From the Herald today:
Overweight women tend to end up with lower-quality mates - but excess kilos are no disadvantage for men, a psychologist has found.
Dr Alice Boyes, a New Zealander who returned from Britain six months ago to rejoin her partner in Christchurch, says heavier women pair with men who give themselves low ratings on scales of "attractiveness/vitality" and "status/resources".
But men's weight makes no statistically significant difference to their partners' ratings of themselves on any of the three scales used - attractiveness/vitality, status/resources and warmth/trustworthiness.
"For women the standards are much more restrictive," Dr Boyes said yesterday.
"A woman with a wee bit of a round tummy might be judged negatively. There is a bit of a bias there."
Click through for the whole article.
4 comments:
well, there's a lot to unpack in those findings! if we accept that women are constantly bombarded with messages telling them that skinny is good, then it stands to reason that those falling further away from skinny are likely to feel crap about their appearances, which is hardly going to be conducive to them being happy in themselves and therefore able to be happy in their relationships. likewise, men are, to a certain extent, given the message that if they are of a high status then they need to have a conventionally attractive armpiece to display to others - again, if they fail in this respect then it's possible it will affect their self-esteem, whether or not they themselves find their partner attractive. this article seems like yet another shallow attempt at fat-bashing women without thinking about any of the deeper issues. hardly surprising from the herald, but i hope the phd itself is more thoughtful, as it's a fascinating subject.
I'm stuck on why The Herald thought this was needed in the second paragraph:
Dr Alice Boyes, a New Zealander who returned from Britain six months ago to rejoin her partner in Christchurch
Hef, I deleted you because you're a pitiful dickhead. Please refer to the comments policy.
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