SexyCongress Tells Us A Lot... About People Who Rate People's Attractiveness On-Line

Allegedly the 74th hottest member of Congress

by Seth Masket

Some enterprising programmers have created a way for people to rank the relative hotness of members of Congress at a website called SexyCongress. As of today, they've accrued nearly half a million votes, so we've got a pretty robust ranking. What have we learned? Sadly, little we didn't already know. Not about Congress, of course, but about the people who go on-line to rank people sexually.

I've gathered the ranking data to see what it tells us. I've taken the rankings and subtracted them from 535 to create a "hotness" scale, with higher numbers belonging to members perceived as more attractive. As others have noted, the hottest members of Congress are all female. But that doesn't mean all the women in Congress are considered hot. The histogram below probably tells you everything you need to know about the people who have used this site:

As the graph shows, men fill out all levels of the hotness scale; their distribution is flat. For female members of Congress, it's a completely bimodal distribution, with women either perceived as very attractive or very unattractive.

And as you could probably guess, age makes up a large component of perceived attractiveness. Below, I've created two scatterplots of hotness plotted against age, one for men and one for women. For both genders, perceived hotness drops dramatically with age. Men drop seven hotness points for each additional year, while women drop eleven. Of course, that's not really a linear relationship for women; according to the raters, you're hot until you're not.

Readers might find some solace in the knowledge that ideology appears to be unrelated to perceived hotness. Tenure doesn't seem to matter, either -- serving longer in DC doesn't seem to make people any more or less attractive, controlling for age. Raters seem to find Republican women somewhat hotter than Democratic women, but that appears to be largely a function of female Republican members of Congress being several years younger, on average, than female Democratic members.

Here endeth today's lesson.