Stressed men fancy bigger women....

"That kind of is what this is about[.......]why would we in the West come to culture revere an apparently unhealthy ideal"

I don't understand how this study would answer this question. This study is coming from the perspectives that westerners have hunky-dory stress free lives, and othered 'foreigners' have stress. It is not putting westerners, western culture, or western values under the spotlight at all.

"That kind of is what this is about. Once anthropologists pointed out that western body preferences weren't the same as non-Western preferences, especially on weight for certain groups, the question became what's driving the differences and why would we in the West come to culture revere an apparently unhealthy ideal."

But this is based on the assumption that reproduction is central to attraction, rather than social status. Perhaps 'stress' makes people less able to judge or less interested in judging the body type they would get most approval for sexually partnering with?

Dr Martin Tovee says:
"My research explores human mate selection and the perception of physical attractiveness in an evolutionary psychology context." read as I've had a lot of access to pictures of naked women and I like putting them in order of preference.

"One of the most fundamental problems for any organism is mate selection." Says who?

"It is vitally important that we are sensitive to the physical cues that honestly signal that one individual is more desirable (i.e. fitter and with a better reproductive potential, and use them to choose the partner who is most likely to enhance our chances of successful reproduction.) than another" Erm, yes, with the hugely complex socialisation of human beings requiring multi-faceted parenting skills, resourcefulness and intelligence to raise an infant to successful adulthood, its all down to 'reproductive potential' that can be gleaned by looking at someone? Since when is what men find attractive key to reproduction? Since when can you tell by looking at someone how easily they'll conceive or whether they have inferior sperm? :/ What a dimwit.

"My research has focussed on the visual cues on which these judgements are based, and how environment and context may alter these judgements." He hasn't considered there is a conditioned response to visual cues.

"This research also focuses on the problem of body image dysfunction in Eating Disordered subjects. This is a key diagnostic feature in both Anorexic and Bulimic subjects, and plays an important role in the aetiology and maintenance of these conditions." Because of course celebrity culture and imagery, patriarchal oppression have nothing to do with it.

What a white male-entitled tosser. Why has he got a job?

This is really interesting, leggy - I'm really excited at the thought of your work, if you get the grant, please come back and tell us how it went! I would actually be almost more interested in how your colleagues think of it as in the results.

Thanks for the info on BMI - I guess I was just surprised they wouldn't include a caveat, but perhaps it's simply to do with knowing their audience would understand why they chose it.

I do understand you can't control what journos write. I don't want to blame the academics unduly - I know sometimes people don't even get to write their own abstracts, is that right? So the big slip there might not have been their fault.

But, it is all someone's set of decisions, on how to present that study, and whether to fund it in the first place, and I think it matters to discuss that. I hope that doesn't sound presumptuous - I know it probably does because I'm not in this area and obviously this is a general forum ... but, I think it's important for us non-specialists to at least try to unpick what's going on, and not just take it as gospel.

To answer a couple of questions that came up on this thread, as I know this literature very well...

-Why these wierd, spread eagled pictures of women and why only women?

The images come from an older study into the way women with eating disorders look at the female body (what interests them vs a 'healthy' viewer, how do they judge attractiveness etc). They are women (with EDs as I recall) of known BMI and body proportions and the images have been used over and over and there's a lot of good comparative data on them. There is no male data set which would allow study of perceptions of men nearly as well. However, this annoys me too and since I'm currently writing a grant to do some related work I shall put that in and get money to create a data set. If I can persuade men to come in and be photographed in white CKs...!

Oh and faces are obscured for the obvious reason of controlling what's driving perceptions. Faces are very influential in attraction. (And we know a lot more about women's preferences for men's faces!).

-" Not sure why they're using the BMI of the women when this has been pretty conclusively challenged. "

In terms of adult health, sure percentage body fat is more important. But those measures don't exist for these women and there's lots of data showing that BMI is an important predictor of attraction.

• "Why not - why do white men like skinny women? "

That kind of is what this is about. Once anthropologists pointed out that western body preferences weren't the same as non-Western preferences, especially on weight for certain groups, the question became what's driving the differences and why would we in the West come to culture revere an apparently unhealthy ideal.

I don't know how well Newcastle involve their academics when creating press releases, but I've had the folks at my institution say "No, you can't add in that explanation, it'll get ignored." And then you can't control what the journos write either.

Sure, I can understand that.

Yes I am interested in the emergence of people - including men -defining as asexual. I also notice a lot of 'I'm so heterosexual' crap most men spout to bond with/avoid bullying by other men. But still, I'd much rather hear about something other than men. Its not just their sexuality that's overexposed - its everything they think, say or do. I'm so bored of it.

Oh, no, not at all, don't worry!

I do know what you mean.

I think, to me, all that stuff 'oh, I'm so out there, sexually, I do all these diverse things' ... no, that's just more of the same. For example I know a guy who thinks he's really really counter-culture and alternative, because he likes the idea of sleeping with lots of women instead of just his wife, and that makes him cool and different.

Well, no, it doesn't. I'm not necessarily judging him for who he wants to sleep with, but I judge him for thinking he's somehow breaking the usual pattern. He's not, because underlying what he does is the same old 'men need sex' message.

It is very hard to talk about men and sex without backing up that same old story. It's why men being impotent is a personal tragedy, whereas every few months some poor woman on here will post about how she hasn't really fancied sex for a while and it huts her but her DH, well, he just needs it doesn't he?

I firmly believe there is far more to it than 'men need sex'. But you're right, that probably the best way to get away from that idea is to research other things - like women and sex.

