2012-09-23
Explanation
This comic features an alien trying to buy naked celebrity photos from a human. The alien keeps rejecting each photo because none of them are at the right zoom level. Too far away and he cannot resolve her features at all; too close and he can see the microbial life in her ducts; zoomed out he cannot make out nipples; zoomed in just far enough and he can see individual hair follicles but cannot determine what body area they are from. The alien insists he needs to be able to perceive her "as a mate, not a biological system" and needs to determine whether the hairs are from a culturally or biologically sexualized body area.
The man eventually draws a diagram explaining human sexuality with a graph. The x-axis shows "Distance" ranging from 1mm to 10^9 m, and the y-axis maps out zones of perception: too close is "Creepy," too far is "Boring," and there is a narrow sweet spot in between labeled "So Hot." The joke is that human sexual attraction operates in a very specific and narrow range of visual scale -- we need to see enough to recognize a person as attractive, but not so much detail that we are confronted with the biological reality of what a body actually is at the microscopic level.
The alien concludes "You guys are pretty limited, huh?" and the man adds "Oh, that reminds me. No ugly chicks" -- further highlighting the absurdly narrow parameters of human sexual attraction. The votey shows the alien deciding to go back to his home planet Zorblax, "where we only judge by proboscis curvature," suggesting that every species has its own arbitrary and narrow standards of attractiveness.