The supposedly perfect body impresses the opposite sex far less than most people think.
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Train to look more attractive? Some studies suggest that it doesn’t even make much sense.
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Above all, many dreams put pressure on those who dream. You chase after an ideal that cannot be achieved with the best will in the world, torture yourself, be disappointed and bathe in misery every day. So from time to time it could be helpful to adjust these ideal ideas.
For decades it has been argued about the beauty ideals of the fashion industry and argued that the sometimes skinny bodies of the models were a dangerous role model. Nevertheless, many continue to strive to be as beautiful, as slim and as desirable as those models that are debated so intensely.
Wrong expectations
But whose ideal are the body proportions of the extremely slim models, which remain the rule in lifestyle magazines despite all the arguments? In a study, psychologists Sarah Johnson and Renee Engeln from Northwestern University, Illinois, show that women tend to overestimate how attractive men find very slim partners.
Young women in their mid-twenties in particular believed in the special attraction of extremely slim bodies, they report in the specialist journal Sex Roles. The male of the more than 2,000 participants in the study, for their part, had a distorted idea of which figure women perceived as ideal for themselves: They too believed that more women dreamed of a particularly thin figure than was the case.
Men overestimate how muscular women want a partner.
Of course, men pant after a dream body, which is an unattainable promise of a six-pack, broad cross and muscular upper arms. With the super power workout, some magazines have been claiming for decades, firstly the dream body works and secondly the success for women is guaranteed.
The same applies to men: they overestimate how attractive they are to women, as psychologists Xue Lei and David Perrett from the Scottish University of St. Andrews in British Journal of Psychology to report. In their current study, they found the same discrepancy between the ideal and the effect on the opposite sex.
Rather slim than muscular
This study showed that men overestimate how muscular women want a partner. Especially when the researchers asked which body shape guaranteed maximum dating success for short sexual adventures, the ideas were exaggerated. As slim as possible, the women said by analogy; as many muscles as possible, the men believed.
Can news like this bring some relaxation to the physical dissatisfaction front? Finally, there are sufficient studies that relate low self-esteem, depression or eating disorders to the ideal of beauty propagated by the fashion industry. However, there is little hope: As early as 1985, the psychologists April Fallon and Paul Rozin published a study cited to this day, in which it became clear that drought models on the catwalk do not look as attractive to the normal viewer as so many think. Nothing has changed, however, the old ideals continue to torture.
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