In this month's
Wired magazine, Katharine Gammon uses reported height and weight for Playboy centerfolds to examine how their Body Mass Index has changed over recent decades.
(Body Mass Index or BMI is calculated by dividing weight in kilograms by the square of height in meters.) In contrast to the increasing BMI of US women age 20-29, Playboy centerfolds have gotten thinner from 1953 to 2009. While Gammon notes that the information may not be entirely accurate (and, indeed, the reported BMI for 1986's Miss December of 16.1 kg/m2 seems highly suspect), the author asserts that what matters is that the magazine thinks its readers want thinner centerfolds. She questions why Playboy has pursued (or portrayed) increasingly unrealistic ideals. This is a great question (and one that was raised by an article published in 1980 by Garner, Garfinkel, Schwartz, and Thompson in
Psychological Reports). However, Gammon's article in
Wired led me to a slightly different question, why does Playboy bother reporting height and weight information for centerfolds?
Precisely how is the information intended to be used? Picture a single man finding his ideal (play)mate in the pages of Playboy and deciding to pursue this ideal for a real life partner. Is he supposed to make note of her height and weight and then start scanning the immediate population and personal ads for someone with the same dimensions? That seems like an awful lot of work, and it seems doomed to fail. Even if very thin women with ample cup sizes were plentiful, how many women would disclose their height and weight to a complete stranger? Surely it would be easier for this same man to simply look at the picture and search for a woman who resembles the centerfold rather than bothering with information about her height and weight. I don't mean to imply that finding such a woman will be easy, just that having information about a centerfold's height and weight has no utility.
I suspect (and doubt I'm the first person to make this guess) that the information is there to create the illusion that the viewer knows something about the woman in the centerfold without actually giving any information that could interfere with the process of projecting a fantasy on to her. So, it would fall squarely into the category of uninformative information. Unfortunately, it becomes one more piece of data to confirm that women don't measure up to cultural ideals of desirability. Given the plethora of sources confirming that women don't measure up, I would like to propose that Playboy consider publishing some other equally useless information rather than adding insult to injury by reporting height and weight for their centerfolds. So, here are some items that could be included that would not actually provide any more information than is usually evident in the photo: eye color, hair length and color, number of visible birthmarks or tattoos. That's all I can think of for now (coming up with uninformative information is harder than I thought).
