Feminist Writer Triggered by Published Study About Attractive Body Types
By Tom Knighton
Science is supposed to be about seeking facts, no matter how uncomfortable those facts may be. At least, that’s the idea. In reality, science has become just as politicized by Leftist pap about feelings and subjective truth as everything else has been.
The feminist weekend writer for Allure magazine said women were triggered by a “pointless and irresponsible” study that found men were most attracted to thin and young women. Rosemary Donahue wrote an article criticizing the study and opining that the results should not have been published because they’re harmful to women.
“The abstract to the study itself holds some real gems about the relationship between health and aesthetic,” she wrote, “like this funny little quote, ‘Aspects of the female body may be attractive because they signal evolutionary fitness. Greater body fatness might reflect greater potential to survive famines, but individuals carrying larger fat stores may have poor health and lower fertility in non-famine conditions.’ That sounds less like something out of a scientific paper than something someone’s insensitive grandmother would tell them, if she were strangely into Darwinism.”
The study interviewed male participants from three Caucasian populations, three Asian populations, and four African populations about what female figure they found most attractive.
Donahue argues that the methodology used in the study was in itself “toxic” and should be discarded.
“The participants were all shown 21 sample images of women with varying BMIs and asked to rate the attractiveness of their bodies,” she explained. “This is a bad and demeaning practice. BMI has been debunked as an indicator for health, and the procedure they chose to use reinforces a toxic paradigm we see so often today — rating women based on their attractiveness and nothing else, in a system where aesthetic is the only measure of worth. Though this is arguably the point of the study, normalization of things like this is also the reason we’re in this mess.”
Oh, boy.
First, BMI is a poor indicator of health in individuals. It is a useful tool for large groups, however, and it’s also an easy and fairly accurate method to determine health without more intensive measures like physicals and body fat measurements. You simply calculate BMI based on height and weight, and there you go.
While BMI fails in some instances — Arnold Schwarzenegger’s BMI listed him as being morbidly obese while he was winning professional bodybuilding titles — those are generally outliers.
Now, with that said, I will agree with one aspect of Donahue’s argument. The study was pointless. Straight men tend to be attracted to young, thin women? What’s next, a study saying that men usually like sex and bacon? Sure, not all men like young, thin women, but anyone with half a brain knows that most do, and that it has nothing to do with it having been “normalized.”
The study was pointless, but it does sure look like actual science. The idea that science is only to be used to back Leftist utopian ideas is ridiculous and dangerous