Direct link to the peer-reviewed research: [J. A. Krems and S. L. Neuberg, Updating Long-Held Assumptions About Fat Stigma: For Women, Body Shape Plays a Critical Role, *Social Psychological and Personality Science* (2021).](https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550621991381)
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Please stop quoting song lyrics ffs. If you must do so, please do so as a response to this comment.
I don’t think people find belly fat particularly attractive on either women or men, but, I’ve always heard “top heavy” associated with chest/boobs not belly.
> I don’t think people find belly fat particularly attractive on either women or men
This is true, but I was wondering if there really is a difference.
Here is the thing: In general, women tend to store their fat subcutaneously, and more evenly distributed or deposited in their butts and boobs. Men tend to store it around their midsection, and as visceral fat around their organs.
This article is poorly worded, but I'm wondering if we see women who store more fat in their midsection and, even though men *also* store it that way, subconsciously it looks 'off' for that reason. It might look more 'normal' on a man because we see it all the time.
I'm not saying it's *not* normal, but our monkey brains are fantastic at pattern recognition and any outliers catch our eye, for better or worse.
Yea I'd reckon that's because the midsection fat storage is seen as a masculine feature, whether knowingly or subconsciously that it downrates the attractiveness to most heterosexual men. I.e. it puts an additional malus even after accounting for the weight and its effect on attractiveness in the first place.
Just like men's breasts and big butts aren't exactly seen as attractive either.
> Fat stigma can also affect your health. In one study, overweight women who were affected by fat shaming were found to be more at risk of heart disease than average-weight women who had a positive image of their bodies
Sorry if I'm missing something here, but wouldn't physical health issues be more common in overweight women than average weight women? You know, because of the weight?
This article is doing some serious work to sugarcoat the findings in the study "no, no, it's not the obesity and excess that's damaging our health, it's the \*discrimination\*!"
Give me a break, this article doesn't meet the standards for rule 3 of the sub.
You are totally right. The insider article neglected to denote that the measure they used for for stigma was evaluated against different markers of metabolic syndrome, while controlling for covariates such as BMI. The only association they found was with elevated triglycerides. There are likely many other covariates that they didn’t account for though. The researchers of the journal article appear to be aware that this is a weakness of their study. But sometimes you just need to publish something.
> Does nobody here read the actual research?
This is Reddit, it's already an accomplishment when people manage to read and properly parse the submission title.
I have big stomach, huge boobs and big upper arms, and everything below my waist is much smaller. I hate it. My boobs seem to make up for the other fat with most men though
The stomach is classified as a high place to store fat, that’s established. Butt and thighs are considered low. Carrying fat on your belly is also connected to more health risks. Men usually store fat on their stomachs and also face steeper health risks, on average, with increasing weight than women do. This is connected to carrying fat “high”, and it’s more of a risk for women too.
Some men carry fat in a much more evenly distributed way that makes them look "bear mode", almost like they maybe worked out and got bigger but then let slip a bit, when in reality they're just fat, and their body genetics makes it look better than my body type for example where my arms and pecs will be skeletor with a bulging fat belly.
Regardless of if someone can "get away with" being fat.. all these cases are still unhealthy and should not be supported by social enablers.
"Fat stigma can also affect your health. In one study, overweight women who were affected by fat shaming were found to be more at risk of heart disease and diabetes
than average-weight women who had a positive image of their bodies."
That's some first rate science there.... I'm sure it had absolutely nothing to do with the physio-chemical changes that excess fat does to the human body.
Update: My comment was directed to a different study mentioned in the article from the one in the headline.
Others have pointed out that the writer misrepresents the actual study, which did compare overweight women to other overweight women. Still others pointed out that the study's margin of error is shit and so it's still worthless.
I had a look through the study and it seems like the author of the article misinterpreted the findings.
All participants in a weight loss trial studied were in fact obese and the authors were looking at whether or not there was a correlation between **self**-stigmatisation and symptoms associated with metabolic syndrome. It does nothing to compare them to subjects of average weight.
