Feminism and Body Image

Via Kay Steiger, "The influence of feminist ascription on judgements of women's physical attractiveness" by Viren Swamia, Natalie Salemb, Adrian Furnhamb and Martin J. Tovéec:

The present study examined the effect of feminist ascription on perceptions of the physical attractiveness of women ranging in body mass index (BMI). One-hundred and twenty-nine women who self-identified as feminists and 132 who self-identified as non-feminists rated a series of 10 images of women that varied in BMI from emaciated to obese. Results showed no significant differences between feminist and non-feminists in the figure they considered to be maximally attractive. However, feminists were more likely to positively perceive a wider range of body sizes than non-feminists. These results are discussed in relation to possible protective factors against the internalisation of the thin ideal and body objectification.

I suppose that's about what I would have expected -- ideological commitment has a real, but circumscribed, impact on perception.

Comments

This seems to be a post designed mainly to lure unwary commenters to their doom.

Why else does MY post a study that pretty much confirms our intuitive assumptions?

Posted by Ted | March 28, 2008 8:45 AM

...ideological commitment has a real, but circumscribed, impact on perception...

The current policy in Iraq is working and will continue to yield improved results. The answer to our economic problems is to lower taxes on the wealthiest and to deregulate our financial services industry, which are booming as a result. The Republican Party will be the majority party for the foreseeable future...

Posted by El Cid | March 28, 2008 8:53 AM

Script for future commenters:
1. Insert obvious, insensitive remark.
2. Denounce #1 in a shrill, overbearing way.
3. Mock the humorlessness of #2.
4. Repeat.

Posted by Wilbur | March 28, 2008 8:57 AM

What an amazingly opaque title--social sciencese at its worst. I thought the study was going to be of the effect on an observer's judgement of learning that the woman at whom he is gazing was a (dread) feminist.

Posted by J | March 28, 2008 9:00 AM

"ideological commitment has a real, but circumscribed, impact on perception"

Careful there, this study just shows correlation but not causality. Both their ideological commitments and their perceptions could be due to some other underlying precondition.

Posted by JPF | March 28, 2008 9:06 AM

I thought the study was going to be of the effect on an observer's judgement of learning that the woman at whom he is gazing was a (dread) feminist.

That's because you've normalized the male gaze!

Posted by Barbar | March 28, 2008 9:28 AM

That's because you've normalized the male gaze!

Jesus, sister, why don't you buy a looser pair of granny panties? It might lower your blood pressure.

Posted by Wilbur's #3 | March 28, 2008 9:33 AM

Stopped at the local indy "you can probably only find it here" music store last night. It's typically manned by a decidedly butch young lady and seemingly patronized by all her young butch friends. They touch and coo and giggle together and it's all just a hoot to watch. Lots of colored hair and stainless hardware piercing nearly every visible part of the body. Each in her own way kinda attractive, yet plump and flabby in their farmer shirts and baggy jeans. Two chins abound. I find myself thinking if they'd drop 50 lbs now there's a cute young woman. But alas their thoughts and longings are only for each other. It must be very liberating to be a lesbian. No pretense to beauty as society views it. Chop off your hair and eat whatever looks good. Then again being a sports fan and a guy affords the same privilege. Sit and swill beer while washing down cheese covered potatoes and fried chicken wings means it's OK to be a fat tub of goo on a stool. Saying "Fuck you" to some idealized concept of how you're supposed to appear is dandy. Of course a lifetime of carrying a BMI 50% over optimum doesn't do much for the ticker and the joints. And then there's the increased incidence of adult onset diabetes, obesity related cancers and hypertension. Throwing in the towel on staying lean seems the trendy thing to do. A little people watching while on a street corner (or in the local record store) shows most of America has conceded the battle.

Posted by steve duncan | March 28, 2008 9:39 AM

So, feminists can appreciate everything non-feminists can, but they can also appreciate more.

Not too surprising.

It would be interesting to see the results from feminist and non-feminist men.

Posted by joe | March 28, 2008 9:43 AM

The first questions that come to my mind are:

1. How interesting that they only thought to have female feminists and non-feminists judging. What about Males? Just saying... I'm male and consider myself a feminist and find such kinds of studies to uphold and reinforce exactly the kind of exclusionary practices that feminism is supposed to be about...

2. Following the line in #1. Was there any data collected on sexual preference? it might make a difference or it might not, but seems like a good thing to know.

