...but is a guy who says:

According to one professional matchmaker, "A guy yesterday said, 'Size 6 is too big! It has to be size 2.'"

ever going to be happy?

She was a size 6.

I am not sure how much a size 6 might have inflated since that time, but for that time, size 6 was pretty small. I was an 8 at 5'6" and 119 pounds. So that shows you how small a size 6 was in the late 70's.

Maybe a size 2 is what a size 6 was then? Does anyone know? Or is Farrah in her heyday now considered too big? Yikes.

I was a size 6 20 years ago and I'm still a size 6 even though I'm 20 lbs heavier and my waist is 3 inches larger. Standard American clothing sizes have definitely increased since Farrah's heyday.

This is all pop-sociology/psychology/biology ... Broadsheet can be like the stoned kids in the woods discussing life sometimes.

But: "There go my plans to find my next husband by hanging outside the unemployment office .... at lunchtime." -> On one hand this points to the increasing trend for cheaper, high-fat diets in lower income echelons... but more actually, this sentence is disgustingly classist in it's assumption that poor people are slothful, overweight and ugly.

Seriously... what are you thinking?

It depends where you shop. If I step into an American Apparel (or any very trendy/young boutique) I’m a L or XL – but at the J Crew, the Gap or Ann Taylor I’m a Med. If I go shopping with my grandmother at her shops of choice I’m a Small all of a sudden.

But really this is all a non issue – 2 or 3lbs? Unless you’re dangerously thin to start with no one can visually spot that sort of very slight weight gain.

I used the context clues to figure out what neotenous means, but, come on, use words that are in the dictionary.

Gams on Glass had a great line about the kids in the woods. That's the freshest critique of broadsheet I've read.

This all reeks of psuedoscience. Just live life people. Be attracted to who you're attracted to. And then love them and be loved by them. Don't sweat 'studies' like this.

There are statistical tools and techniques that researchers use to figure out whether differences between groups they survey or measure are due to luck/chance/random variation, or due to real underlying differences.

When the tools and techniques indicate the latter, it is called a "significant" difference, or a "statistically significant" difference. That means that it's real. It means that there's really a difference there.

Now, whether these differences are truly large or not is a different issue. In fact, most of the time, researchers find "small but significant" results. What does that mean?

It means that the world is complicated and there are lots of factors. It means that there are very many relevent factors that all contribute to the world we know. And if you ignore all the little contributors, you will stupidly credit a small number of things for far more responsibility than they deserve.

This is a real difference. And it means something. Actually, there are two different issues there, and each mean something. Perhaps there are interesting implications for things other then standards of female beauty. If you want to understand our society, you might want to understand this.

Women's clothing sizes are indeed larger today than 20 - 30 years ago. Case in point: I weigh exactly the same today as I did in 1989, yet at age 26 I wore size 3 jeans. Today at age 46 I wear a size 1. How is that possible? A friend in the clothing industry explained that clothing manufacturers now use "vanity sizing" to help women feel better about themselves by believing they fit into a smaller size. A better self-image translates into more dollars spent on clothing -- at least it did before the economy tanked. But even with today's sizing, a size 6 woman is nowhere near overweight, and no woman's self-esteem should suffer simply because of the number on the tag.

A small, non-random highly skewed sample, dubious methodology, ambiguous results, all the rest of it, used as a foundation for a castle of theorizing! Lotsa math! Big words! Confirms stereotypical ideas! What's not for an Evolutionary Psychologist to love?

Incidentally, Mikes Pace, "neotony" is a rather old, yet still somewhat controversial evolutionary theory. It refers to the retention of child-like features into adulthood in homo sap's evolution-- small noses, smaller frames, less hair, etc. The idea being that such markers would trigger the protracted parent care a human infant needs. Or that it is the side-effect of delayed development. Or that it is an adaptive strategy by dependent women to evoke male protective/supportive instincts that also spilled over onto males. Or something-- it is one of those phenomena that can be used to support pretty much any of your pet theories.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/neotenous

There you go, a word in the dictionary! And it took me one second to find it (granted I am on a T1, but still).

