Give Pizza A Chance

I'm a straight 36-year-old woman, and I recently lost a lot of weight. My doctor's happy. My girlfriends think I look great. They're all "How'd you do it?" "You look like a model!" However, my male friends think I'm too skinny now. Is there a big difference in what the sexes consider a good body?

--Slim

Though women assume that men think the ideal female body shape is modeliciously skinny, consider that construction workers rarely yell out, "Hey, Hotstuff! Great set of ribs!" In studies exploring men's and women's ideas of the ideal female body weight, women consistently "perceive men as being attracted to thinner female figures than is true in reality," writes social psychologist Viren Swami. And it isn't just North American men who like fleshier women. Swami ran a massive survey -- of 7,434 men and women in 26 countries, across 10 world regions -- and "men across all world regions except East Asia selected a significantly heavier figure as being most physically attractive compared to what women believed was most attractive to men." Swami and his colleagues speculate that "women exposed to magazines marketed to women may form skewed perceptions of what body types are most appealing to men." But don't despair. Swami's study and others measure the preferences of the "average" man. There is no such person. Or, as an epidemiologist friend of mine often reminds me, there are "individual differences" -- meaning individuals' preferences vary. In other words, there are men out there who will be seriously into a woman like you -- a woman who can do amazing feats in the bedroom, like removing a pair of skinny jeans without calling 911 and asking for firemen to come over with the Jaws of Life.