Psychologist and relationship coach Sadia Khan shares videos on her YouTube channel, Sadia Psychology, to help individuals and couples navigate the complexities of modern relationships. In a recent interview on the relationship podcast, We Need To Talk, Sadia shared her 'controversial' take on why 'attractive women are treated differently' by men and women.  

Men's 2 reactions when they see a beautiful woman

The Instagram caption alongside a clip of her interview read, "This may be a controversial take. Do you agree that people, regardless of gender, act differently when interacting with attractive women?" In the clip, the host, US TV personality Paul Carrick Brunson, asked Sadia, "Men react negatively to attractive women. Why is that?"

To this, Sadia replied, “Men automatically go in two directions when they see a beautiful woman – they either go in awe or they go into hostility. But when their self-esteem is super, super low, and feel really low about themselves, they immediately want to reject her before she can reject them. They want to find reasons to kind of get rid of their attractions. They have to somehow obliterate their (woman's) self-esteem in order for them to make sense of why they are so attracted to her, get rid of it (the attraction) because they don't want to face the rejection.”

When asked how women react to attractive women, Sadia said, “What I find with women, when it comes to attractive women, even the women that are girl's girls, is that women will always side with those they find least threatening looks-wise. That's it. High self-esteem women are not threatened by attractive women. As a result, when they see an attractive woman online, they either scroll past because they are not interested or they support her because they are not threatened. When they have low self-esteem, they have to somehow take something or the other away from her.”

What does science say?

According to recent research, very attractive and very unattractive men show the highest hostility towards women. The recent study of men in the UK. found that those who perceive themselves as either the most attractive or the least attractive tend to show higher levels of hostility towards women compared to men with an average view of their attractiveness. The research was published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology.

Researchers have been looking into the effects of attractiveness for decades. Interestingly, a recent study published in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, also showed that men were more likely to behave more honestly when they believed they were interacting with a beautiful woman while the opposite pattern was seen in female participants, who exhibited ‘a beauty penalty toward attractive women’, the study's authors wrote.

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