The following is an answer and/or comment by inhahe aka ColorStorm (inhahe.com - myriachromat.wordpress.com).

Lufasa Mufasa: Would you say you're shallow? If so, in what way?

ColorStorm: There's one way in which I may be shallow. I like girls mainly based on whether they're cute or sexy. Having intelligence or a good personality is just a plus. (Though I won't be likely to keep thinking about them 9 years after being with them if there's not something about their personality that's perfect for me. And if they're too stupid/basic/ghetto that probably makes them a no-go despite their looks. Though low intelligence in itself can actually be perfectly acceptable depending on its expression/the rest of the personality.)

It's not just that I care more about visual aesthetics than personality, though. It's more like I automatically read personality into looks, so I tend to like girls that are cute in certain ways based on the potential personality traits that I associate with those looks. Generic beauty I'm attracted to too ('generic beauty' by some standards, not by others), but that's perhaps because I adore/want to kiss most girls in general because of their spirit, so it's not so much that I'm attracted to their beauty as much as that I'm put off by ugliness (and most girls look ugly to me). Actually I think it's not that simple, it's more like: even generic beauty has personality traits associated with it, it's just that they're personality traits of humans or of girls in general and I like those traits because I like the human form in its totality (including mind and spirit). Also even 'generic beauty' comes in flavors, i.e., isn't really totally generic.

I also don't agree with people who call people shallow for rejecting people on purely aesthetic bases. We're not just disembodied minds or spirits and we shouldn't disregard the body, we're made up of all three components: mind, body, and soul. Beauty in all three is/should be important. There's a reason humans are attracted to physical beauty, based on evolution and especially the sexual-selection aspect of it. If we just pretend we're only minds and the body doesn't matter, the purposes of the evolutionary wiring for being attracted to beauty will stop being actualized and it'll further the effect of genetic drift.

Okay, that's not exactly true, because ugly people probably have just as much sex and children--they just meet up with each other. But still, there's a biological purpose to being attracted to physical beauty, and if you force yourself to ignore it to fit in with current societal standards, you're less human because you're denying part of what makes us human: our physical makeup.

So is it really shallow of me that I'm attracted to girls based mainly on looks? I think that's debatable.