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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. Read More
Well, they say if you put
Well, they say if you put more stats on a product, it sells better in retail, maybe its the same for playboy.
that being said, I didn't
that being said, I didn't even notice that "info" the couple times I looked at that magazine.
Is it lower BMI or is it
Is it lower BMI or is it just the weight of the body hair decrease? ;)
maybe?
The first thought that came to me (CPR) was that it's fantasy fuel for the male viewer. He thinks, "Hmm. Mary is about 5'6" and weighs 110 pounds, this must be what she looks like naked."
Yuck..
Hi Pamela,
You're right. What is the point? If anything those numbers are meaningless to men and only play into the insecurities of women. (I'm picturing being at a butcher shop and reading the tags.)
Guys can think of it this way.. Imagine a magazine tailored for women with photos of men listing the yearly income, educational background, and/or social status.
Kind of sick, right??
I'm not saying I have a problem with Playboy. I understand the need for this sort of thing.
And no, I would never masturbate to a dollar sign..
Sick?
I don't find what you are suggesting as 'sick' disturbing in the least. Why are we fighting nature? Men like women becuase of beauty and the ability to birth children. Women like men because of stability and the ability to care for children. (At least according to evolutionary psych.) Why do we fight this?
What is it about Americans that drives us to do what is unnatural to us? It seems to me like we are all living with elephants but claim to be living alone.
Sigh.
> Guys can think of it this
> Guys can think of it this way.. Imagine a magazine tailored for women with photos
> of men listing the yearly income, educational background, and/or social status.
Doesn't that pretty much describe the "People" style celebrity magazines which are such a large part of the supermarket checkout aisle magazine displays, which one presumes are bought almost entirely by women -- not to mention the several similarly based TV shows, which one presumes are watched entirely by women?
Two different kinds of porn, except that one isn't kept under the counter and sold in a plain brown wrapper.
And, yes, it does cause the same sort of money/status image issues w/men (some or many, at least) as lots of women have wrt their bodies. It would certainly seem to be at least partly expressed by the little-talked-about and much-less-addressed fact that men commit suicide at 4-5 times the rate as women.
Ok, now that I've read the Wired article...
There are a couple of epistemological issues with the Playboy "data".
First of all, it's not verifiable or reproducible, or even independently certified. So, strictly speaking, one can't draw any sort of scientific conclusions from it. Playboy could hedge or "augment" the numbers substantially without anyone much knowing it. BMI's down in the 18's start to stretch credulity for such curvy women, and there are quite a few with BMI's in the 17's and even several in the 16's (the minimum is 15.33). These are down at the level of some women athletes, especially those in track and field (i.e., distance runners), who look quite different from Playboy centerfolds in having so little body fat that many almost entirely lose their breasts and hips, and thus more nearly resemble early adolescent boys than sex symbols. Heck, some of these numbers are even almost down to the level of anorexics. So there's reason to be suspicious about how accurate the reported raw data is. Bogus data is going to give bogus results.
Second, some of the commenters to the article have suggested a straight line doesn't fit the BMI "data" (such as it is) very well, so the conclusion drawn from said fit line may not be all that valid in any event; a second order polynomial might fit better and show the "trend" leveling out. This would be plausible, as there's only so far Playboy could push the numbers it publishes before people started saying "No way!". While height might be difficult to fudge very much - seeing as how these women do make public appearances (albeit probably in high heels) - weight is virtually impossible to eyeball. So my bet would be that the weights are all low by quite a bit, probably at least 10%. I hope that's some comfort to all the women distressed by this "study".
Ok, on to the blog here... Dr. Keel's main issue seems to be this:
> In contrast to the increasing BMI of US women age 20-29,
> Playboy centerfolds have gotten thinner from 1953 to 2009.
That is, that Playboy is being *mean* to US women. That it's not fair.
But this would be like a guy who's of average height complaining about NBA players all being so unrealistically tall, or how the guys on all the covers of the business magazines all make more in a year (or a month) than the average guy does in a lifetime - if he's lucky. It's not clear why Playboy's mission, or any other magazine's, should be to be *representative* rather than to highlight the exceptional. People are surrounded by the former all day long, so naturally they're going to be willing to pay for the rare and unusual.
It should be easy to understand that as women get bigger and heavier, the premium on those fewer remaining who can swing being in optimal/great shape increases.
Height, ok, it paints a
Height, ok, it paints a picture, but weight means nothing. You can't picture what a person looks like if you know their weight (within a reasonable range), because people carry weight in all different ways. For example, a woman could look very thin because her lower body is slender, but weigh more because she has large breasts. Or, a very athletic woman could look slender but weigh a lot due to muscle mass. Notice that your height is on your drivers license, but weight isn't, because it doesn't help at all with identification, and it changes. Everyone I have ever met, including doctors and personal trainers, have guessed my weight incorrectly, and I don't believe I could accurately guess others' weight.
Also, whenever I see a woman's weight mentioned in more "fictional" media, it is always ridiculous. I know some very thin women, but I've never met ANYONE who weighs 110 lbs, outside of a severely anorexic girl I knew and some teenagers. It creates this inaccuracy that makes women feel more badly about themselves when they weigh what they should. it's led to a culture where if you know a woman weighs 150 or 160 lbs, you might picture someone obese, where in reality the women could look perfectly normal and be at her appropriate weight and healthy.
Height, ok, it paints a
Height, ok, it paints a picture, but weight means nothing. You can't picture what a person looks like if you know their weight (within a reasonable range), because people carry weight in all different ways. For example, a woman could look very thin because her lower body is slender, but weigh more because she has large breasts. Or, a very athletic woman could look slender but weigh a lot due to muscle mass. Notice that your height is on your drivers license, but weight isn't, because it doesn't help at all with identification, and it changes. Everyone I have ever met, including doctors and personal trainers, have guessed my weight incorrectly, and I don't believe I could accurately guess others' weight.
Also, whenever I see a woman's weight mentioned in more "fictional" media, it is always ridiculous. I know some very thin women, but I've never met ANYONE who weighs 110 lbs, outside of a severely anorexic girl I knew and some teenagers. It creates this inaccuracy that makes women feel more badly about themselves when they weigh what they should. it's led to a culture where if you know a woman weighs 150 or 160 lbs, you might picture someone obese, where in reality the women could look perfectly normal and be at her appropriate weight and healthy.
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