Inherently Attractive Profession

aka: Hot Scoop

Rachel: Ross, the guy is a very, very successful lawyer!
Ross: How is that important?
Rachel: Oh, it's important!

— Friends

Let's face it: certain professions are just attractive. Not just the person with the job, no — although they usually will be good-looking as well — but the job itself will play a part in attraction. Whether it's the money that the job brings, the power and status, the glamor associated with it, the perks like free concerts, the cool uniform that comes with it, or the fact that it'll please your parents, there's just something that might draw a character to a specific professional type of person.

What distinguishes this from tropes like Hospital Hottie or Hot Teacher is that what's attractive isn't just the person with the job, or that the job itself is used for fanservice — it's that the job itself or the characteristics associated with it have their own innate appeal.

There are many reasons why a person with a certain job might be considered appealing. If you're with them, it can provide financial security, prestige, or access to expensive services for future in-laws. Some people may be into positions of power. Character traits that are seen as implicit for certain jobs, like being intelligent or caring, might be seen as attractive, while the artistry or athleticism implicit for specific jobs may also be a turn-on for some. Other people might just be into it for reasons as shallow as "uniforms are hot". See the Analysis page for more information.

Contrast Married to the Job and Workaholic; certain demanding professions might have the opposite effect on a relationship and cause it to deteriorate. Marriage of Convenience or Gold Digger may be employed, with the "gold/convenience" being the spouse's job. An overbearing My Beloved Smother or Jewish Mother might push her kid to get with one of these attractive professionals (usually doctor/lawyer for the prestige), if she isn't pushing them to get the job themselves.

One common way this can be exploited is by pretending to be or invoking attributes of such professions, or trying to get the jobs themselves, in an attempt to score dates. For example, someone might learn to play the guitar because "Girls Like Musicians".

Supertrope of Artists Are Attractive.

This trope is In-Universe Examples Only — the character must say or imply that they find a particular job attractive, express interest in someone because of their job, or discuss or converse the fact that some professions are better at getting dates. Hollywood Beauty Standards are nigh-omnipresent, so simply an attractive character in a job the audience thinks is attractive is not enough to qualify them for this trope.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In My Hero Academia, Mineta entered hero school with this mind. He believes that since heroes are cool and popular, girls will flock to him once he becomes a pro. He only learns later on that people don't admire heroes just for being heroes, but for their actions that make them heroes.

Comics

• In Archie Comics, Betty and Veronica, along with any number of other girls, will occasionally be attracted to the beach lifeguard just by virtue of him being a lifeguard. As you might imagine, Archie and Reggie are jealous of all the attention they get.

Film — Live-Action

• Fire Island: The friends coo over the fact that Howie's summer fling Charlie is also a doctor in addition to being nice and good-looking.
• An Officer and a Gentleman: The naval aviation officer cadets are warned about "Puget Debs" — women from the Puget Sound area who will do anything to snare themselves a naval aviator, including springing The Baby Trap onto them. Sure enough, Zach the protagonist and Sid, his best buddy start dating two such Puget Debs, Paula and Lynette. While Paula is a Nice Girl who genuinely loves Zach for who he is, not for what his profession will be, Lynette only wants someone who will become a Navy pilot. When she hints to Sid that she might be pregnant, Sid quits OCS and promises to get a civilian job to support her and the baby. A furious Lynette dumps him, stating that there was never any baby and that she only wants to marry a pilot and go see the world with him. Sid is Driven to Suicide due to this.
• Polite Society: Everybody swoons over the fact that Salim, in addition to being very good-looking and charming, is a doctor who saves children with his genetics expertise.
• The Wrestler: Robin goes home with a woman after a night at the bar, who wants to have sex with him while he wears firefighter boots. Robin agrees, but when he wakes up the next morning to notice the woman's room is wallpapered with pictures of sexy firemen, he feels used.

Jokes

• Q: Why are women attracted to a man in uniform? A: Because it means he has a job. The type of uniform is irrelevant.
  Q: Why are women especially attracted to a man in military uniform? A: Because it means he has a job and he's already been trained to follow orders.