Your insecurity ensures you will never leave me.

Why do the editors allow Kate to post yet another article about a study she never read?

In today's Daily Beast, Casey Schwartz reminds us of a 2005 study

At least this time she actually gives a link to the study which is a start. Congrats here.

According to the study's abstract, the hypothesis "that men who feel either poor or hungry prefer heavier women than men who feel rich or full" was confirmed.

But than she does not bother to actually read it. She reads the abstract. The study cost 35 bucks is Salon really that hard up that it can not afford the 35 bucks?

Since I don't know if "fairly substantially" here means a margin of 5 pounds or 30, I'm not sure exactly how much I should boggle, but boggle I shall.

Of course your going to "boggle" about something you do not understand when you could have spent 35 dollars to find out or picked up the phone and asked Nelson about. Dr. Nelson office number is 858-822-7472 and his email is ldnelson@ucsd.edu. I am sure he would be more than happy to conduct an interview with you.

hat makes somewhat more intuitive sense to me, if I consider the pressure men still feel to be providers. When times are good, they're confident they can take care of a more, um, neotenous woman. When times are rough, they want a woman who can shift for her own damn self. The problem is, we're once again dealing with "ultra-thin margins." Would anyone not being paid to research it really notice a difference in eye height between different Playboy centerfolds?

If the question is, is it a conscious decision than probably not. But if the question is, are there examples of people changing their taste and behavior in times of economic hardship that is a big hell yes. Comfort foods become more popular. Underdog stories sell more. The list goes on. So in the playboy example it is reasonable that issues that feature women that are closer to the mean sell more. That is because the fantasy of what is attainable has come closer to reality. To use a crude rating scale when the mag is selling perfect 10s you can fantasize that you can date her if you have a nice enough job. When you don't have that job anymore it is hard to imagine you will date her killing the fantasy.

Nope, says Schwartz. She failed to find anecdotal support for the idea that a recession might make men attracted to more mature-looking, larger women than usual.

Now its time for total derailment. Because a writer could not find 1 case of a guy turning into a chubby chaser the results most be false. I am assuming that the writer lives and works in New York so it is not all that surprising she has not found one. Her circle of acquittance are Investment bankers, artiest and other college types and as hard hit as wall street has been, they still are for the most part well off. Anyways asking someone is not the right technique to find this information, what needs to be done is the use of pictures.

And for once, the anecdata might just trump the scientific research, for all practical purposes.

Nope it never does. Because you do not understand scientific research or well research of any kind does not mean it can. What this research shows if it holds is that there is a sizable number of men that change preference in hard times. That does not mean that there is not exceptions as you will find that there is not a single piece of social science research that applies to all people just trends that affect a sizable portion.

women who don't meet that standard are out there falling in love every dingdang day. It's almost as though attraction were a highly individual thing, regardless of the relationship between environmental resources and models' cheek chubbiness. Go figure.

Where to begin. An individual can fall in love with someone that is not there ideal. To use a three examples. A women can have the image of Tom Brady as her ideal, a handsome successful, rich young man but her actual chances of dating let alone meeting him are rare and she can fall in love with a roofer or substitute teacher. A mans ideal might be Gabriel Union or Scarlett Johanson but again he can fall in love with the average looking girl at the coffee shop. Or the best example of all, around 95 percent of men are attracted to women and 95 percent of women are attracted to men and yet lesbians fall in love with other women and gays fall in love with other men. So if I go to boystown and did and talked to a few people I could prove that over half the men are gay.

This research is about finding common traits in a population to explain an individuals behavior. It is in its infancy but it has a very solid foundation namely evolution. Since evolution is the best model common traits in the population should have a common source and that trait would have had to have a relationship to the environment. This field is going to have a lot of dead ends but it is about finding a better understanding of our traits.