the man was. Symmetry has a lot to do with our attraction. Overall, the women were able to detect by smell, with a creepy amount of accuracy, who was symmetrical. They could smell undershirts and get a better than average grade on how symmetrical the man was. A similar study was even more impressive where they asked women to wear t-shirts to sleep in during their fertile and infertile points during their cycle. Then they asked men to smell their t-shirts and assess which ones they found more pleasant. And overwhelmingly, they judged the shirts worn by fertile women to be more pleasant and sexier. So, not only are we probably built for it, but your subconscious picks up on so much that you're unaware of as far as your senses go.

At the beginning of the show, we joked that all women are just attracted to big biceps and huge shoulders. There is a Huffington Post article, and they break down attraction very nicely, but they say: "In pertain to masculinity from an evolutionary perspective, masculinity is man's way of advertising good genes dominance and a likelihood to have healthier kids."

This means that if genes and survival are essential things for you as a human, that kind of masculinity as a survival trait would be more critical. This is why women living in impoverished environments may actually have a greater preference for masculine men, according to the study. But women in more developed areas show an appreciation for more feminine-looking men. If you seek out somebody who's more feminine, it may be because you live in a wealthier or more resource-rich area.

I want to talk a little bit about the MHC in the immune system. If you find somebody with a good immune system, it means you can make kids that can fight off more bacteria, parasites, and viruses. That's the body's primary goal in mating. When you kiss someone, your mouth is conducting a science experiment and just hoovering the immune system of somebody else to find out if you're going to make good kids.

A great kisser might be a great dad or a great mom and make gorgeous, healthy, smart kids. There's also a field of study where they look at how hormone pills, which change pregnancy cycles such as progesterone, might affect the way we sample MHC. Women are more prone when they're pregnant to seek out comfort from family. They will try to gravitate towards safer males. You may get knocked up by a "bad guy," but that's not the guy you want comforting you while you're pregnant. You stay away from the big scary guy that got you knocked up and seek out family because you're protecting the baby.

However, if you're on progesterone or something like that, the body has been fooled into thinking you're in that cycle all the time. You're less likely to seek out that kind of like alpha male to mate with at that moment. You may be more prone to be attracted to more feminine men or men with similar MHCs as you. You're more likely to look for people who have similar immune systems or immune responses as yours, which is another point of attractiveness.

In these articles, they cited a study where participants selected 32 faces of women, and they use a computer program to make their features look more average. They show what Angelina Jolie would look like averaged out with other celebrities or average it out with the population. They showed photos of these and 94 pictures of real female faces of two groups of college students. And only for the photographs of real female faces were rated as more attractive than the average face. So generally, we are not necessarily looking for the most beautiful person. We are looking more for somebody who is symmetrical and average in general.

And finally, we can't have an episode about attractiveness without mentioning how much personal preference falls into this. If you're sitting at home and you're thinking I'm not a slave to pheromones and looking for someone unique, then that comes down to personal preference. There is a good quote by Helen Fisher. She worked on something called love maps, and they dictate or determine who individuals gravitate toward. Here's what she said about that, “These love maps vary from one individual to the next. Some people get turned on by a business suit or a doctor's uniform, by big breasts, by small feet, by a vivacious laugh...” She then discusses that it boils down to everyone having their own preference. You've got a type, and that's okay. We all have our own, and it's not prejudice. It's a preference, and if that means that you pull over your car tires screeching to yell at a woman who is on the streets like Linda Riss, then you have found yours.

Myth 2: why are pretty people meaner than the rest of us? Or are they? And can sitting next to an attractive person on the bus stress you out?

Reading about Linda and Burt made me want to know if attractive people are meaner than everyone. Do they feel like because they are attractive, they can look down on others? This comes from a Psychology Today article where a doctor named Holtzman assembled a team, and they started looking at something called adorned versus unadorned attractiveness. They wanted to test people, first by taking pictures of them in what they called an anti-makeover, where they would put them in like simple gray sweatpants and sweatshirts. They would pull their hair back, and they would make them look as dull and plain as possible. Even the men had to remove their beards. They wanted nothing to make them look more attractive. And what they were testing their attractive ratings when they were shown to other people. They wanted to test their completely natural attractive state rating versus their personalities. What they found was there wasn't much of a correlation between naturally attractive people and meanness.

Overall, attractive people are not necessarily mean. However, their adorned attractiveness is represented, or at least correlated, with psychopathy. They were able to take the data, and they found correlations that were associated with adornment. So, people who dress up to look good, who put a lot of effort into making themselves look more attractive, who did not score highly in the naturally attractive rating were adorned themselves. Apparently, if you spend that much time on your looks, then you may have some amount of psychopathy in you. In summary, store-bought beauty people showed more signs of psychopathy.

Going to an Atlantic article on how attractive people affect your brain, they talk about this effect where if people who are absurdly attractive go near you, you get a dopamine kick. It's like seeing a beautiful painting; your brain distributes dopamine. However, attractive people can make you feel less than so. If you see the doctor because you are sick and feel bad about how you look, it can put you down if you see an attractive nurse or doctor. You know you do not look up to their standard. Overall, you get dopamine initially but followed by cortisol.

Myth 3: You're born either beautiful or ugly, and nothing in your behavior can change how attractive you are. Or can it?

If you are not naturally symmetrical, how can you be more attractive? The answer comes from several bar studies. I love scientists, by the way, because they are willing to study the weirdest stuff . Anyways, they followed men and women to bars, and they wanted to see what people can do to appear more attractive. And they based success off of if those people got a phone number in the end or if they got people to approach them. For the men who went to the bars, they took these study groups, and they found out that women were three times more likely to give out their phone numbers to men who told jokes compared to men who did not.

They found that the men who told jokes and were humorous were also considered more attractive, intelligent, funnier, and more sociable.

For the women, Psychology Today states that women who smiled at men signaled to them interest. In the study, when the women smiled, the number of men who approached them was five times more than the women who didn't. So, attractiveness comes down to personality, smiling, and being humorous. In online dating, everyone starts out shooting out of their league by about 20%, and then they adjust later. So a takeaway here is that when you're dating or approaching somebody, gain control of your signals and attractiveness through smiling and humor.

Final Thoughts

Have you ever seen the ads for Axe Body Spray commercials, where a man sprays himself with a magic can of pheromones, and suddenly women can't keep their hands off him? Don't we treat our own attractiveness like that? If we just lost a bit of weight, we'd be more attractive. If we just wore the right dress, got the right haircut, or drove the right car, that would finally redline us on the attractiveness gauge.

In reality, it comes down to a lot of different factors. And while pheromones are one of those factors, we also have to consider immune system compatibility, genes, symmetry, averageness, and above all, personal preference. We all want to be attractive, but attractive people can make us feel uncomfortable or less than. And attractive people can seem unnecessarily mean. If you find yourself sitting next to someone so beautiful, it can make you feel like a slob. But understand that it is not about us; It's our reaction to feeling put on the spot. It's your brain’s natural defense against being charmed. Unless their supernatural attractiveness is just an adornment, that maybe they're a sociopath.

Either way, there seems to be a universal way to boost whatever attractiveness you already have, and here it is: Men, you need to get funny! For women trying smiling, but only if you feel like it. Whatever you do to boost your attractiveness, just remember that it's a better plan than splashing lye in their face, getting buff in prison, and waging a decades-long psychological war against them. That may be taking attraction a little too far.