What Do Guys Say Their "Perfect Woman" Looks Like?

Just when you start to feel the slightest bit optimistic about the progress feminism made in 2014, something like What'sYourPrice.com's "perfect woman" survey comes along and smacks you in the face with its backwards, almost comically sexist line of thinking. The aptly-named wesbite, where you can "get the date simply by using your wallet," is essentially a giant online dating auction, in which men bid on dates with attractive women like they're cattle. In case that wasn't creepy and objectifying enough, the company recently surveyed 145,000 male users in the U.S. about their Perfect Woman (but not the women, because all we really look for is a deep wallet, amiright ladies?), and the results are exactly what you'd expect.Apparently, the average American male is looking for... a blonde, blue-eyed, skinny nonsmoker who only drinks socially. Go ahead and take a minute to process that shocker. If you don't happen to fit into all of those categories, I'm sorry to say that unless you dye your hair/lose weight/wear colored contacts/quit smoking/take up drinking, apparently you're never going to get a date. And if you're a woman of color, there's just no helping you. It's best to just resign yourself to being alone forever right now, so you have time to get used to the pain.

The perfect woman also had a graduate degree, so these guys do get points for wanting a lady with a brain.

So how exactly did What's Your Price get to this caricature of a human Barbie doll? First, according to Cosmo, they "calculated how much money they were willing to offer to date a woman with specific attributes," then they compared that to the average price of a woman on the site, which is a phrase I never thought I'd write in an article that wasn't about human trafficking. The average cost of a date with this Perfect Female Specimen? $135.07. It's not exactly surprising that there are still men out there who think of women as objects for sale, or that it's hard out there for a woman of color in the online dating world. (Or any world, really.) But that doesn't mean it's not depressing as hell to see yet another survey of the "Perfect Woman" shoved in our faces as the ideal we should be striving for. These kinds of press releases forget that maybe women don't actually care what some dude with a neckbeard and a bunch of money is looking for in a date, because we're busy setting our own standards for ourselves. Society already gives us so many impossible ideals to live up to — this particular Perfect Woman can get in line.

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