A Preoccupation With How We Look

Several naughty readers have noted via the Internet that the Unconventional Wiz seems obsessed by scholarly studies of physical appearance. Is the Wiz perhaps sensitive about his own looks? Or, as a Bellingham, Wash., reader suggested, is the Wiz “butt-ugly?”

Of course not. In the right light, the Wiz is quite presentable.

The Wiz writes about looks because most Americans, including social scientists, are preoccupied with their physical appearance. In recent weeks, at least a dozen articles have appeared in major scholarly journals on some aspect of physiognomy - a banner crop of smart thinking about how our looks shape our lives. Here’s the pick of the latest litter. (Butt-ugly, indeed!).

Truth about torsos

When it comes to breasts and chests, bigger isn’t necessarily better - though men and women apparently think so.

Both sexes worry about the relative sizes of their upper bodies and have grossly exaggerated views of what the opposite sex finds most attractive, said Scot Burton, a professor of marketing at the University of Arkansas in a recent issue of the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing.

Women think men prefer bigger-bosomed women than men said they preferred. Similarly, men are convinced that women want chestier guys than women said they liked.

Burton and his research colleagues showed 82 test subjects an artist’s rendition of five males and five females whose chests or breasts differed in size. “Female subjects believe that men prefer a breast size larger than their own ideal size and the ideal size reported by men,” he said. Likewise, “men’s ratings of the ideal chest and the chest size they believe women prefer are greater than women’s ratings.”

Freak show Barbie

Were you into Barbie? Since 1959, millions of girls have grown up playing with the plastic fantastic doll, visualizing themselves as Totally Hair Barbie, Shopping Spree Barbie or the Wiz’s personal favorite, Wet and Wild Barbie.

And that’s precisely the problem, say two Yale researchers, who argue that Barbie and Ken are grotesquely lean and lanky, presenting to impressionable youth an unrealistic and potentially dangerous image of what women and men should look like.

Psychologists Kelly Brownell and Melissa Napolitano found that it would be necessary for a young, healthy adult woman to be 7 feet 2 inches tall and add 5 inches to her bust to “attain the same body proportions as Barbie.”

That’s a whole lotta woman - but matching up with Ken would require even more stretching and bulging: A regularly proportioned guy would have to be 7 feet 8 inches in height and add 11 inches to his chest circumference.

“If healthy, normal weight individuals use such models as standards for comparison, discontent is a logical outcome,” they warned in the International Journal of Eating Disorders.

Fattening up the centerfolds

Is thin no longer in? Perhaps. Three years ago a team of psychologists who studied the heights and weights of Playboy centerfolds between the years 1959 and 1988 reported that these women weighed less than the average woman of similar height and age - and that the gap had consistently widened. But in 1995, data collected by Washington Post researchers Ruth Leonard and Mary Louise White disclosed that the current crop of centerfolds weighed 83 percent of what the average woman of similar height weighed, a tick up from the late 1980s. That’s still dangerously underweight, says Yale psychologist Claire Wiseman, who led the 1992 study team: “When you get below 15 percent (below average weight) you’re medically too thin.”

Average weight of Playboy centerfolds as a percentage of the average weights of women of the same height and age: 1959-91%; 1965-88%; 1975-85%; 1985-83%; 1988-82%; 1995-83%.

(Sources: “Cultural Expectations of Thinness in Women: An Update” by Claire Wiseman, James J. Gray, James E. Mosimann and Anthony Ahrens in the International Journal of Eating Disorders and The Washington Post.)