Every Philosopher Who Said Men Are More Beautiful Than Women Explained

For over two millennia, some of philosophy’s biggest names—from Aristotle to Hegel—have claimed that men are more beautiful than women. Not because of vanity, but because they tied beauty to reason, symmetry, purpose, and intellect—all qualities they coded as masculine. This video traces that long, fascinating, and deeply revealing history.

We begin with the ancient world, where Hippocrates’ “hot man, cold woman” biology shaped early ideas about perfection. Aristotle turned it into metaphysics: the male as complete form, the female as a failed copy. Augustine and Aquinas sanctified that view; Ficino and Michelangelo turned it into divine art. Renaissance thinkers measured beauty with the male body as their ruler, while Enlightenment giants like Rousseau and Kant wrapped gender hierarchy in the language of reason and aesthetics.

From Schopenhauer’s bleak metaphysics to Nietzsche’s glorification of strength, from Castiglione’s courtly grace to Hegel’s lofty theory of spirit, each thinker inherited and passed down a single assumption—that true beauty belongs to the active, the rational, the male.

By following this lineage, we see not just the history of misogyny in philosophy, but how culture itself learned to disguise power as beauty. It’s a story of genius entangled with bias, ideals wrapped in hierarchy, and the centuries‑long equation of masculinity with perfection.

Philosophy gave us logic, ethics, and art—but it also taught us what kind of face could symbolize the divine. Understanding that legacy helps us see how much of the world’s “reason” was built on unexamined ideals of gendered beauty—and why it’s time to reimagine what beauty really means.