"Researchers set up four situations to see what men find hot; two variables made the guys feel financially insecure while the other two variables tested them when they were physically hungry. The men who felt financially insecure chose women who were about two pounds heavier than those chosen by men who felt financially stable. And hungry guys tended to go for women who were about three pounds heavier than those chosen by men who were full."
Further musings on the recession. Click here for the full story
hahaha! Excellent! I've no idea how they set up these 'variables', but anything that increases my chances of pulling is jolly good.
About horses
17 hours ago
22 comments:
How are you going to work this though? Lock the men in a well in the basement while you fatten yourself up?
Bless your heart, GSE. I'm already fairly well padded, I'm hoping the current state of the economy will sort out the men for hunger and feelings of financial insecurity...
Start using perfumes, shampoos and moisturisers that smell like cake.
well, it has long been known that men respond well to vanillic scents.
Or vanillary ones as Marsha Klein would have it.
It's much simpler than that:
Man feels financialy secure, man has much higher self-worth, man feels capable of pulling a skinny girl.
On the other hand, man feels financially insecure, man has feelings of low self-worth, man thinks he can't get a skinny girl, so sets his sights lower.
Man feels hungry, man sees chunky-chick, man thinks "I bet she knows how to cook up a good feed, maybe if I chat her up she'll make me some dinner."We are, as I'm sure you'll agree, simple creatures.
Mmm, cake - do you know any perfumes that smell specifically like cake? I think we have found a gap in the market!
Vanillary? Nobody told me! I would have been dousing myself in the Body Shop Vanilla scent, had I known.
LC 'feels capable of pulling a skinny girl...' 'so sets his sights lower...' so much wrongness, where to start?
... um, because men can't afford to switch the heating on, they'll snuggle up to a big lass on the sofa instead?
I have a weakness for that Body Shop stuff, and have since I was a teen. I can't really do a control experiment about its efficacy though.
The whole man-attraction thing only struck me at one point several years ago when I was using vanilla scent, cocoabutter moisturiser, almond something or other and I think a shampoo that was supposed to smell of cookies. I thought the food/cosmetics thing was for women ("guilt-free" indulgence) but now I wonder.
(Also, I gave up on Lulu after someone told me it smelled like grandmothers. I was thinking Brooksie, but there you go).
Mmmm... Vanilla.
Oh come on, take the bait! You're no fun any more.
:(
Betty, ha!
B, I am intrigued, I'm going to take a poll of all the men I know.
See? Billy likes vanilla. But does it say Sex to you, Billy, or does it say Cake Flavouring?
LC – ha! Okay then, right now I have nicotine withdrawal and am grouchy enough to take the bait – why should skinny be preferred over fat? Why should skinny have a higher status as arm candy, or be more fanciable? Why can’t men fancy women whatever shape they are? Only cause they’re slaves to propaganda, my friend, if they were in any other culture apart from this stupid last gasp decadent corrupt Western one, the skinny (pre-pubescent boy-like, hmm) figure wouldn’t be considered the only desirable one. I fully agree that you are simple creatures, though.
(I didn’t really take this study seriously you know, it’s preposterous, like something out of Bad Science.)
I've seen other research somewhere that says that men AND women tend to go for partners with roughly the same BMI. I've no doubt that similar research on women would reveal more or less the same results, for exactly the same reasons that LC states.
>>Why can’t men fancy women whatever shape they are?
Coz thousands of years of Darwinian evolution have driven us to seek out partners who are physically fit in order to produce offspring which stand the greatest chance of survival, so, broadly speaking, most people are attracted to members of the opposite sex who have athletic, or at least healthy, physiques, rather than those who are overweight and unfit. Probably.
However, as Del alludes to, in the real world we can't always get the person we find most attractive, and studies have shown that people tend to pair off with partners of roughly equal attractiveness. This doesn't necessarily mean of equal physical attractiveness, however, since women tend to view wealthy men as more attractive than poor men (again, probably because they can ensure greater survival prospects for their offspring) it would not be uncommon for a physically unattractive yet financially wealthy man to pair off with a woman who is considerably more physically attractive than him.
Oh, the reductive old cavemen argument gets wheeled out again - if that's so, cleverclogs, you wouldn't be attracted to skinny women, (as they would have snuffed it when you failed to bring home enough meat from the hunt to survive over the long cold winters sitting around in your caves.) You'd be going for the chunky chick with reserves of flesh to keep going and not die in childhbirth because their hips were too narrow. Probably. So nurr.
I love arguments that begin 'research says'. You can always dig up some science study somewhere to support the most flaky argument. Victorian scientific research used to say that bigger brains meant greater intellegence, until it was found that the biggest brains belonged to African women, so they changed that theory sharpish...
Er, intelligence. *blushes*
There's a difference between 'enough reserves to survive the winter' and 'too fat to escape from anything faster than an enraged sheep'.