3. Another data question--was there any data collected on the physical characteristics of those who were asked to judge? That also seems like an interesting thing to know, since it could generate more understanding not only of whether self-designated feminists ascribe body types in different ways--but whether this ascription has anything to do with their own self perception--and whether this ascription correlates more to their self-designation--or more to perceptions of their own physicality...

Sorry.. I'm a grad student.. this stuff just comes naturally..

Posted by Mr. Feminist... | March 28, 2008 9:44 AM

Wow. Steve Duncan has offered a truly novel explanation of America's battle with obesity.

It's funny. Though I enjoy seeing ten-car-pile-ups in the movies, I find myself not wanting to check back to see how this comment thread evolves. Go figure.

Posted by Ted | March 28, 2008 9:46 AM

Yes, J is right: the study's title made me assume the experiment was something entirely different. But, on reflection, I seem to have brought my unspoken assumptions to reading their title, just as the authors did in writing it -- precisely as Barbar posts while I'm in the process of writing that very sentence (grin).

I wondered whether the evidence actually did suggest that men tend to consider women less attractive if they know those women are feminists. A quick web search indicates that this may not be so (or at least may not have been in 1983):

"Meta-analyses were performed on the body of literature investigating whether a bias against women who support the women's movement existed. It had been suggested that supporters were perceived as less physically attractive than nonsupporters. Yet numerous attempts to replicate the bias has resulted in a complex set of findings. The overall pattern of results did not support the existence of a bias (p = .58), and the mean effect size was virtually zero (+.01). It was concluded that people rate others with similar attitudes as more physically attractive than those with dissimilar attitudes." http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/9/4/544

Posted by bcamarda | March 28, 2008 9:46 AM

It seems like if there's causation here it might be the opposite of what the study's implying: perhaps people who don't have an extremely narrow range of "acceptable" body-types are simply more likely to be drawn to feminism?

Posted by LittleMac | March 28, 2008 9:49 AM

I agree Ted. Carnage and mayhem are wickedly guilty pleasures.........kinda like banana splits.

Posted by steve duncan | March 28, 2008 9:53 AM

ideological commitment has a real, but circumscribed, impact on perception.

I think it's possible you've got this backwards. That is, the causality goes the other direction: perception has an impact on ideological commitment.

Specific to this study, I would think it possible that a positive perception of a wide range of body size makes it more likely to be a feminist.

It seems to me that perceptions of body sizes likely form much earlier than ideologies. And while there may be a self reinforcing cycle here, the dominant idea is probably the perception, not the ideology.

Posted by Al | March 28, 2008 9:55 AM

It's difficult to take this seriously without knowing how they controlled the two groups in order to isolate the feminists vs. non-feminists results.

Were they of similar ages, for example?

Seems impossible to really isolate... dunno...seems like BS to me.

Posted by AKBY | March 28, 2008 10:13 AM

Feminists are notorious liars, and they're just being pc. Here's a better study. Ask the participants who they think other people will find attractive, and promise them money if they guess right. I predict no differences in the two groups.

Posted by bjk | March 28, 2008 11:21 AM

Feminists are notorious liars, and they're just being pc. Here's a better study. Ask the participants who they think other people will find attractive, and promise them money if they guess right. I predict no differences in the two groups.

Posted by bjk | March 28, 2008 11:22 AM

I disagree with Barbar & bcamarda. I have no stake in thinking one of these issues is more worth studying than the other. My point is simply that the title is pretentious and misleading gobbledygook (sp.?). The study is not a study of how having the designation 'feminist' ascribed to one affects one's judgement of female beauty or, as I thought, of whether being told that a woman is a feminist affects one's opinion of her appearance. It's a study of what feminists, or those who identify themselves as feminists, think about female beauty. I'd be very surprised if anyone got that from the title alone.

Posted by J | March 28, 2008 12:07 PM

Shorter Yglesias: feminazis like fat chix

Posted by The Fool | March 28, 2008 12:13 PM

J, I was kind of kidding, but I can continue. I believe the objection you're making is that the term "feminist ascription" should be replaced with "female feminist self-ascription."

Posted by Barbar | March 28, 2008 12:19 PM

body objectification

The body is an object. See: the Enlightenment.

Unless you think the body is a temple for the soul or some thoroughly religious (and anti-feminist) notion like that.

"Feminist" is a pretty broad (haha) notion these days, so broad that it is almost meaningless, except maybe for distinguishing the Amish from the rest of us.