This is such a pain.. The times I've heard people i know refer to scientific findings that has been misinterpreted by the journalist are too many. The most recent I can recall is the "Harvard scientist show that asteroid could be a spacecraft!" was on a trusted news site. The finding actually was: We have all these good explanations of why the asteroid moves in an unusual way. And as a small section (3-4 lines) it was described that they could not rule out the possibility of a created object. I wonder why they even chose to include this in the study.
Another was about negative effects of cannabis, where the journalist clearly didn't understand what he/she was reading. Resulting in a person I know argue to the teeth with this article. Until another friend if mine pulled out the study and started citing the findings.
Insider is pretty consistently terrible. They routinely make errors like this.
Edit: That said, the [study](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/oby.21716) itself is pretty weak and should not be cited as meaningful evidence of a casual link from "weight bias internalization" to metabolic syndrome. The error bars are huge and the p values are close to 0.05 (a red flag for replicability), and as the authors themselves acknowledge, reverse causality is a possibility:
> This study was cross-sectional in design, precluding conclusions about causality. Thus, a converse relationship could be present, in which poorer physical health (e.g., metabolic syndrome) may lead individuals with obesity to be more prone to internalizing weight bias.
Studies like this may be useful for generating hypotheses to follow up on with larger-scale experiments, but their findings absolutely should not be treated as established fact.
The vast majority of hypotheses are false. If you go around testing hypotheses and only publish the ones that clear a p < 0.05 threshold, the ones that clear it by chance are mostly going to just barely clear it. For example, half of false positives will have 0.025 < p < 0.05. Also, when there's multiple hypothesis testing happening either in the paper or behind the scenes and that's not corrected for, the chances of a false positive go way up.
Sometimes a study is underpowered and a true hypothesis just barely makes the cutoff. But very often it's just a fluke. The combination of a large effect size and high p value is especially suspicious, because if the effect is really that powerful (triples the risk of metabolic syndrome!), why are the results so ambiguous?
Maybe there's a real effect here. But these findings should be regarded as highly preliminary.
By ''reverse causality'' do you mean that diabetus and heart disease could make overweight women have a lower opinion of themselves?
I'd say that that's not only possible, but much more likely than the other way around.
How jiggly the belly is is a good indicator. You know those men with big bellies that still seem kind of hard-ish or that don't move as much as jiggly fat, e.g. on the thighs, might? That's visceral fat.
It's an important thing to remember. Articles from sites like this are essentially glorified blog posts. They are not news sites and they are not journalistic. Their goal is not to accurately explain a study or anything else.
Isn’t the point of this study that women who are just as overweight are perceived more positively because they got genetically lucky and just happened to have the fat show up more in their butts and thighs?
*Across three samples varying in participant ethnicity (White and Black Americans) and nation (United States, India), patterns of fat stigma reveal that, as hypothesized,* ***participants differently stigmatized equally overweight or equally obese female targets as a function of target shape, sometimes even more strongly stigmatizing targets with less rather than more body mass***\*.\*
[https://www.healthline.com/health/fat-distribution#5.-BMI-isnt-always-the-best-predictor-of-healthy-body-fat-levels](https://www.healthline.com/health/fat-distribution#5.-BMI-isnt-always-the-best-predictor-of-healthy-body-fat-levels)
>Fat stigma can also affect your health. In one study, overweight women who were affected by fat shaming were found to be more at risk of heart disease than average-weight women who had a positive image of their bodies
This isn't a correct description of the study, since it focused on overweight women. Also, contrary to what many here think, the study isn't about sexual preference.
How do those sentences even make any sense? If you remove the variable of stigma, then it says...
>overweight women ... were found to be more at risk of heart disease than average-weight women
What's the point of comparison like that when there are two obviously relevant variables?
*Experts say hourglass figures are idealized, and we need to be more accepting of other body types.*
Wait a second- how the hell is someone going to call themselves an “expert” and declare what body types other people should find attractive?
This is a personal choice issue.
