Stressed men fancy bigger women....

[SardineQueen]

Can anyone explain to me what a useful purpose of this study might be?

BBC

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)

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......

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!

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....

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.

'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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Very interesting posts thanks everyone. Some of them help me understand very well my discomfort reading the BBC piece.

I found LRD's points about the differences in sizes between the control and study group, and the ethnicity, very pertinent.

Foodunit your last 2 posts also sum it up for me.

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

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

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?...

Absolutely.

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.

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?

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 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.

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'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.]

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.

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

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

Naturally.

It did occur to me afterwards.