Men from modern Western societies are more attracted to heavier women when they're hungry, and to thinner women when they're full. I heard this fascinating tidbit
during a lecture by a Terry Sejnowski, a neuroscience researcher, and turned it over in my head for a few days. I asked Malaya and the IG about it, but neither of them had any idea what it might mean, and I couldn't figure it out either. So I typed some notes about it, reminded myself to look into it later, and forgot about it.
This afternoon, while enjoying a brief hour on the computer (with parents in town and graduation events over the weekend, I've had very little time to surf/blog/work), I thought I should blog something, and when I saw this bit on my notes page, I did a quick search, and found some more information on the study. I knew nothing about it other than what Dr. Sejnowski said, and she made just a very brief mention of it during her speech.
Details:
Men in rich, Western countries tend to prefer thinner women, whereas men in poorer South Pacific countries tend to prefer bigger women. It’s been argued that this is due to cultural and ethnic differences, but increasingly psychologists now believe it has more to do with socioeconomics, so that men prefer bigger women when resources are scarce because a woman being bigger is an implicit sign that she’s got access to resources.
It's not a cultural thing, and it's not a racial thing. In the past white, Western men preferred heavier women; witness all of those "Reubenesque," thunder-thighed, pear-devouring fleshpots in art from Renaissance Europe. The difference was that in those times, the standard of living was lower, and more people were skinny and/or starving. Being fat, or even plump, was a sign of power and luxury, and it set you apart from the rest. You looked "better" in the eyes of people in that place and time, and you looked different.
Today in most Western cultures, certainly in Britain and the US, being not-fat is the unusual state, and it's what's desired culturally. It's impossible to say how much of that is media-driven and how much is scarcity and how much is genetic preference, but it's easy to see the result. Most men want thin women and most women feel bad about not being thin. A lot ties into this; men are visual creatures, men are genetically attracted to young, healthy women since their fertility is likely to be higher, we all see thin women working as models and movie stars, excessive fatty food is hard to avoid in our culture, etc. It's just how things are now. Or is it?
To test this idea further, Viren Swami and Martin Tovee asked 61 male undergraduates at a British University to rate the attractiveness of 50 differently-sized women as depicted in black and white photos. The women were either emaciated, underweight, normal, overweight or obese, according to their body mass index (the ratio of height to weight). They were dressed in identical grey leotards and their faces were obscured. The male participants were recruited as they were entering or exiting the university dining hall, and they rated whether they were hungry or full on a 7-point scale.
The researchers found that the hungrier participants rated heavier women as more attractive than the full participants did. The hungrier men’s ratings were also less affected by the women’s shape, as measured by their hip to waist ratio.
"Temporary affective states can produce individual variation in mate preferences that mirrors patterns of cultural differences", the researchers concluded.
This is obviously a very tentative result from a small study, but it's fascinating to consider the psychological issues behind this. Just checking into the reverse would be interesting. Anyone know some psych people working in like, a poor area of Vietnam? Or Ethopia? Would those men rate heavier/lighter women in the reverse of their current cultural norm? Prefer skinnier women when they were full?
There's no telling about that until further research is done, and the logic behind what those British men wanted is untested and unproven too. The study in question doesn't even seem to speculate about the "why." That's not going to stop me, of course. First off, I think we can rule out the men making a conscious decision about this issue. I don't think any man tells himself, "I'm hungry, so I want Anna Nicole Smith instead of Mary Kate Olsen." Furthermore, the scientists running the test couldn't have told the subjects what they were testing, or the controls would have been thrown of. I also think we can rule out cannibalism as a contributing factor to the male preferences. So what are we left with?
1) Men when hungry unconsciously associate a fleshy woman with their own desire to be full and not hungry.
2) Men when hungry are not thinking about sex as much as they normally would, so their normal attractions are skewed, and the results are simply randomized (thus leading to heavier preferred, since the women men usually prefer are pretty far down the BMI scale.)
3) Men when hungry think about being full and fat and want a woman who won't judge them for that, and they figure a fat one won't? (It would be interesting to see if the male preferences varied by the weight of the men; did fat guys and skinny guys have the same "when hungry" preferences?)
4) Men when hungry think about food and mom and cooking and there's an ingrained attraction to non-skinniness. "Never trust a skinny chef," as they say...
Most likely the answer is some combination of these reasons, and some other ones I've not yet thought of, but it's an interesting riddle to puzzle over.
Labels: obesity, psychology