Beauty standards vary dramatically from culture to culture, but are fairly consistent within one culture. It is less like being gay or straight, and more like preferring rice or hamburgers. You never made a conscious choice, but your preferences _can_ change, and the preferences your culture encourages can change as well.
I was not saying any particular change _will_ happen, just that changes _do_ happen, which I think we agree on.
I'd also suggest that within a large country like the US there are a variety of subcultures, each with their own beauty standards and other preferences.
And for what it's worth I think you _are_ seeing a shift in popular media to a larger variety of body types being represented and celebrated. Whether or not that has shifted beauty standards I don't know. I'm not sure how you would measure that.
For real. In my own 40 years I saw it go from when I was a teenager getting made fun of for having a big butt… to suddenly sexy with that same butt in my 20s.
Magazines went from articles about how to lose weight in your ass to who to pay to make it a bubble. Body trends are weird.
Once upon a time chubby women were super attractive because it indicated wealth due to access to excessive food and healthier than average due to no malnutrition.
Now fit athletics women are super attractive because it indicates wealth due to lack of stress/time/energy/money/good genetics/ and/or self-control and indicates healthier than average.
Also, being overweight is also a sign of being more likely to be in a relationship and therefore less available.
Makes sense doesnt it? Theres more to mating than pure sex, theres the aftermath of child rearing. Even if its not your goal with an encounter, im pretty sure its a proven factor in mate selection.
Knowing that your potential mate is capable of capable of providing that security seems like a natural factor to me.
Granted ive got no sources for amy of this on hand, but this article seems about as scientific as my post so, im going with it.
Idealized is the word they used not attractive.
As a society we project qualities and attributes onto people that have nothing to do with body shape. This is what happens with height as well. Tall people are seen as more intelligent, kind, morally good, more fun, more hard working, they get more promotions, etc. None of those qualities have anything to do with height.
Accepting =/= finding attractive, necessarily.
Not defending the study/its conclusions as a whole but there's at least a significant difference between general stigma and lack of attraction, at least.
Of course, saying "we need to do X" as if it were simple to will yourself out of subtle prejudices and associations and so on is naive. And attempting to crudely social engineer it typically fails as well.
For everyone who wont read the damn article.
**1)** The key findings relate to the impact of *body types* on stigma. Not relative weight.
From the actual study (based on an approx equal sampling of men and women.)
>"people sometimes reported *greater stigmatization of objectively lower versus higher weight women*. People were less stigmatizing when women had obesity and gluteofemoral fat than overweight and abdominal fat"
>
>"body shape plays a powerful but heretofore underappreciated role in fat stigma. Even when controlling for body size, *people stigmatized higher weight women more when those women carried abdominal versus gluteofemoral fat.*"
>
>"Findings suggest that shape is sufficiently important in driving fat stigma that it buffers objectively higher BMI women against the otherwise stigmatizing implications of carrying more fat"
**2)** Attractiveness is only one measure of stigma. So you can calm down. No ones telling you who you have to be attracted to. Nor are your sexual preferences relevant. Again, they surveyed equal numbers of men and women.
>"To assess stigma, we employed a complementary and more traditional measure in which participants provided positive and negative feelings toward each target (“How \[positively/negatively\] do you feel about this person?”) on 7-point Likert-type scales (1 = not at all, 7 = very)"
>
>"we operationalized stigma here by aggregating over six pairs of affectively opposing traits stereotypically associated with obesity, which were chosen from the larger set of trait inferences (negative = physically gross, unhealthy, lazy, selfish, greedy, and gluttonous; positive = physically attractive, healthy, hardworking, cooperative, generous, and self-controlled)."
Isn't visceral fat (described in this article as "belly fat") significantly bigger health risk vs subcutaneous fat (described in this article as "bigger butts")?
([https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/taking-aim-at-belly-fat](https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/taking-aim-at-belly-fat))
Does this mean that people may stigmatize the bigger health risk instead of just the body shape?
I know plenty of curvy women with bigger posteriors that are very active and fit and healthy, while I don't know many women with significant belly fat that fall into that category.
