Stressed men fancy bigger women....

Well that's three minutes of mi life l'll never get back .

Thanks for linking to it, SQ, it was interesting to read and think about.

Yes, I agree. 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.

I had a bit of a 'hmm' about the ethnicity references too - esp. the Zulu one, that was peculiar.

To expand on my last post. This study is about what it is fashionable to find attractive, not what people actually find attractive. So I don't actually know what scientific good it can do to have a study founded on a dodgy premise like that.

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

'Why do foreigners like fat birds?'

but:

'Why do white men like skinny women?'

Therein the truth of the socio-economic conditioning of sexual preference can be found.

This idea that ancient figurines of corpulent women is about attractiveness is also very prejudiced and unscientific. Surely those figurines, like most others are to do with protection and hope in an uncertain world - protection from starvation, etc. The idea that people sat around carving them some celebrity culture idols because they fancied them, shows a total inability to think outside the box of the socio-economic box.

I mean come on, people don't change their actual preferences just because some coke-fuelled twerps with delusions of shaman status pontificate in their isolated bubbles before announcing to the world 'next seasons colours are', 'the look to go for is', etc - eg- 'fashion'. People seek to fit in with fashion, and what they associate with wealth and status are influenced by fashion, but what they deep-down find attractive has absolutely bugger-all to do with it.

Sorry, I should be clearer. Saying 'Given there is a range of "larger" women, men have clearly selected for them' doesn't follow. There could be umpteen dozen reasons why there's a range of 'larger' women, and we can't know whether or not they're around because men select for them or not.

From a biological POV, also, you can't look at one side of genetic inheritance (the women men select) and expect that to explain why larger women exist - partly because women's body shapes are influenced by all the relevant genetic info, not just the mother's side, and partly because body shape isn't entirely genetic, it's also environmental.

'Evolutionary biology/ Sociobiology is pretty clear on this - men get the female shape today that they have selected over the last N generations (and vice versa). Given there is a range of "larger" women, men have clearly selected for them. '

Sorry, I don't follow the logic there, it doesn't make sense. That's not how biology works.

myinner - I think they already have come up with cliched conclusions in the beeb article.

trills - I don't know, I think increasingly lots of young women are interested, aren't they?

I know it does, but I sometimes wonder at the possbile relevance of it in society today, and in the practicalities of real day to day life. What do they propose will be the useful outcome of this research?

I would feel more positive if they diverted resources into understanding more effective forms of stress relief and recovery. We use the same stress techniques as our ancestors who faced real and life threatening forms of danger in our day to day lives. As stress is a constant background in our environment (unlike our ancestors) we find it hard to turn off the tap on this mechanism as we live with daily underlying stresses.

It manifests itself in all sorts of health problems. I'd rather they open up understanding on this, than tell us something that isn't really going to change our daily lives.

And as usual it doesn't relate at all to real life in this century, where there is a Benji's sandwich shop on every corner and even the homeless don't starve

It takes longer than a few years of Benji sandwiches for evolutionary choice to cut in :)

In an equivalent test with women looking at men, you'd have to take the stage of their menstrual cycle into account (differences in attraction at different stages of cycle are well-documented)

Good point.

That also reminds me of all the hoo-haa when teh research came out that said women in their cycle wore less, and marries women out without partners even less....

This is interesting, because it's possible the men's own body sizes would affect their preferences.

I agree that this could be a factor and should be matched between the control and experimental groups.

In an equivalent test with women looking at men, you'd have to take the stage of their menstrual cycle into account (differences in attraction at different stages of cycle are well-documented), and when you start asking questions like that it becomes a bit more difficult to easily and cheaply recruit participants!

I think they will try and draw the usual cliche conclusions based on our early ancestors where stress arose from situations of danger and survival, and formulate either:

a: that if a woman looks "well fed" then the man feels there is less pressure on him to go out for days hunting down enough animals to feed her

b: that said well fed woman might be an excellent "gatherer" and self sufficient and therefore the pressure to cull that woolly mammoth again isn't so steep

c: it will be linked to fertility in some way. (And we aren't talking about the morbidly obese here, versus the anorexic just a slightly more padded female)So there is probably some inner instinct to know that someone with some fat reserves laid down may be more fertile, and easier to impregnate in times of danger blah blah....

And as usual it doesn't relate at all to real life in this century, where there is a Benji's sandwich shop on every corner and even the homeless don't starve.

But I can already picture the Daily Mail article......

I was wondering because there seems to be this very common narrative that if a man goes for a bigger woman, he's somehow 'settling', as if her being big is some kind of major drawback, or evidence he has 'weird taste'.

Evolutionary biology/ Sociobiology is pretty clear on this - men get the female shape today that they have selected over the last N generations (and vice versa). Given there is a range of "larger" women, men have clearly selected for them.

I suspect one of the reasons that fashion likes waifs is that couture designers are not "in the market" for women, as it were.

That said, all the studeis I have seen show women getting slimmer as societies get wealthier (ie fat storage becomes worth less as a sign of reproductive fitness)

Well, it is, isn't it? Stressful.

I was wondering because there seems to be this very common narrative that if a man goes for a bigger woman, he's somehow 'settling', as if her being big is some kind of major drawback, or evidence he has 'weird taste'. I have a friend who's married to a larger lady and he gets so fed up with these comments. I get far less of the same about DH - no-one seems to assume that I must be odd to marry a fat bloke, they just assume women don't care so much.

