To think Lad Mags aren't the real problem

[Mengog]

Over the last couple of years feminist groups and others have really doubled down on the campaigns against Lads Mags and Page 3.

Yet time and again I'm more shocked at the gossip Mags. This was sparked off by a headline about Cheryl Cole, calling her "a bag of bones" on Heat or something similar.

Not too long ago the front of FHM featured Kelly Brook on the cover with the headline 'Beautiful'. This was next to a gossip mag calling her "Fat".

AIBU to think the wrong magazines have been targeted?

I think arguing about free press and whatnot is absolutely redundant. Canny business people in all fields, media and otherwise, see what people respond to and sell them that.

The question is, why do women respond to endless guff about looks?

Eh, perhaps because for hundreds of years the only commodity a woman had was her looks and so "female" culture has been built on competition around looks and attractiveness and hasn't developed away from that yet, seeing as we were only freed from servitude less than 100 years ago?

Before i lost weight i was insulted and abused in the street by men on a regular basis.

I really dont think they had been reading Grazia or Closer. (although i cant stand these mags)

I have found (at least in RL ) that im treated better by women.

I say RL because the weight shaming threads that appear on this board have really shaken my belief that women always treat each other better.

Since the weight loss ive had compliments from men but women keep asking me if im going to lose any more. Men dont.

I agree the banning argument introduces a false binary.

To make a comparison: would the 'choice' people on this thread be very happy to say 'well, those teenage girls choose to have FGM done, and we must just keep remembering it's banned, so the problem really shouldn't exist'?

Obviously, that would be absurd. And yes, obviously, crappy magazines are in no way comparable to FGM. But choice, and prohibition, work in precisely the same ways.

The thing that needs to change is wider society. By saying 'oh but it's choice' or 'but do you mean we should ban it', you're accepting the premise that we're stuck between a rock and a hard place, and society will never change. I don't believe that.

The question is, why do women respond to endless guff about looks?
Because 10 thousand years of evolution has shown that men select partners based primarily on visual signals that they are healthy fertile mates. Its not rocket science, and we have not 'evolved' as animals away from natural human instinct, despite what some interest groups would have us believe.

More like 200,00 years of evolution (being pedantic)
You are correct that men select partners based on visual signals, hence the massive emphasis on appearance.

I agree that that is one influence, Ellie. But there are huge and complex webs of cultural factors (memes, if you like that language) which have taken the whole "looks" arena way beyond direct fertility factors.

(e.g., in many instances, women end up competing with each other to look far thinner than is optimal fertility-wise, and way thinner than is attractive to the average man).

I have found.. that im treated better by women.
Women tend to compare other women to themselves and make judgement calls as to whether they are more or less attractive than them. More or less of a mate. After an initial dismissal out of the elderly and the young, they compare. They tend to be catty, even if it is internalised and not vocalised.

Men do exactly the same thing. They compare other men's prowess, apparent wealth, apparent power, and level of confidence, with their own, immediately dismissing those excessively powerful and wealthy, and those with no confidence, as not being a threat.

I don't mind admitting that I assess men on the quality of his clothes, that specific manner of his dress, his demeanour and his purpose, and I have no issue with him assessing me on the size of my breasts, the shape of my hips, or the openness of my smile. Its how human beings have existed on this planet for millennia, and it is not going to change because some people believe that 'we should be intelligent enough to evolve beyond that'.

Pretending that we now control human existence is the same as pretending we are the centre of the universe and everything revolves around us. It is blatantly not so, but it is fun watching people dedicating their lives to trying to break the human condition.

I haven't found where anyone's saying that we need to deny basic factors affecting attractiveness, Ellie (although I haven't RTwholeFT). It's just that they form one set of factors among many.

All the judgments (of sexual attractiveness) you're talking about clearly do happen, and much of it happens before we're even aware of it. But there are also huge cultural overlays. These are incredibly complex and are probably the product of many, many human influences as well as random factors.
If there is one single "human condition", why is there so much cultural variation across the world, and over time?

But, ellie, men haven't evolved to select women based on blue eyeshadow (in the 80s) and a smoky eyeliner (in 2008).

And women select men, too - but we don't find men's magazines working on the same premise.

Evopsych types have tried very hard to argue that we can see all contemporary fashions as matters of 'evolution' over millenia, but all they have done is to make themselves look like fools who've never studied history. I'm thinking especially of the ridiculous 'scientific' study that concluded women are 'evolved' to like pink, because 'berries are pink' and so women in gathering sections of hunter-gatherer society became attuned to the colour.

The same kind of shoddy research would argue that men are 'evolved' to like slim, big breasted blonde women, because a wide hip/waist ratio suggests fertility, or breasts indicate good ability to breastfeed, or blondeness suggests youth (particularly disturbing implications, there). You can then feed that into your analysis of a women's mag and say wow, look, it's purely evolutionary that we women need to think these women are pretty! Of course!

Neatly avoiding about a hundred quibbles, but my favourite one is pondering out how on earth the authors of these studies imagine people who are not white have ever managed to procreate.

Jeanne, are you denying that there are any influences of male preferences for certain types of (fertility-related) physical attributes on the development of lads mag images? Or just that these things don't adequately explain the whole culture surrounding these? The latter seems very reasonable. But writing off all the research itself as "shoddy" based on the dubious over-generalisation of implications seems to be going too far.