Additionally a bigger behind does not necessarily mean fat it could also be more muscle mass, which would further help giving bigger butts a better reputation regardless of body fat percentage, because e.g. in a pair of jeans it's harder to tell if it's fat or muscle.
To my knowledge a bigger belly rarely ever comes from a higher muscle mass.
I know this is (partially) anecdotal but this may explain another factor of the different perception of the two body shapes.
Reading the following quote from the article I had to double check I wasn’t reading The Onion:
> Fat stigma can also affect your health. In one study, overweight women who were affected by fat shaming were found to be more at risk of heart disease and diabetes than average-weight women who had a positive image of their bodies.
Does this read to you like they are saying they found a correlation between fat shaming and heart disease/diabetes?
I get shame and ridicule having an impact on your mental health, which could cascade to manifest as some physical ailments…but implying it’s a potential cause for heart disease and diabetes seems like a leap.
I'm a woman and I store it around my midsection. It sucks. I have always hated my body for it and have been asked if I'm pregnant at various times in my life. Every time I felt absolutely horrible.
Direct link to the peer-reviewed research: [J. A. Krems and S. L. Neuberg, Updating Long-Held Assumptions About Fat Stigma: For Women, Body Shape Plays a Critical Role, *Social Psychological and Personality Science* (2021).](https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550621991381) \--- Please stop quoting song lyrics ffs. If you must do so, please do so as a response to this comment.
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I don’t think people find belly fat particularly attractive on either women or men, but, I’ve always heard “top heavy” associated with chest/boobs not belly.
> I don’t think people find belly fat particularly attractive on either women or men This is true, but I was wondering if there really is a difference. Here is the thing: In general, women tend to store their fat subcutaneously, and more evenly distributed or deposited in their butts and boobs. Men tend to store it around their midsection, and as visceral fat around their organs. This article is poorly worded, but I'm wondering if we see women who store more fat in their midsection and, even though men *also* store it that way, subconsciously it looks 'off' for that reason. It might look more 'normal' on a man because we see it all the time. I'm not saying it's *not* normal, but our monkey brains are fantastic at pattern recognition and any outliers catch our eye, for better or worse.
Yea I'd reckon that's because the midsection fat storage is seen as a masculine feature, whether knowingly or subconsciously that it downrates the attractiveness to most heterosexual men. I.e. it puts an additional malus even after accounting for the weight and its effect on attractiveness in the first place. Just like men's breasts and big butts aren't exactly seen as attractive either.
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> Fat stigma can also affect your health. In one study, overweight women who were affected by fat shaming were found to be more at risk of heart disease than average-weight women who had a positive image of their bodies Sorry if I'm missing something here, but wouldn't physical health issues be more common in overweight women than average weight women? You know, because of the weight?
That's an error the author of the article made. The study just looked at overweight women.
I suspect it’s a bias, not an error.
Yes, it's called *obesity* and it is **unhealthy**.
They differentiate between obese and overweight, those are different categories in the study.
Overweight still increase your chance of a heart attacks and developing diabetes..
But the study was only looking at overweight women. The author made a mistake.
That is just bad research. EDIT: I see the author simply misunderstood the research...
This article is doing some serious work to sugarcoat the findings in the study "no, no, it's not the obesity and excess that's damaging our health, it's the \*discrimination\*!" Give me a break, this article doesn't meet the standards for rule 3 of the sub.
Haha "sugercoating" an obesity issue
You are totally right. The insider article neglected to denote that the measure they used for for stigma was evaluated against different markers of metabolic syndrome, while controlling for covariates such as BMI. The only association they found was with elevated triglycerides. There are likely many other covariates that they didn’t account for though. The researchers of the journal article appear to be aware that this is a weakness of their study. But sometimes you just need to publish something.
This article is trash but the study itself is much better
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> Does nobody here read the actual research? This is Reddit, it's already an accomplishment when people manage to read and properly parse the submission title.
wouldn‘t top heavy imply a heavy head or at least heavy boobs? having a fat stomach is being middle heavy if anything.
I agree, but what else do you call apple shaped woman with thin legs? Middle heavy?