Sorry, I'm not wanting to put you down... just heard it a few too many times - usually from men trying to defend their porn, lechery and rape myths.

That's true, it would be good to hear more about women's sexuality.

I didn't know it was a cliche, I'm sorry - I've not come across it much except in the dodgy, Pamela Stephenson-esque forms (which to me don't seem like anything but more of the same rubbish, so I don't count them).

"I do not believe for one minute male sexuality is as one-dimensional as we're led to believe."

Y'know what? I feel like even that is a cliche too: I am fed up of hearing about how, in spite of the mainstream view, there's a subtle, multi-faceted nature of male sexuality with diverse manifestations.... YAWN!

The only refreshing thing would be to hear about something other than male sexuality - maybe women's sexuality, for example.

In a perfect feminist utopia, I wouldn't care if people wanted to research erections. In this world, yup, I agree with you, it's time (and past time) to do something else!

I disagree male sexuality has really been researched though - I bet there is lots that never gets looked at because it doesn't fit the patterns of what researchers think. I do not believe for one minute male sexuality is as one-dimensional as we're led to believe.

LRD "Not that people shouldn't research male erections"

TBH I don't really think there is any call for research into male erections. Google probably has all the statistical data you could possibly ever need/want.

Men are falling over themselves to find reasons to research their erections, and although there really is pretty much zero call for it, they still tie their daft hypotheses in knots to find excuses to fund each other to do it. There really is no area of male sexuality that has been left unchartered. The world is totally over-exposed to male sexuality and male sexual preferences and it is b.o.r.i.n.g.

Naturally.

It did occur to me afterwards.

Am I permitted a slight snigger at the scale of male erections? :o

(Not that people shouldn't research male erections, I mean ... it's the scale of it.)

That does annoy me too, food - research into male erections. At the moment is it pretty hard to get research funding, and people have to justify very thoroughly why their research is really important to society, and not just of academic value (I'm not very sold on this, but that's another story). Some things, you feel really cross wondering what they bumped off the funding list in favour of this.

I don't want to judge this one study too harshly, as it could just be a sub-par paper in a study that's good overall, but it's worth knowing about it all the same, IMO.

"I'm buggered if I can understand why this bt of research is causing all this defensiveness, seems fairly innocuous stuff."

Whenever there is a seemingly 'fairly innocuous' bit of socio (biological) research touching on 'sex' and 'race' - it is usually underpinned by racism and misogyny, because the educational economic climate, society and perspective from which it was conceived and funded is a patriarchal, white-dominated status quo underpinned by misogyny and racism.

As a feminist critic of white supremacy and patriarchy, it would be foolish to take a cursory glance at such a study into these things, say 'seems fairly innocuous' and leave it at that, given the history of how dodgy anthropology and science has had a very real impact, reinforcing peoples prejudice, upholding stereotypes, and leading from minor to appalling human rights abuses in the real world.

[And in addition, I f*cking hate all this 'science of what gives men a hard-on' - it seems like there's a will to put all that time wasted on masturbating over images of random women who've been reduced to the sum of their parts to good use and call it scientific research.]

It's just like if the beeb published a story headlined 'researchers discover the world is flat' - I'd want to go and look at the paper and wonder what was going on!

I don't know that research (thanks for the rec), but what I'm objecting to is that this paper has some errors, not what it's conclusions are, and the beeb then magnifies those.

Of course, I wouldn't have looked for those if I'd not been curious to see whether it were good research or not, but I can't say I'm hugely surprised to find things like that generalization of 'man' to 'human' between paper and abstract ... there is a fairly strong track record of people doing bad research in this area.

I think that is pretty important, because research does affect how people see things and eventually, lots of it filters into general knowledge. So it matters to look at it and see not only what it claims, but also how it claims that and what its details are.

To me this is of of the same nature as that research that showed when women are in oestrus we prefer alpha males (and get more of our kit off) and in the downcycle prefer homely men (and sensible dresses).

Its also predicted by the bio-theories, directionally correct, no doubt upsets a few people of various "strong nurture" or "-ist" persuasions but its hardly earth shattering stuff.

I don't know about defensive (I don't feel as if I'm defending something) - I just think it does not look very good, is all. And the beeb has picked it up and run with it, generalizing it to a point where it's pretty unhelpful.

It does, to me, come across as plain bizarre the way halfway through the paper, having said they'll exclude ethnicity as a factor, they suddenly comment on how this is just like the Zulus. It just seems odd and not remotely scientific.

Picking holes in research is what it's there for - I bet the authors and their colleagues will be doing the same at a much higher level, so where's the harm?

The premise of the study is wrong. It shouldn't be from this narrow racist, misogynist 'othering' perspective

I'm buggered if I can understand why this bt of research is causing all this defensiveness, seems fairly innocuous stuff.

Absolutely.

LRD "I don't think you could separate out what's fashionable to find attractive, and what people 'actually' find attractive - there's no such thing as a human who's grown up not influenced by society, and if you could produce such a thing, he or she would still be an anomaly not a control, because humans are social creatures and depend on interaction with other humans.

I think it's the beeb pretending this study is somehow telling us something objective about male desire/female attractiveness, rather than the authors, but it's still annoying."

The reason they conflate these two, is because if they don't, it exposes the study for the time/money-wasting ,pointless non-science that it is i.e.:

"A study into the influence of stress upon how much men buy into the currently fashionable female appearance"

...mmm... like anyone f*cking cares?...