Lauren passed on this little item from the BBC: Study finds that hungry men prefer larger women.
A study of 61 male university students found those who were hungry were attracted to heavier women than those who were satiated.
The hungry men also paid much less attention to a woman’s body shape and regarded less curvy figures as more attractive.
The abstract of the study, published in the British Journal of Psychology, suggests that the researchers were trying to find out why male preferences for female body weight followed a consistent socio-economic pattern. You’d think general resource allocation had more to do with that than hunger qua hunger. After all, the heavier female ideal occurs in cultures where there is a lot of scarcity, and having a fleshy figure is a sign of prosperity and of having enough resources to feed oneself (as well as enough leisure not to have to work off all the calories one consumes). In cultures like ours, where not only is hunger not so widespread but the kinds of foods available to the poor are those that tend to pack on the pounds, the ideal is one of thinness — of the sort that can be achieved if one has plenty of leisure time to hit the gym and the resources to buy fresh foods.
In other words, the ideal across cultures has more to do with wealth; not only the wealth of the women themselves, but the wealth of their men. There’s a reason for arm candy.
What can be regarded as a normal and acceptable body size is also influenced by what we see, including advertising, and can change. For example, migrants from rural to urban societies show an increasing idealisation of thinner figures.
Dr Viren Swami from University College London and Dr Martin Tovée from Newcastle University believe there are biological factors at work too.
Dr Tovée explained: “Your cognitive state, your drives and your interests are dependent on your underlying physiology, your blood sugar levels and your hormone levels and these depend upon hunger.”
Except that those are transitory states, whereas cultural beauty standards are somewhat more constant. Not that they don’t change, of course — witness the shift in beauty standards from, say, Marilyn Monroe in the 50s to Twiggy in the 60s — but it takes more than a meal to make the difference.
And apparently, they didn’t test the same men both when hungry and when not hungry:
They recruited male university students as they entered or exited a campus dining hall during dinner time.
They asked the men to rate how hungry they were on a scale of one to seven. Using these responses, the researchers selected 30 hungry and 31 satiated men to take part in the study.
The men were then asked to rate the attractiveness of 50 women of varying weights, all within a healthy range, who had been photographed wearing tight grey leotards and leggings.
The hungry men rated more of the heavier women as attractive than the men who were full up.
It also doesn’t sound like they had a terribly wide selection of body types, if the weights of the women pictured were all “within a healthy range” as that is understood by the BMI-obsessed medical community.
Apparently, the researchers think that the findings are small but significant and might, given extrapolation (for instance, over time with many missed meals) could explain cultural shifts.
Maybe. But I think they’re getting closer to it when they discuss obesity and its class-relatedness:
The work could also help further our understanding of obesity, he said.
“A lot of what we are doing is looking at how flexible these representations of body size and shape are and the effect of environment. If you are growing up in an environment where you are seeing heavier body types, is this what you set your norm?
“We know that diet is related to social class and obesity tends to be class related too. So we are looking at how diet then impacts on your ideals and perceptions of what is a good or bad body shape.”
Maybe they ought not to discount the class issues.