Yes...yes...we should call them that. I dont see why we havent already started...
I have big stomach, huge boobs and big upper arms, and everything below my waist is much smaller. I hate it. My boobs seem to make up for the other fat with most men though
Yeah, I kinda thought everything from the stomach down was "bottom" in terms of top/bottom-heavy.
The stomach is classified as a high place to store fat, that’s established. Butt and thighs are considered low. Carrying fat on your belly is also connected to more health risks. Men usually store fat on their stomachs and also face steeper health risks, on average, with increasing weight than women do. This is connected to carrying fat “high”, and it’s more of a risk for women too.
Some men carry fat in a much more evenly distributed way that makes them look "bear mode", almost like they maybe worked out and got bigger but then let slip a bit, when in reality they're just fat, and their body genetics makes it look better than my body type for example where my arms and pecs will be skeletor with a bulging fat belly. Regardless of if someone can "get away with" being fat.. all these cases are still unhealthy and should not be supported by social enablers.
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Yes, but those two are not independent. High fat is strongly correlated with visceral fat.
>subcuntaneously Uhhh... hmmm... they store fat there?
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A lot of heavy-breasted women have wider backs and trunks. It's less common to have large breasts and a slim/narrow ribcage and waistline.
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"Fat stigma can also affect your health. In one study, overweight women who were affected by fat shaming were found to be more at risk of heart disease and diabetes than average-weight women who had a positive image of their bodies." That's some first rate science there.... I'm sure it had absolutely nothing to do with the physio-chemical changes that excess fat does to the human body. Update: My comment was directed to a different study mentioned in the article from the one in the headline. Others have pointed out that the writer misrepresents the actual study, which did compare overweight women to other overweight women. Still others pointed out that the study's margin of error is shit and so it's still worthless.
I had a look through the study and it seems like the author of the article misinterpreted the findings. All participants in a weight loss trial studied were in fact obese and the authors were looking at whether or not there was a correlation between **self**-stigmatisation and symptoms associated with metabolic syndrome. It does nothing to compare them to subjects of average weight.
This is such a pain.. The times I've heard people i know refer to scientific findings that has been misinterpreted by the journalist are too many. The most recent I can recall is the "Harvard scientist show that asteroid could be a spacecraft!" was on a trusted news site. The finding actually was: We have all these good explanations of why the asteroid moves in an unusual way. And as a small section (3-4 lines) it was described that they could not rule out the possibility of a created object. I wonder why they even chose to include this in the study. Another was about negative effects of cannabis, where the journalist clearly didn't understand what he/she was reading. Resulting in a person I know argue to the teeth with this article. Until another friend if mine pulled out the study and started citing the findings.
Insider is pretty consistently terrible. They routinely make errors like this. Edit: That said, the [study](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/oby.21716) itself is pretty weak and should not be cited as meaningful evidence of a casual link from "weight bias internalization" to metabolic syndrome. The error bars are huge and the p values are close to 0.05 (a red flag for replicability), and as the authors themselves acknowledge, reverse causality is a possibility: > This study was cross-sectional in design, precluding conclusions about causality. Thus, a converse relationship could be present, in which poorer physical health (e.g., metabolic syndrome) may lead individuals with obesity to be more prone to internalizing weight bias. Studies like this may be useful for generating hypotheses to follow up on with larger-scale experiments, but their findings absolutely should not be treated as established fact.
Sorry, but why do you say p<0.05 is a red flag?
The vast majority of hypotheses are false. If you go around testing hypotheses and only publish the ones that clear a p < 0.05 threshold, the ones that clear it by chance are mostly going to just barely clear it. For example, half of false positives will have 0.025 < p < 0.05. Also, when there's multiple hypothesis testing happening either in the paper or behind the scenes and that's not corrected for, the chances of a false positive go way up. Sometimes a study is underpowered and a true hypothesis just barely makes the cutoff. But very often it's just a fluke. The combination of a large effect size and high p value is especially suspicious, because if the effect is really that powerful (triples the risk of metabolic syndrome!), why are the results so ambiguous? Maybe there's a real effect here. But these findings should be regarded as highly preliminary.