I think it'd be interesting to see how some of these social narratives factor into it all, instead of doing what that study did and making rather random comparisons with Zulu society (which they did and which made me a bit puzzled).

I wonder if it's possible stressed men, or stressed people, are just, well, not very picky?

Not only stressed men, unless male life is permanently stressful :)

Yes, I thought the fact the range of women they liked expanded was easily as interesting as the conclusion the beeb headlined.

I wonder if it's possible stressed men, or stressed people, are just, well, not very picky?

Oh, no, it was helpful, I just wasn't initially sure it was the same study or another one you meant. I was just clarifying they're the same thing.

whatme - noo, science can always be better!

It's not that it conflicts with my belief system - it's that there are drawbacks in the method and the conclusions. Lots of these they acknowledge in the main study - the problem is they've been generalized and no mention is made of those drawbacks in the media version, which is the one that people will see.

It's fascinating that it's the size issue, men 'preferring bigger women', not the expansion of the range men prefer upwards in BMI, so men 'preferring a wider range of women', that's been picked up on

Blows the entire "Size Zero" and Glamour industry to shreds - its the lamentations of a million couture designers and supermodels :o

My apologies: I thought it would be helpful to link directly to the study. Clearly not.

That is really dodgy, both as science and, obviously, from a feminist perspective. They are assuming men's views are default, without studying them

I think the science is "as good as you'll get" in these situations, by fairly sound people at fairly sound institutions and (as far as i can see) no undercover paid-for agenda.

They did a study, these are the results. If you don't agree with them give reasons, just because it conflicts with your belief system doesn't make it wrong.

Someone clearly should do a study of the reverse effect on women, but that wasn't this study.

Going through the main study - I'm just picking out things that struck me as off, so this isn't intended to be especially even-handed. And I'm not saying these are necessarily things the authors didn't accept (they explicitly accept some of them), but they might change how far we take their conclusions:

• They're looking at a very particular group of men, specifically white British undergraduates between 18 and 42, which is interesting. They accept 'ethnicity' as a possible influence, so exclude other ethnicities.

• Their test group has a substantially heavier top limit for the men's own BMIs than the control - the test group ranged from 17.15 (just slightly under normal), to 31.64, which is into the obese range. The control group, OTOH, ranged from 16.53 (underweight) to only 27.76 (overweight). Since the standard distribution of BMI in both groups is the same, these are significant differences between the two groups.

This is interesting, because it's possible the men's own body sizes would affect their preferences. They reckon they discounted BMI by finding no significant differences across the groups, but I'm curious about this one - I wonder what another study focussing on the BMI of men would show? Here, I'm thinking it's interesting they want to discount this factor in the men, whereas they want to focus on it in the women - methodologically, why would they choose to do it that way around? (I mean, I know why, but it's interesting to look at which experiments get done, as well as how they're done).

Interesting point not flagged up in the BBC article - the stressed men not only preferred bigger women, they preferred a wider range of women to the control group.

They point out their study's limitations - they had the control group sit around doing nothing while the test group were being stressed, so maybe the control group's boredom accounts for something too.

My feeling is, while this study has some methodological drawbacks (largely much acknowledged by the authors), the main problem is they push their conclusions far beyond what the study can show, and their abstract makes a pretty unforgiveable generalization from men's responses to 'human' responses. It's not replicated in the article but it's dodgy. The BBC then generalizes it further.

It's fascinating that it's the size issue, men 'preferring bigger women', not the expansion of the range men prefer upwards in BMI, so men 'preferring a wider range of women', that's been picked up on.

It's linked to in the OP? On the BBC website?

I don't know two of the universities but Newcastle is certainly respectable.

I stand by the idea they're pushing conclusions to the BBC to up their impact rating, too. Otherwise, why do it? And why make such sweeping conclusions about 'human' attractiveness judgements?

Either they're bad scientists, or they're good scientists selling out (which might be understandable given the situation, but doesn't make it good), or they are simply so sexist they don't understand why using men as a default and generalizing to 'humans' is wrong.

Here is the actual study.

I've no idea of the standing of the authors or this journal, but it's work done in psychology departments of respectable universities as part of a suite of studies of "why do people find others attractive". It had no special funding, so appears to be just normal collaborative work (updating previous work in the area described as "archival").

Just looking at the abstract at the moment for some initial impressions:

Pros:

It's not a tiny sample

Cons:

41 test subjects and 40 controls, though not ridiculously small, is quite a small group really.

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

They get mega negative points for concluding, in a study focussed entirely on men looking at women:

"These results indicate that human attractiveness judgements are sensitive to variations in local ecologies and reflect adaptive strategies for dealing with changing environmental conditions" (italics mine).

That is really dodgy, both as science and, obviously, from a feminist perspective. They are assuming men's views are default, without studying them.

Oh, sure, I agree, it's good to discuss.

I don't think anyone should censor things ... not sure what you mean by 'the Western mind' though?

Obviously, yes, samples can be used as representative of a larger population, but you'd have to have a population that are all of one homogeneous culture, I think, before it was accurate.

So I'm not suggesting this sample isn't represenative of the society from which the test participants were taken - it might well be - but it only tells us about that society, it doesn't mean it's true in general.