You can blame the phalocentric hedgemonkey controlled media for dictating what we find attractive all you like, but ultimately all you're trying to do is replace the currently accepted view of 'beauty' with one that more closely matches your own agenda (i.e. an ideal of beauty that doesn't require people to make any effort to eat healthily and excercise regularly) and I personally think that evolution is a much more powerful force than FHM or Cosmo.
As far as the hips thing goes - the hip to waist ratio is one of the key factors governing female physical attractiveness (at least, I read that in one of those horrid studies where people try to learn things by conducting controlled research) - so as it turns out, boys ARE attracted to women with child bearing hips, whatever you may think.
(I should really think about doing some work today...)
LC - actually, the hip-to-waist thing isn't a universal. There's a tribe somewhere that thinks women with skinny waists must have had diarrhoea and are therefore not attractive mates.
I know it sounds like I made that up, but I really did read it somewhere, and wish I'd written down the reference.
Plus the definition of "curvy" changes. Greek lady statues are not the same shape as Marilyn Monroe, and Marilyn Monroe ain't built like Pamela Anderson.
Evolution, eh? Evolutionary psychologists fling evolution in your face like Christian fundamentalists say 'because Jesus...' - thus endeth their argument - often to justify cultural prejudices without looking very closely at them...It's just Natural, innit, it's just Nature, we're all just Animals... It's curious how 'nature' and 'evolution' changes throughout history, often in tandem with changes in culture, don't you think?
'an ideal of beauty that doesn't require people to make any effort to eat healthily and exercise regularly' - so skinny means that you exercise regularly and eat healthily? Poppycock. And might I say, balderdash.
I think we've been through the men and women and money argument before - let me say it again NO WOMAN I'VE EVER MET HAS EVER GONE FOR A BLOKE WITH MONEY - in fact, they've usually gone for the starving artist who they have to bail out. How does 'evolution' explain that, eh?
'controlled research' yes, highly controlled. You've got to take scientific studies with a pinch of salt because they often contradict your own experience or have a transparent agenda, seeming to seek to prove rather than disprove - an awful lot of Bad Science floating about out there.
For what it's worth, I don't think most men have an ideal shape in mind when they fancy someone, I think what I'm arguing is not just an apology for, ahem, curvy ladies - and there's much more variety in how men and women get attracted in the real world which exists outside the media. Thank the lord.
Happy now I took the bait?
B, yes exactly and if we were in Tonga or somewhere we wouldn't be having this debate.
So your argument, essentially, boils down to:
Women choose their partners purely on the basis of personality – ignoring physical and practical considerations because, contrary to everything we have learned about natural selection, evolutionary pressures have no influence on sexual selection.
Men, however, are too influenced by the media* in deciding what they find attractive (presumably because we are too stupid to be able to make our own minds up, like you girls can) and therefore need to be re-educated in order to make correct decisions.
*The media, which for reasons as yet to be explained, is engaged in some sort of sinister campaign to trick men into lusting after the wrong kind of women (rather than simply publishing pictures of the kind of women men are naturally attracted to in order to sell more copies and make more money).
Women choose their partners purely on the basis of personality - nope, they just don't go for purely skinny, or purely beefcake, or purely money because JUST LIKE MEN, they are more complex than a simplistic behaviouralist model would allow them to be. In my experience.
'Evolutionary pressures' are open to interpretation - as I'm trying to explain, what's explained as 'nature' and 'natural' behaviour changes along with the changes in our culture - in the last century, for example, skinny was not privileged as it is now. It's only fairly recently that skinny was equated with status and wealth, and not poverty and ill-health, for example. But I bet you a million that skinny girls (and boys) were still fancied - because people have different tastes and respond to individuals, not types, and we are attracted for a million different reasons. How does your insistence on evolution as the main human behavioural motivation explain homosexuality, for example? It's always been around, it doesn't promote the continuation of the species, how does 'nature' and 'evolution' account for it? I distrust a lot of evolutionary behaviouralists because anything they can't explain, they simply skip over...
"Men, however, are too influenced by the media* in deciding what they find attractive" - Yes you are, but I think women are just as influenced by the media (and are our own worst enemies, a lot of the time.) Plus a worldwide fashion and modelling industry that is largely influenced by men who fancy men and design clothes that only boyish figures can fit into... There's a lot of distortion in the media, come on, you know that, being in that industry and all - remember Kate Winslet announcing that Loaded or whoever had photoshopped someone else's legs onto her cover picture? And she's a perfectly fit, healthy, gorgeous, young woman as she is.
I do find the idea of re-education quite appealing though, can I be in charge of that?
And you are the one who brought up the skinny/fat thing, I think men are more forgiving or maybe less discerning than women. Except for you, you great big body-fascist.
Right, I must now do some work.
LC, do you write advertising copy by any chance?
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