Literature

• Genevieve Dieudona from Anno Dracula and the Diogenes Club series seems to have a thing for soldiers and men in uniform. This extends to Charles, who... doesn't exactly fit that description.
• In the Joe Pickett novels, there is a lot of discussion of 'buckle bunnies': female groupies attracted to rodeo riders and who follow the rodeo circuit around. Joe's adopted daughter April becomes one before an abusive boyfriend almost kills her and she returns to her family.

Live-Action TV

• On Friends:
  • Rachel's obsession with doctors was something of a Running Gag.
  • Paul Stevens (played by Bruce Willis) is an older guy who dates Rachel. She's delighted that he's a successful lawyer.
• The Golden Girls:
  • "Stan's Return" does the My Beloved Smother variation. Dorothy's daughter Kate has been seriously dating a man named Dennis, and when Blanche learns that he's a doctor, she remarks "To hell with his background!" while Sophia is eager to know how much money he makes. Dorothy tries to claim she doesn't care about the job but proves Not So Above It All when she says "If they happen to get married, I will shout from every rooftop in Miami: 'MY SON-IN-LAW'S A DOCTOR!'" Humorously, when Dennis reveals that he's specifically a podiatrist, Dorothy keeps using "doctor" because it sounds more impressive.
  • "'Twas the Nightmare Before Christmas" reveals that Blanche has a thing for guys in Santa suits. Even the rest of the girls, who are quite used to Blanche's long list of lovers, are surprised by that particular kink.
• On The Good Place Eleanor's thing for mailmen repeatedly comes up. It's implied that the uniform plays a big role in this case.
• How I Met Your Mother:
  • Ted is an architect. In his plan to charm Robin, he imagines "showing some foxy young thing all his cool architecture stuff" to make Robin jealous. The episode "Ted Mosby: Architect" milks this to the extreme when Barney impersonates Ted because lots of chicks think architects are hot.
    Barney: Dude, lots of chicks think architects are hot. Think about it, you create something out of nothing. You're like God. There's nobody hotter than God.
  • Barney claims that pharmaceutical representatives are the "hot-chick" profession of their generation (like nurses or stewardesses were in the past). He has flings with several of them, then meets a plain one and declares the era of the "hot pharma girl" over.
  • One episode has Robin dismissing the boys' interest in a new female bartender by arguing that she's only hot by virtue of being a bartender. When they don't believe her, she proves her point by getting behind the bar herself, where she's instantly treated like the hottest woman in existence. The reasoning isn't elaborated.
• Laverne & Shirley: Shirley wants to marry a doctor.
• Fran Fine from The Nanny is particularly attracted to men who are doctors, especially Jewish doctors.
  Fran: All the while that you were selflessly raising your son Eric, while his mother, Cheree, was gallivanting all over Spring Valley, did you know that he wasn't your biological child?
  Brock Storm: Yes, I've always known.
  Fran Fine: You are a god. And a doctor. I gotta lie down.
• Never Have I Ever: Prakash, Kamala's would-be fiance, is an engineer. As a prestigious and presumably high-paying job, being an engineer is clearly a selling point, as the Indian aunties fawn over this fact.
• New Girl:
  • The boys are initially amenable to letting Jess live with them because she knows a bunch of models, with the implication that she'll introduce them to her attractive friends.
  • Jess becomes Friends with Benefits with a guy named Sam, but things get complicated when she finds out he's not only a doctor, but a pediatrician (meaning he likes kids in addition to all the other things that make doctors desirable) and winds up actually falling for him, which drives him off.
• Seinfeld:
  • One episode has Elaine dating a man who is studying to become a doctor, saying it's every woman's dream to date a doctor. When he passes his boards and becomes a doctor, he immediately dumps her, saying it's every aspiring doctor's dream to dump the woman he's with and find a better one once he becomes a doctor (and therefore has the inherent attractiveness that would allow him to do so).
  • Regarding Elaine's attraction to another doctor in "The Heart Attack," Jerry compares women pursuing doctors to men pursuing models, commenting, "They want someone with knowledge of the body...we just want the body."
  • Another episode has Jerry dating a Romanian gymnast, which is apparently the fantasy of every adult male. According to her, comedians are the subject of fantasy in her country. They both end up disappointed.
• Sex and the City: When Miranda tries speed-dating, she pretends to be a stewardess because she's too intimidating as a lawyer. She decides to date a doctor... but it turns out he's not a doctor. He only pretends to be a doctor because women dig it and he wants to have sex with a flight attendant. Miranda decides not to reveal that she's not a flight attendant because that way, that particular fantasy was fulfilled.
• Schmigadoon!: The McDonough sisters fawn over the fact that Josh is a doctor.

