She Told Women How To Look Sexier. I Have the Data on That.
I had 3,000 people rank body types of men and women, so I'm a bit of a hotness expert myself.
Because I’m pathologically afraid of disagreement, I don’t often rebut Substack essays, but my hope here is that the rebuttal will be viewed as a thoughtful reflection with some helpful data (and free promotion, hah) as opposed to a catfight (or, how this is more realistically going to be perceived, cope from a bitter old hag with small tits).
Okay, hold up. What am I talking about? Aria Schrecker wrote a fairly viral essay about how women can get sexier (or in other words, looksmaxx) specifically to find a husband. As a nerd who has no qualms talking about sexual attraction in a relatively callous way (I have a whole spreadsheet of my waist-hip measurements, because I am insane) I’ve written about this kind of thing too.
Some people took issue with Aria’s article for being too shallow or putting too much onus on women to look good for men. But that’s not my issue with it. There are probably women out there who want to look sexier, and there’s nothing wrong with giving them some tips and tricks if they have somehow missed the memo that men like long hair and natural-looking makeup. So no, I am not offended or aghast at the vanity of it all. I just…factually disagree with some of the conclusions drawn.
Overall, Aria’s essay was about 70% correct—or, at the very least, her baseline assumptions were correct. Yes, men (generally) prefer long hair on women. Yes, men (generally) prefer slim women. And men unanimously prefer clear skin, because last I checked, nobody has an acne fetish (okay, I’ll ask Aella, I’m sure someone out there has an acne fetish.) But some things veered into weird, unsubstantiated territory. For example, she asserts that the ideal woman’s measurements are 39-24-39, and admits this ratio is very rarely found in nature. She is probably correct, broadly speaking, and those are the measurements I’d probably choose for myself if I magically could, although I wouldn’t get plastic surgery to achieve it (she advises women to get boob jobs and go on GLP-1s). However, she goes a step further: if it’s possible to be even curvier than this (ie: Kim Kardashian) you should aim for that instead. There is apparently no maximum on curves, as long as you aren’t fat.
She even advises women never to get a breast reduction no matter how enormous, saggy or uncomfortable their breasts are. She also affirms that all men—yes, including highly-educated, upper class men—prefer large anime-size breasts with basically no maximum (which again, is why you should never get a breast reduction.)
But about a month ago, I did a survey on digitally generated male and female body types, and asked 3,000 people of different genders, ages, sexualities and political orientations to tell me which bodies they found appealing. They had three options: yes, no or “this is my type” for bodies that they found especially appealing. I’ve been sitting on this data for a while, waiting for a moment where it made sense to share, and I think this is that moment!
First of all, let’s talk about the top female body type for straight men, based not only on overall acceptance rate but on the proportion of men who said “this is my type.”
