Sex Matters: You think I'm fat, don't you?
Most women—overweight or not—think they should be thinner. That's true, in part, because they suspect their husbands and significant others would find them more attractive if they were skinny.
But that's not so, says psychologist Charlotte Markey, an assistant professor at Rutgers University-Camden. She and her husband, Patrick Markey, a psychologist at Villanova University, have been studying what couples believe is attractive and desirable in the female form.
"We're looking at men and women in romantic relationships to see how they see their bodies, how satisfied they are with their bodies, and whether their romantic partners share those feelings," says Charlotte Markey. "And it turns out that to a certain extent the partners don't agree."
The Markeys worked with 104 couples in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. They weighed the women to assess their real body mass index. All the women were in their 20s, and none were significantly over or underweight. Then, they asked each man and woman, in separate rooms, to look at drawings of women in bikinis. The drawings were ranked on a scale of 1 to 9, with 9 being the heaviest and 1 the thinnest. Then each woman was asked to choose four drawings: one that most looks like she does now; one that represents how she would like to look; one that she believes depicts how her partner thinks she looks; and finally, a drawing that shows how she thinks her partner would like her to look. The men were asked to pick a drawing that represented their partner's figure and another that showed how they would prefer their partner to look.
The results were fascinating: Women chose drawings to represent themselves that were larger than average, 5.26 on the scale. The men, however, saw them as thinner than average, 4.84 on the scale. The body type the women desired was significantly underweight, 3.88; the body type the men would most want was very close to how they saw their partners now, or 4.51 on the scale, about average.
"The other interesting aspect to this research," says Charlotte Markey, "is that we found that the longer women are in romantic relationships, the less likely they are to think that their partners are satisfied with their bodies." She speculates that there are two possible explanations.
First, the longer people are in relationships, the more they tend to project their own feelings on their partner. So if women are dissatisfied with their bodies, over time, they begin to believe their husbands are dissatisfied as well, even if they aren't. And "what may be even more likely is that very early in a relationship men are more complimentary and as time goes on, we start to take people for granted," she says. "Those complimentary comments are less quick in coming. But what we are finding is that doesn't mean the man thinks the woman is less attractive." When women get less feedback from men, they are more readily influenced by "the countless messages on a daily basis telling them they should be thinner."
So what should the average couple take from these insights?
"Women are their own worst critics. And the people they care about most are not as critical as they think they are," she says. Men, in particular, are terribly fearful of discussing body image with women, as they're scared to say the wrong thing.
"But if men could tell women it doesn't matter that they don't look like Barbie, and that they like how they look, it would benefit both partners." Sadly, Charlotte Markey adds, "there's just not a lot of honesty about these issues in relationships."