Posted by jim | March 28, 2008 12:25 PM

Thanks Barbar. Humor now apparent and appreciated. But, in answer to your question: no. 'Feminist ascription' is a remarkably obscure way of saying 'calling someone a feminist' and 'feminist self-ascription' isn't much better as a replacement for 'calling oneself a feminist' or 'describing oneself as a feminist'. (Compare a 'a self-described feminist' with 'a self-ascribed feminist'.) Only a quest for pretentious obscurity could explain resorting to talk of 'ascription' in the first place. In any case, it's not, I take it, the influence of calling anyone or oneself a feminist on judgements about women's appearance that is being studied, but what feminists think about the subject. Calling oneself a feminist is just being used as a clue to discover who the feminists, whose views are to be studied, are. But I think it's time to let this bee out of my bonnet.

Posted by J | March 28, 2008 2:05 PM

Like bjk, I suspect that this study proves that people who call themselves feminists are also more likely to lie about whom they find attractive.

Posted by blah | March 28, 2008 2:08 PM

I hate to break it to you, but, guys, on average lesbians aren't as hot as in your porno downloads.

There's a fair amount of evidence that homosexuals differ by sex significantly in the innateness of their homosexuality. A lot of lesbians are currently lesbian less because they always been that way than because they can get better offers from women than from men, due to age, obesity, homeliness, etc. For example, Susan Sontag, David Rieff's mom, said she switched mostly from heterosexuality to homosexuality after age 40 because her options in partners (e.g., Annie Liebowitz) became better on the female side as men lost interest in her as she aged.

Posted by Steve Sailer | March 28, 2008 5:10 PM

"Both their ideological commitments and their perceptions could be due to some other underlying precondition."

Yeah - they're human.

The reality is that a significant percentage of - maybe most - humans would be bi-sexual if it weren't for social conditioning. Their preferences in physical appearance would also probably be more broad absent social conditioning.

Still, there would be limits on the broad population's perception based on physical realities like health, the incidence of disease related to physical health in the current time period, and the like.

The reality is that both notions: 1) "everybody is beautiful", and 2) "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" are not completely true.

I myself cut quite a bit of slack on female appearance. I don't mind women with a few extra pounds on them if they don't look like beach balls or waddle when they walk. I prefer faces with some regularity of features, no weird facial quirks or ticks, reasonably good skin, etc.

At the same time, I have a pretty advanced and detailed hierarchical concept of attractiveness, ranking women on looks on more than the typical "1 to 10" scale. I also weight much more heavily on personality and basic human characteristics like intelligence and imagination than most males probably do.

As a PUA (pick up artist) once put it, "Beauty is common." The question is: what else does a woman bring to the table?

I like Andrea Corr. She has her defects - she's too religious, for one thing. And there are tons of women who are more beautiful than her, despite her being ranked highly in magazine polls. Her own sister Sharon is more beautiful than Andrea in my opinion. But Andrea has personal qualities that make her more desirable to me than some other women who might be far more beautiful physically. At the same time, there are some other women who blow past Andrea in my view, either in looks or personal qualities or both.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | March 28, 2008 6:45 PM

I myself cut quite a bit of slack on female appearance. I don't mind women with a few extra pounds on them if they don't look like beach balls or waddle when they walk. I prefer faces with some regularity of features, no weird facial quirks or ticks, reasonably good skin, etc.

LOL! Thanks for "sharing" Richard.

Posted by AKBY | March 28, 2008 6:59 PM

Re: A lot of lesbians are currently lesbian less because they always been that way than because they can get better offers from women than from men

Just when I think I've heard everything, Steve Sailer comes up with a new idiotic theory. If he'd simply said that lesbians, on the average, are more likley to gravitate to bisexuality than gay men are, I might have agreed with him, but instead he proclaims that A) lesbians are too ugly to attract men (yeah, but what about all the ugly men who have to settle for ugly women?) and that they pick sex partners the way they pick through lettuce heads at the grocery store. Stevie-boy, life don't work that way.

Posted by JonF | March 28, 2008 8:43 PM

Men are really picky when it comes to the beauty of their partners. It's evolutionary biology in action, man! Science!

Oh wait that doesn't make any sense.

Posted by Barbar | March 28, 2008 8:53 PM

I don't know that there is that much overlap between one's taste in beauty and one's politics.

I mean, I'm much more attracted to white women than to any other race, and I find fair skin very attractive. It doesn't make me a white supremacist (I'm not even white myself, and very dark skinned, so it would be kind of ridiculous if I was). My tastes don't have to influence my politics.

Posted by Hector | March 28, 2008 8:55 PM

So, AKBY, is Bella Abzug more to your taste?

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | March 29, 2008 2:34 AM