There is good evidence that a large proportion of men find certain attributes (an approx 0.7 waist-hip ratio is an obvious one) more attractive than other attributes (e.g., a waist-hip ratio > 1).
This is true, and interesting, and explains certain things, but is entirely inadequate to explain or justify lads mag culture (or much else at a cultural level).

I thought the "blondes" research was actually an April Fool. (I could be mis-remembering, however; a hell of a lot of evo-psych theory comes across as though it could be an April Fools joke. I always think of it as a curious intersection between pseudo science and just-so stories).

fine, I was thinking of the latter point primarily. But no, I do think the research is shoddy. You cannot claim that we have evolved to do x, if x is in fact not a historically prominent fashion but a very recent phenomenon.

The waist-hip ratio thing is really dubious too - studies cannot exclude the fact we're told these things are attractive, so it is impossible to tell whether we're studying nature or nurture. However, we can look at the variation across race and, to some extent, time, and conclude that it is vanishingly unlikely that we have evolved to prefer such a narrow range of traits.

lurcio - no, not an April Fool. Annoyingly.

www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(09)00088-9/abstract

There are certainly cross-cultural variations in what's considered attractive. The fact that it's not set in stone is perfectly compatible with there being plenty of evolutionary influences (which are then culturally/socially/randomly shaped for individuals). There are some preferences, however, which appear relatively stable across time and place. Some of these make good sense evolutionarily.

But no, I do think the research is shoddy. You cannot claim that we have evolved to do x, if x is in fact not a historically prominent fashion but a very recent phenomenon.
Hmm, perhaps we're using the word "research" differently. Sounds like you primarily have a problem with the over-interpretation of the data. I think it's often very reasonable to hypothesise, as opposed to "claim", that the process of evolution has shaped certain human behaviours, including many related to sexual attraction.

Ok, so that study is talking about the waist-hip ratio for 'healthy Caucasian women'.

It then refers to a really problematic study, where someone showed three line drawings of thin, fat, and 'normal' women and asked men to rate which was the most attractive (so we're not even looking at actual women's bodies, but at a representation - and there is a reasonable case to be argued that people relate quite differently to representations, which they understand to be idealised constructs, and to reality).

It then notes that this study hit some issues with non-Western, non-Caucasian respondents. So they tried to see if the results could be generalised.

Their actual main research is based on ten women, before and after surgery to change their body types. These photos were photoshopped to hide surgery scars. Then, they showed the photos to four groups of men of different ethnicities, who all preferred the post-op images.

I can't help feeling this is not just scientifically insubstantial (ten women!), but also morally pretty dubious. Also, if this is about evolution, isn't testing on women who've undergone surgery - something we can hardly have evolved to 'prefer' deeply flawed?

Cross post.

Yes, we may be using the term differently. But this isn't just about over-interpretation: in order for research to be valid, it must be investigating what it claims to be investigating. The problem is with a poor hypothesis at the start, not a poor interpretation at the end (although that is a worry too). If you begin on shaky foundations (eg. 'women have always liked pink'), you will end up with research no one can trust.

It seems to me we have disparate ideologies at play. We have those advocating a world in which women are freed of the burden of concerns about their appearance and their perceptions of how they believe others are judging them, and we have those who see the world very much as it is at present. I'm sure there is plenty of nuance and differing opinion as well.

But these are ideologies nonetheless. They are not real. They are a desire in some to make them real, and to sell their utopia to the rest of us.

We all know that the world will not change the way it works. We all know that we will not alter our instincts or our rate of evolution. We merely follow the likely course of fashion in our own little pockets of the world.

Personally, I have no time to explore ideals, noble as they may be. The mechanics interest me, so I do a little light reading.

The fact is that women weren't allowed to amass wealth or power. Women were only allowed to attract a mate with looks and 'womanly' talents. So how can we know what men were historically attracted to? It's not like they had much of a choice is it?

The problem is with a poor hypothesis at the start
Agreed. And, yes, there are some problems with this specific study. There is, in my understanding (and I'll admit it's not my area), converging evidence from a number of other studies, though.
I do think that if you start with a hypothesis of "some specific, measurable physical attributes are generally more sexually attractive to men than others", there is decent supportive evidence. You can also find good support for the contention that some of these same physical attributes are correlated with fertility. Then, if you assume that genes contributing to behaviours which increase fertility tend to increase in frequency within a population by virtue of being passed on at a greater rate (also backed by evidence), you have a reasonable argument for evolutionary development of certain elements of sexual attraction.

However, none of these things justifies or explains the ridiculous focus on female appearance in our (and many other) culture(s). In fact, I think it's important that we're clear that, even if we accept many of the evolutionary psychology arguments, this focus on physical appearance is a load of harmful bollocks. It's a really small part of the the whole situation.

ellie, I agree we come at the question with differing ideologies, but I don't follow what you mean when you say an ideology is not real. Obviously it's not - almost by definition.

That does not mean that ideologies don't provide a pattern for action, does it? Of course the world can, and does, change.

Ideology is behind what the current government is doing; it was being the legalisation of equal marriage; it was behind laws criminalising marital rape. You may think some or all of those ideologies are flawed or dangerous, but there's no doubting they've changed the world, surely?

Cross post.

YY, agree, the focus on physical appearance is a load of harmful bollocks.

I have to admit, I've never seen an evo psych study that didn't turn out to look like nonsense. I believe they may exist - but an awful lot of what is published in the popular media as 'scientific evidence' is pretty similar to the study you linked to - superficially interesting, but very, very flawed.