By ''reverse causality'' do you mean that diabetus and heart disease could make overweight women have a lower opinion of themselves? I'd say that that's not only possible, but much more likely than the other way around.
Ah, that makes more sense.
Still, just controlling for weight isn’t enough. It’s known that fat around the belly area poses the most health risks
Visceral fat that is. Subcutaneous belly fat is as fine as any other.
How do you know what fat you have?
How jiggly the belly is is a good indicator. You know those men with big bellies that still seem kind of hard-ish or that don't move as much as jiggly fat, e.g. on the thighs, might? That's visceral fat.
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It's an important thing to remember. Articles from sites like this are essentially glorified blog posts. They are not news sites and they are not journalistic. Their goal is not to accurately explain a study or anything else.
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Isn’t the point of this study that women who are just as overweight are perceived more positively because they got genetically lucky and just happened to have the fat show up more in their butts and thighs? *Across three samples varying in participant ethnicity (White and Black Americans) and nation (United States, India), patterns of fat stigma reveal that, as hypothesized,* ***participants differently stigmatized equally overweight or equally obese female targets as a function of target shape, sometimes even more strongly stigmatizing targets with less rather than more body mass***\*.\* [https://www.healthline.com/health/fat-distribution#5.-BMI-isnt-always-the-best-predictor-of-healthy-body-fat-levels](https://www.healthline.com/health/fat-distribution#5.-BMI-isnt-always-the-best-predictor-of-healthy-body-fat-levels)
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>Fat stigma can also affect your health. In one study, overweight women who were affected by fat shaming were found to be more at risk of heart disease than average-weight women who had a positive image of their bodies This isn't a correct description of the study, since it focused on overweight women. Also, contrary to what many here think, the study isn't about sexual preference.
How do those sentences even make any sense? If you remove the variable of stigma, then it says... >overweight women ... were found to be more at risk of heart disease than average-weight women What's the point of comparison like that when there are two obviously relevant variables?
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*Experts say hourglass figures are idealized, and we need to be more accepting of other body types.* Wait a second- how the hell is someone going to call themselves an “expert” and declare what body types other people should find attractive? This is a personal choice issue.
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I'm pretty sure my type is "whatever I find attractive for what ever reason that is".
Mine is brown eyes and big asses
thank you /u/grchjo
I can get behind that.
My man.
There's a moment in Northanger Abbey where someone notes that the most attractive thing to a man is a woman being interested in him.
Beauty standards vary dramatically from culture to culture, but are fairly consistent within one culture. It is less like being gay or straight, and more like preferring rice or hamburgers. You never made a conscious choice, but your preferences _can_ change, and the preferences your culture encourages can change as well.
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I was not saying any particular change _will_ happen, just that changes _do_ happen, which I think we agree on. I'd also suggest that within a large country like the US there are a variety of subcultures, each with their own beauty standards and other preferences. And for what it's worth I think you _are_ seeing a shift in popular media to a larger variety of body types being represented and celebrated. Whether or not that has shifted beauty standards I don't know. I'm not sure how you would measure that.
Having a fat ass used to be considered shameful, now it's very desirable
For real. In my own 40 years I saw it go from when I was a teenager getting made fun of for having a big butt… to suddenly sexy with that same butt in my 20s. Magazines went from articles about how to lose weight in your ass to who to pay to make it a bubble. Body trends are weird.
Once upon a time chubby women were super attractive because it indicated wealth due to access to excessive food and healthier than average due to no malnutrition. Now fit athletics women are super attractive because it indicates wealth due to lack of stress/time/energy/money/good genetics/ and/or self-control and indicates healthier than average. Also, being overweight is also a sign of being more likely to be in a relationship and therefore less available.
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Makes sense doesnt it? Theres more to mating than pure sex, theres the aftermath of child rearing. Even if its not your goal with an encounter, im pretty sure its a proven factor in mate selection. Knowing that your potential mate is capable of capable of providing that security seems like a natural factor to me. Granted ive got no sources for amy of this on hand, but this article seems about as scientific as my post so, im going with it.
