Dear Lord, you’d hope these people could get a clue occasionally.
This included people from an urban area, a village with television access and a village with little television access.
And it was found that the highest Body Mass Index (BMI) preferences were found in the village with the least media access, while those living in urban areas preferred thinner female bodies.
Dr Martin Tovee, co-leader on the research and a reader in visual cognition at Newcastle University’s Institute of Neuroscience, said: “Our study shows that television is having a significant impact on what people think is the ideal woman’s body.
“Nicaragua provides a unique opportunity to study media effects as we were able to minimise variance in potential confounding factors and focus on the influence of visual media.
“The differences in television access allowed us to explore how media exposure affects the size and shape women aspire to be.
“Findings revealed that the more television exposure people receive, the thinner a female body women and men prefer – the amount of media access directly predicts body ideals.
“Overall these results strongly implicate television access in establishing risk factors for body image dissatisfaction.”
Farmers prefer heftier women, eh? Who would have guessed it?
That would explain why the USA and Britain, the residents of which are seemingly addicted to television, are populated by slim, heavenly beauties whereas in backward countries like Russia where satellite TV is seldom to be found the womenfolk are fat heifers who knock over furniture when dancing in clubs.
Uh-huh.
Farmers favour “use over ornament”, as my granny would have put it.
Or Sir Terry: “What a farmer looks for in a wife is the ability to carry a pig under each arm while kicking a wolf.”
Your Central American Indian is a squat cove anyway.
In Nicaragua, well, how does one put this delicately? Some large percentage of the population is of African origin and some other percentage of the population is of European origin. I am pretty sure that the former are more likely to be rural and the latter more likely to be urban.
Now if only we had any evidence about what men of African origin liked in a woman …..
Also: does this mean that the way to get slim and pretty is to watch TV?
It does seem to imply that watching TV helps fight the obesity epidemic.
Perhaps it’s all that advice on healthy eating.
And the purpose of this study is somehow something other than getting Dr. Martin and co off on a South American jaunt for a few weeks or months?
Pat – “It does seem to imply that watching TV helps fight the obesity epidemic.”
It must be the telenovelas. I doubt the Nicaraguans are getting much lecturing from the government about diet. But they are probably getting a lot of younger Salma Hayek or look-alikes.
So clearly the solution is more Salma Hayek. It may work, it may not. At least it will be fun for all the family. And obesity is a national crisis so do you want to take the risk?
SMFS said
In Nicaragua, well, how does one put this delicately? Some large percentage of the population is of African origin and some other percentage of the population is of European origin.
Not quite. Wikipedia says:
The majority of the Nicaraguan population are Mestizos (mixed Amerindian and European), roughly 69%. 17% of European origin. About 9% of Nicaragua’s population are black
Isn’t it more likely that TV is to blame but not for the reasons they think?
The farmer without TV wants a wife that can get some work done which is generally not the stick. He gets laid because there is nothing else to do at the end of the day.
The lard ass watching TV glances at his lard ass lazy wife during the viagra commercial and thinks, “If only my wife looked like the twigs on TV maybe I wouldn’t need viagra to get laid.” Lard ass wife just wants to get laid and the twigs never appear to have that problem.
Nicas, especially the women, tend to be plumper, shorter and generally more Mesoamerican-looking than Ticos, who basically look like Europeans (because they are). I can walk around the shopping mall near my office for 15 minutes and see three dozen absolute heartbreakers, and none of ’em will be Nicaraguan. Sad, but them’s the breaks.
SMFS: Nicaragua is a socialist republic. Of course it hectors its citizens about what they should eat, along with so, so much more. The Nicas might blithely ignore the impertinence, but since when has that stopped a Lefty?
The same used to be said about Afrikaners, and why they have traditionally preferred large women: “Somebody has to pull the wagon when the oxen get sick.”
This is why you are my favourite vaguely libertarian classical liberal Tim. I find out that Kim du Toit is still out there, and still one of the best deals value-for-word wise around.
Kim- if you see this- I wonder if a compilation of your weblog essays on softcocks and the problems they cause would sell, and if it’d be worth having the Eye of Marx turned on you again. It seems like it might be worth a go.