Why are fair-skinned women so popular?

Steve Sailer:

When the Internet came along in the 1990s, I discovered that an anthropologist at Université Laval in Quebec named Peter Frost had been researching for years this question of why actresses were so fair, and much else besides.

His findings are quite extraordinary.

He's finally published a lucidly written and wide-ranging book entitled Fair Women, Dark Men: The Forgotten Roots of Color Prejudice. It proves well worth the wait, shedding light on a broad array of contemporary social issues.

It turns out that this favoritism toward lighter skinned women is not an invention of Hollywood. You'll note that conventional "social constructionist" thinking can't explain this phenomenon. The standard academic's logic would predict that, because whites rule and men rule, therefore the whitest men would be the most popular. But pallid blonde actors of the James Spader ilk typically play evil preppie-yuppie villains, not heroes. Conversely, the movie industry is responding to a fondness for fairer females found in almost all cultures across almost all eras.

Fair Women, Dark Men: The Forgotten Roots of Racial Prejudice

Sexual selection as a cause of human skin colour variation: Darwin's hypothesis revisited