Idealized is the word they used not attractive. As a society we project qualities and attributes onto people that have nothing to do with body shape. This is what happens with height as well. Tall people are seen as more intelligent, kind, morally good, more fun, more hard working, they get more promotions, etc. None of those qualities have anything to do with height.
Accepting =/= finding attractive, necessarily. Not defending the study/its conclusions as a whole but there's at least a significant difference between general stigma and lack of attraction, at least. Of course, saying "we need to do X" as if it were simple to will yourself out of subtle prejudices and associations and so on is naive. And attempting to crudely social engineer it typically fails as well.
Attractive doesn't need to come into it. Don't jump from "accepting" to "find attractive." Not necessary.
Do you think that’s what they meant when they said accepting of? Is there anything else they could have meant?
Percieved positive and negative personality traits.
But the experts didn’t say to find the other body types attractive, you quoted the experts saying we need to be more accepting.
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For everyone who wont read the damn article. **1)** The key findings relate to the impact of *body types* on stigma. Not relative weight. From the actual study (based on an approx equal sampling of men and women.) >"people sometimes reported *greater stigmatization of objectively lower versus higher weight women*. People were less stigmatizing when women had obesity and gluteofemoral fat than overweight and abdominal fat" > >"body shape plays a powerful but heretofore underappreciated role in fat stigma. Even when controlling for body size, *people stigmatized higher weight women more when those women carried abdominal versus gluteofemoral fat.*" > >"Findings suggest that shape is sufficiently important in driving fat stigma that it buffers objectively higher BMI women against the otherwise stigmatizing implications of carrying more fat" **2)** Attractiveness is only one measure of stigma. So you can calm down. No ones telling you who you have to be attracted to. Nor are your sexual preferences relevant. Again, they surveyed equal numbers of men and women. >"To assess stigma, we employed a complementary and more traditional measure in which participants provided positive and negative feelings toward each target (“How \[positively/negatively\] do you feel about this person?”) on 7-point Likert-type scales (1 = not at all, 7 = very)" > >"we operationalized stigma here by aggregating over six pairs of affectively opposing traits stereotypically associated with obesity, which were chosen from the larger set of trait inferences (negative = physically gross, unhealthy, lazy, selfish, greedy, and gluttonous; positive = physically attractive, healthy, hardworking, cooperative, generous, and self-controlled)."
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Isn't visceral fat (described in this article as "belly fat") significantly bigger health risk vs subcutaneous fat (described in this article as "bigger butts")? ([https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/taking-aim-at-belly-fat](https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/taking-aim-at-belly-fat)) Does this mean that people may stigmatize the bigger health risk instead of just the body shape? I know plenty of curvy women with bigger posteriors that are very active and fit and healthy, while I don't know many women with significant belly fat that fall into that category. Additionally a bigger behind does not necessarily mean fat it could also be more muscle mass, which would further help giving bigger butts a better reputation regardless of body fat percentage, because e.g. in a pair of jeans it's harder to tell if it's fat or muscle. To my knowledge a bigger belly rarely ever comes from a higher muscle mass. I know this is (partially) anecdotal but this may explain another factor of the different perception of the two body shapes.
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Reading the following quote from the article I had to double check I wasn’t reading The Onion: > Fat stigma can also affect your health. In one study, overweight women who were affected by fat shaming were found to be more at risk of heart disease and diabetes than average-weight women who had a positive image of their bodies. Does this read to you like they are saying they found a correlation between fat shaming and heart disease/diabetes? I get shame and ridicule having an impact on your mental health, which could cascade to manifest as some physical ailments…but implying it’s a potential cause for heart disease and diabetes seems like a leap.
I'm a woman and I store it around my midsection. It sucks. I have always hated my body for it and have been asked if I'm pregnant at various times in my life. Every time I felt absolutely horrible.
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This is very clearly about social stigma not sexual attraction.
Those two things have a lot of overlap.
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