Are Men Really Attracted to Ultra-Skinny Women?
Do media portrayals accurately reflect male desires?
In 2009, Supermodel Kate Moss was asked if she had any mottos.
“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”
Her words spoke to a deeply-engrained idea that permeates American culture, the idea that skinny = sexy. Moss's career was built on her thin body, and there’s absolutely no question it wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t stayed thin her whole life.
Her rise to stardom was as swift as it is shocking. Moss was already modeling in the 1980s and made a name for herself doing topless modeling shoots at age 14. Looking back on it, what seemed normal at the time couldn’t have been anything other than sexual child exploitation.
By the 1990s, Moss had become a card-carrying supermodel of international acclaim, with her photos plastered all over magazines at a time when thin was in. Her waifish figure fit right in with the “heroin chic” look that was all the rage. It was the culmination of decades-long trends getting skinnier and skinnier.
The thin model craze had been gaining steam since Lesley “Twiggy” Hornby in the 1960s. Models got progressively thinner from that point forward, and Kate Moss rose to fame at the end of the era when models were at their thinnest, with extremely underweight models cropping up in media ads.
Some supermodels lived on only three apples per day and Diet Coke. Kate Moss was 5'7" and 104 lbs, with a BMI of 16.3. She was significantly underweight throughout her career.
Her motto swiftly drew criticism.
Thanks to a half-century of skinny models dominating magazines and media outlets, America began to notice the dark side of this media fascination when a wave of eating disorders swept the country as a result.
Thin & Sexy: Perfect Synonyms?
The idea that skinny = sexy has been so profoundly seared into American minds that it’s almost gospel. Impressionable preteen and teenage girls took their cues from this media trend and ran with it, creating a tidal wave of pain, destruction, and self-loathing we still haven’t healed from.
Countless women count every calorie. The numbers on the scale dictate our self-esteem. Eating disorders are on the rise still today. No demographic has gone untouched, including men.
Women have rightly complained about the monolith of skinny women that has dominated media covers for a half-century. It’s conveyed a very narrow worldview of what bodies look like and has convinced women that that’s what they need to become to attract a partner, especially men.
But what if this idea that skinny = sexy was nothing more than a myth?
What if men aren’t interested in just that one body type? What if the “ideal” body type plastered all over ads and magazines has more to do with photography and less to do with sex appeal? Are men really attracted to unattainable body standards, or is that just the fable we’ve been sold?
If you’ve ever wondered about the crazy trend of super-thin models and what it says about our preferences, buckle up, this story has a lot of twists and turns as we dive into the science.
Big Beautiful Bodies
A 2009 study published in The Journal of Sex Research supports both sides of the story—that some men find the ultra-thin body type attractive, while others are more flexible.
The study is titled Big beautiful women: the body size preferences of male fat admirers, and researchers recruited 47 men from fat-acceptance movements and 64 other men as control subjects. They asked them to rate the body types they found physically attractive.
The men from the fat-acceptance movement rated larger body types as more attractive, but they also reported a vast array of body types as beautiful, not just larger body types. The men in the control group rated slim, underweight body types as most attractive.
A simultaneous study from the same author found that the men attracted to a wide array of body types still preferred a hip-to-waist ratio of .7, which is what men all over the globe seem to like. Both the hip-to-waist ratio and BMI are predictors of health outcomes.
Combining this with other studies and “common knowledge,” some have theorized that men prefer skinny women with the right hip-to-waist ratio because it communicates youth and fertility.
Many agree with this view. Adding up the lengthy history of thin models adorning the covers of every type of media under the sun, with the fact that only a specific subset of men from fat acceptance movements are more forgiving about body types paints a grim picture for the male sex.
But that’s if you consider only this evidence. There’s a whole lot more to this story.