Magazines

• MAD did a parody of Sex and the City where Samantha had to regretfully break up with a boyfriend because his boring career was making it too difficult for the writers to think of any sexual puns.

Video Games

• Papyrus from Undertale seems to believe this of the royal guard, as he believes that he'll be "getting a shower of kisses" once he officially becomes a part of it.
• One of the planned ten rivals from Yandere Simulator for Senpai's affection is Muja Kina, who substitutes the school's nurse for a week, during which Senpai gets sick and visits her cabinet a lot. According to Yandere Dev, Senpai might have a fetish for nurses.

Visual Novels

• In the Ace Attorney world, prosecutors are attractive — or at least, more attractive than defense lawyers. (It helps that they're often in a position to get wealthy off the job). Miles Edgeworth is considered more appealing than Phoenix Wright, even though there's not much difference in the art style. And poor Apollo Justice can't even hope to compete with Klavier Gavin, who is a rock star as well as a star prosecutor... and doesn't change his behavior much when switching between the two.
• Not quite a profession, but the skiing career of the protagonist of Double Homework has played a big part in his success with the ladies.
• In Love Esquire, if you pursue Giselle, a number of characters will wonder whether the squire has a thing for nurses. And in one scene, when her uniform allows him a pretty impressive look down her cleavage, the squire himself thinks to himself that they might just be right.
• Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: After the release of Ultimate Writing Prodigy Toko Fukawa's bestselling romance novel So Lingers the Ocean, "fisherman" became this all across Japan.

Webcomics

• In Questionable Content, Hannelore has a thing for sexy firemen.

Web Original

• CollegeHumor, "Meet Cute with a Ghost": Jess meets a really cute ghost during a seance. She originally wanted to contact her dead grandfather, but the ghost turns out to be "tall, muscular, with dark hair" and a doctor to boot. She's delighted. The psychic is baffled why she wants to pursue him, but Jess says dating in LA is hard.

Web Videos

• The Lizzie Bennet Diaries: Bing Lee being a medical student on top of being handsome, kind, and rich is just the cherry on top of Mrs. Bennett's "he would make a perfect son-in-law; let me set up my daughter Jane with him" pie. By the end of the show he's dropped out of medical school because it wasn't making him happy, but he still ends up with Jane.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: When Nicole's parents come to visit, it's revealed that Nicole is actually her middle name. Her parents were so insistent that she become successful that her proper name is Doctor Nicole Senicourt, now Watterson.
• From the Family Guy episode "The Former Life of Brian:" While attending a birthday party, the lady that Brian had his eye on says that she always thought that magic was sexy, which prompts Brian to say that he himself is a magician. After he works real hard to become a professional stage magician, however, she dumps him for somebody else.
• Futurama:
  • In "Why Must I Be a Crustacean In Love?", the crew go to Zoidberg's homeworld for mating season. Zoidberg has his eye on a Decapodian named Edna, but she's not interested. Leela tries to convince her by telling her that "he's a doctor. A doctor, honey!"
  • Leela's unsuccessful relationships include a doctor and the mayor's aide. Naturally, her One True Love turns out to be relatable dead-end-delivery-job-holder Philip J. Fry.
    Leela: If you were my kids, you'd get quite a talking-to!... From your father. ...When he got home from the Senate.
  • Played for laughs when Leela starts dating a doctor, and Dr. Zoidberg warns her, "Be careful with those doctors, Leela. They're all incredibly poor." Leela points out that most doctors are actually quite rich, to Zoidberg's shock and dismay (Zoidberg is a laughably terrible doctor, which explains his poverty).

---