The reason I removed the Atlantic Monthly from the blogroll?
This: Men Who Idealize Large Breasts Are More Likely Hostile Towards Women.
For cryin’ out loud:
The problem is primal, so the research methods are not to be outdone.
Huh?
361 white British men were “taken to a quiet private location” to look at women.
Kicking and screaming I suppose. Then again maybe they were men of the other kind. I’ll never know; the research paper, published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, is behind a pay wall. Maybe the location was private because there was no Internet cafe in Jolly ol’ England large enough to accommodate 361 white British men assembled to ogle women. Or, maybe, the concern was that caffeine imbibition would bias boob assessment. You can’t to be careful with your experimental design.
Not real women; 3D computer renderings. The men were allowed to rotate them 360 degrees. The only difference among the women was breast size.
Rotatable women! Isn’t the Internet grand!
The men were then asked to “make their ratings on a paper-and-pencil survey.”
Pencil & paper? Kinda old school, no?
Men then decreed, with paper and pencil:
Right, pencil & paper, you just said that, one sentence ago. We got it.
The most-preferred breast size is “medium.”
It you read that like I did it sounds like most of the 361 men preferred medium boobs. Not true. Only 32% preferred medium boobs. 68% preferred non-medium boobs. See, the men were shown 5 (rotatable!) women, differing only in boob size — very small, small, medium, large, very large. Less than half the men preferred large or very large boobs, only 43%, whereas the rest, i.e. “most” of the men — 57% — preferred medium or smaller boobs.
And then the very next sentence:
That’s the middle of the five images to the left.
Look, dude, don’t insult your readers. They can figure out for themselves which picture is the small boobs, which one is the medium boobs, and which one the large boobs, okay?
But wait, then the men were separately questioned about their attitude toward women on three “interesting rubrics” (“rubrics”? — go figure): 1) The problem of intoxication in women (versus men), 2) the motivation for female flirtation w/men — to tease or to hurt, and 3) women’s sense of culture & taste — better or worse than mens’. Consistent with credible research the author provided references for the “rubrics”, and encourages us to read them, because they’re interesting. Hey, don’t snicker, he’s an MD, the Atlantic’s “Health Editor.”
But really, who cares, all we want to know is the bloody conclusion anyway:
Swami and Tovée compared the results with the men’s preferences in breast size, which showed that “men who more strongly endorsed benevolently sexist attitudes toward women, who more strongly objectified women, and who were more hostile toward women idealized a large female breast size.”
There you have it, 155 out of 361 white British men are significantly more likely to be caught wearing a wife beater, the other 206, cooing and reciting poetry in the company of small to modest cup sizes.
But there’s more:
It’s the first study to make these associations. Which is interesting
If you’re like me, you’re annoyed by now by the author telling us what’s interesting. Usually we leave that up to the reader to figure out, you know, like assessing boob sizes.
Plus he’s a horrid writer, to wit:
Media portrayals, hegemony, and cultural factors of heteronormativity unique to these British white men. All not to overlook evolutionary, inborn preferences for reproductively viable mates.
Huh? If the point he failed to write is that the results should be viewed in the context of evolutionarily derived preferences, but of course! Who among us is capable of ignoring or overriding their genetically driven behavioral imperatives. Everything, all the time, is ultimately about making more and better babies.
My guess is the research is a bunch of phooey, but to be fair, I can’t say for sure given the paper is behind a pay wall, all that’s freely readable is the abstract. And no way am I plopping down $40 to read it. No, my snark is directed at the Atlantic for publishing this impeachable pile of dung. I used to enjoy the Atlantic. Anymore it reads like The Onion, only the Atlantic doesn’t get the joke.