Can we stop with the references to fat chicks? No one ever dares refer to a slender woman as a chick. Why are we comfortable applying the term to fat women?

It is so disappointing to me that the news editor of "psychology today", presumably an educated and thoughtful person, would serve up such revolting sexism.

Maybe the men in your fraternity routinely referred to women as "chicks" but for any public discourse, the term is in bad taste. The illustration of the article with the image of a chicken with bikini marks and spread legs proves the real intent of your usage of "chick" - to ridicule and demean female readers.

Your talk of "chubby-chasing" and the inherent comparison of women's bodies to food products that man buy and consume, further proves the point.

I have to agree with Claudia about the poor taste. What message are you really trying to send to young women? They have enough god-damn self-esteem issues.

While your work itself and the content of this post is probably valid and insightful, you and others like you trash your own hard work and reputation with pointless sensationalism. You could have said the exact same thing much more professionally.

In fact, for those of you trying to sell books who are banking on shock-blog popularity: Systematically alienating every subset of the population who may otherwise be interested in buying your book is not considered good advertisement!!!

I don't want to encourage censorship or editing what the writers write. I appreciate the diversity of everyone's views here. That's how learning and growth happen. However, I think you and other PT bloggers need to evaluate whether or not you actually give a damn about people. This is fucking psychology. You may be in the wrong field!

The mission statement of PT reads "here to help". Just make it say "here" then. Okay? Quit making people think this is a psychologically healthy website! That's probably just adding to their chaos.

RESPONSIBILITY. INTEGRITY.

Sorry, I'm just getting sick of the lack of both.

Peace

Oviously money doesn't effect what men are looking for. Men have different tastes in women, were all different in some way, shape, or form therefore what we look for, from person to person, is in different shapes and forms. We are all like snowflakes, we are all looking for something different.

You are right. Also so very, very, wrong.

There IS a connection between large women lovin' and poorer cultures. In China, larger women are believed to be well cared for, and kinder and therefore sought after. In India I am catcalled something fierce, In Morocco/ West Africa, dear, god, will the marriage proposals ever stop... African-American men in popular culture consistently extol the joys of the large booty.

Connection, YES. Fiscal, NO.

It is not a function of economics, but a function of culture -- lower income countries, value family more, values motherhood more, value people connections more. And they value the things that make body type less of an issue. They look for people who are rad... and sometimes those rad people are fat people-- they are too busy being rad to overdose on self (and other) loathing. And the men around them know it.

Here in the West the war against "the fat" it in full force, and it will take a full on recession and several years, for the ideals of beauty, family and individualism to shift to match the Hofstede ( http://www.geert-hofstede.com/ ) cultural observations of poorer countries. But with the medical establishment sticking around with its head up its BMI rating (where I'm considered "Morbidly Obese") and where the war on the fat is considered a HUGE income boost to that market... they won't be helping along a pattern of ideology that values the awesome over the pretty.

Seriously dude, call me before you write another post about fat people again. I expect better science out of you.

It seems to me that the title was meant as an attention grabber weaved into a pun.
Whether the relationship between "fat" and "lean"
has any validity, I have no idea and I believe that most "research" of this kind is highly speculative.
There is a bumper sticker that reads "If you are not outraged you are not paying attention". I think it is quite the reverse "If one is outraged one is not paying attention" to oneself that is. To be outraged says a lot more about our own issues than what we are outraged about even if we are right. In most wisdom traditions that I am aware of, we need to fight the good fight simply because it is the right thing to do. But to fight the good fight because we are outraged means that we have not done our inner homework.

Y.G., why are you apologizing? Yes, it was an attention-grabber woven into a pun, but that doesn't make it alright. I completely disagree with the notion that we need always look within when outraged. I am slim woman by pretty much any standard, and I am put off by this particular pun for reasons that have nothing to do with my feelings about myself. I'm put off by it because it relies on ugly cultural undercurrents to do its attention-grabbing.

You can make the argument that calling women "chicks" is no different than calling men "dudes," but the fact that several of us reacted to this headline the same way suggests that popular culture has conditioned us to hear the two terms through very different filters.

Blogs are a terrific, conversational medium. But now that publications are hyper-conscious of the number of hits each entry or author generates, those attention-grabbers become awfully tempting. And suddenly the tail is wagging the dog in terms of editorial judgment. I realize the author of this particular post did not write the post about fat chicks getting laid more, but it is true that both posts concerned fat chicks' sexual allure. Indeed, one of the the main attention-grabbing elements is that--surprise!--the fat chicks are desirable at all, right?

Would PT's editors ever do this in print? Giving bloggers access to a respected, professional platform should elevate the quality of discourse in the blogosphere. What a disappointment it will be if instead the end result is in fact a lowering of editorial standards overall.

at chubby-chasing ;)