How to Kill the Thin Ideal
If you watch TV, or read magazines, or go to the movies, or browse the internet, or walk down a street lined with billboards, then it can’t have escaped your attention that most of the people we see in the media are totally flipping gorgeous. There’s no doubt there are benefits to this — we all like looking at attractive people. It fires off the reward centres in our pathetically primitive monkey brains. But there’s also a well-publicised downside: we begin to think that Jessica Chastain and Channing Tatum are the norm. And if Hollywood stars and models are run of the mill, then where does that leave us, with our pizza faces, pancake chests, and cottage cheese backsides? Well, according to the research, it leaves it with body dissatisfaction and low self-esteem.
Women probably have it worse than men, because they’re judged more on their appearance. We know that exposure to thin models leads women to believe that thinness is more attractive, which makes them think their own bodies are less attractive by comparison. And the effect is stronger in women who watch more TV or read more fashion magazines.
Hardly the cheeriest news. But scientists at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and Florida State University in Tallahassee realised that where there’s a crisis there’s an opportunity. Maybe beliefs about thinness could be turned in the opposite direction if women were exposed to more positive ideas about bodies bigger than size zero.
Andrea Meltzer and James McNulty theorised that one reason heterosexual women might equate a thin body with attractiveness is because thin women in the media tend to be rewarded by men. Men pay more attention to, and are more affectionate towards, thin women. What if Meltzer and McNulty flipped the script, as it were, and told women that men prefer a lady with love handles?
What I like about this idea is that it doesn’t even involve deception. Men really are attracted to women larger than the so-called “thin ideal”. Studies show that when women and men are shown a spectrum of female bodies varying in weight and asked to choose the most attractive, men consistently go for heavier bodies than women do. Whether this is because women’s attractiveness radar has been made all screwy by Grazia magazine and America’s Next Top Model isn’t clear, but what is clear is that women don’t know what men want. Let’s see what happened when Meltzer and McNulty set them straight.
First, the scientists showed photographs of female models from a plus-sized shopping website to 74 heterosexual female students. It’s worth pointing out for listeners who don’t make a habit of browsing fashion websites that plus-sized doesn’t necessarily mean that the models were big as a house: just that they were bigger than the usual stick-thin models. In fact, they were about the size of the average undergraduate.
Half of the students — the experimental group — were told that the photographs were selected by men as the most attractive. The other half of the students — the control group — were simply told that the images were taken from advertisements: attractiveness wasn’t mentioned.
After sifting through the photos the students answered questions about how satisfied they were with their own weight. Meltzer and McNulty tested whether the answers varied between students in the experimental and control groups. They found, as they had expected, that women were most satisfied with their weight if they had viewed women ostensibly preferred by men. Remember that all of the volunteers saw the same images, so it wasn’t the content of the photographs that drove the effect: instead it was the idea that men find average sized women attractive that gave the students’ self-esteem a boost. A modest but healthy boost of about 14%.
I can imagine that some listeners might be thinking, that’s all well and good but should women really base their body image on what they think men find attractive? Well, that’s a trickier question to answer. It would be great if we could all feel good about ourselves without worrying how we’re perceived by others. But is that even possible? I’m not so sure. Besides, the situation we’re in right now is that many women are consuming media and making the implicit assumption that the models, actors and singers they see are employed because they’re attractive to men. In other words, the male gaze is already part of the equation whether we acknowledge it or not.
We would all like to be just that little bit better looking. And some of us wouldn’t mind being quite a lot better looking. It’s human nature. But if we’re doomed to worry about our attractiveness, it makes sense to know exactly what attractiveness means. And for most men, it doesn’t mean a stick figure surviving on a diet of lemon water, lettuce, and a sense of smug superiority.
I’m looking at you, Chastain.
Meltzer, A. L., & McNulty, J. K. (in press). Telling women that men desire women with bodies larger than the thin-ideal improves women’s body satisfaction. Social Psychological and Personality Science. Read summary
The content of this post first appeared in the Jan 2015 episode of The Psychology of Attractiveness Podcast.
