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Originally Posted by CoolBee 
Young men on the whole chose a hot- looking, blonde, bubbly type as someone to be their girlfriend, but a more 'mumsy' looking type as potential wife material.
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It would seem that both guys and girl has this thing going on where they separate "dream bf/gf" from "dream husband/wife", dream boyfriend often being the hot adventurous stud and dream husband less interesting and less handsome guy. It often has something to do with their insecurities, since people often assume that hot people who are hit on everyday won't make good wives/husbands because they should be more inclined to cheat with all those opportunities flowing. I find this to be non-sense, though, and my dream boyfriend and dream husband is the same person (..and definitely hot!)
Quote:
Originally Posted by CoolBee
As someone who has been obese, I did have the misfortune to have someone I thought of as a good friend who I overheard one day (I came to the top of a staircase unexpectedly - she was giving forth below  ) telling some male friends of mine that she liked hanging out with me because it made her look slim. She got dumped soon after by me and one of the guy friends asked me why on earth I was friends with her (though he didn't know I had overheard her and he didn't tell me what she had said). |
That's called a contrast principle, where if you see one girl who is good looking and another who is obese, you will perceive the good looking one as more attractive than you'd if she would be with a similarly good looking friend. I would say that girls who do that should sort out their own self-confidence issues and stop being bitches, though..
Quote:
Originally Posted by CoolBee
I do just want to ask if you know of many very obese women in the UK or US who are in high positions in companies or government? I ask because my experience of the UK is that very obese women are very rarely found high up the trees because they won't push themselves forward because they know for sure people are looking at them with judgement thinking "look at the state of that, she obviously can't control herself in the face of a batch of cream buns, how dare she presume to have any opinions whatsoever".
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I'll probably sound like a horrible person, but..
There really is a lot of hidden issues when it comes to obese women in high positions. There are people who are obese due to an illness, but I'm not talking about these cases now, ok? In general, you can read a lot from obesity. First, if a person is obese (I mean obese, not 5kg overweight), they clearly don't regard their health as important, which consequently often signals that they have a poor self-image and are not very serious about their own well-being. Second, the discipline issue is not that far away from the truth, because I don't think that there are many people who make a conscious choice to stay obese although they have all the discipline and anything else they'd need to get in shape. Third, obesity often comes from excessive food consumption (..I remember I asked why so obese people in US stay obese, because it's just plain dangerous health-wise and my american friend explained me that they think that "it's genetic" and continue to eat those enormous supersize junk portions we don't even have in Europe) and excessive food consumption signalizes unresolved emotional issues. When you add all this together, it isn't really the image of most desirable CEO for a company, is it? It doesn't even have to be true about that particular person, but because it's true in general, most people will get similar impression.
Now, all that aside, there's also the halo effect thing that we can't run away from. It's simple: if you have a good looking woman making a sales presentation and an obese woman making the same presentation, majority of people will automatically find the presentation made by hottie more interesting, better researched and more convincing. Companies make their living from employing persuasion tactics and they're very well aware of how good looks influence people's decisions. Also, it's true not only when it comes to an actual promotion: a good looking woman with a nice personality will find it easier to climb career ladders because people will unconsciously like her more than an obese woman with a nice personality, hence more doors will be open to her.
I think that although women are judged more harshly for their looks, the same thing will be true for men as well. I assume that if we will have a handsome guy and an obese guy who have similar qualifications and character traits, the handsome guy will progress in his career faster than the obese guy. We can see that in the president example and he was far less qualified than his competitors.
I think that importance of looks decline when people get older, though. My assumption is that people will judge an obese woman who is 40 less than an obese woman who is 20, because it's generally expected that older people don't look that hot and it can be simply written down to their age.
I don't want to sound judgmental, though, I'm simply sharing my observations from the persuasive psychology perspective
