Liking Curvy Women is not a Fetish

Responding to Reader Comments

My analysis of survey data on romantic attitudes towards women has generated quite a few thoughtful comments, both open and private, that really merit a thorough response. Although anyone interested can always check the original post, it can be summarized by saying that people’s attraction towards women can be broken down into five orthogonal, unrelated dimensions regarding:

1. A tradeoff between how much people like slenderness, vs how much they like curves (like large breasts, wide hips, and fat thighs),

2. How much they care about personality and intelligence (which correlated with leftist political values),

3. How much they like outward displays of sexiness, such as high heels, makup, and jewelry (which conservatives liked more than leftists),

4. How much they like youth and fertility, vs how much they like maturity and athleticism (male respondents liked the former more, while female respondents liked the latter more), and

5. How much they value the traditional characteristics of a wife, cook, maid, or babysitter in a woman, (which correlated with rightist political values).

Perhaps it’s no surprise that the relationships with leftism vs conservatism saturated these dimensions, because leftism vs conservatism is the biggest factor of political issues, representing enduring disagreements in personal values. Likewise, the preference for slimness vs curves is the biggest dimension of romantic preferences, representing—or so it seems—enduring disagreements regarding beauty. In other words, the biggest and most contentious issue when it comes to the attractiveness of a woman is whether or not she’s too fat, or too flat:

This is not a scale of women, but—for better or for worse—of the preferences of people attracted to them. Why did I choose these women, though? Twiggy is an icon of thinness, and Sophie Turner is an attractive actress on the thin side. The Internet tells me that Kelly Brook is “The Most Beautiful Woman, According to Science” so whatever, I found a full-body image of her that looks close to the middle of her weight. Ashley Graham was the first plus size model to make the cover of Sports Illustrated. Sophia Rose was the first hit that I got for BBW, while Mary Bobery was the first name that came up on Reddit for SSBBW.

Are Chubby Chasers Really For Real?

A long-time reader said to me in private:

Great job with the survey analysis. One thought I had with the fat admirers: is this preference partly caused by one’s inability to get interest from non-fat women? (Maybe the admirer is fat or lives in one of those American regions with obese majorities.) One may acclimate to fatness or convince oneself that fat is attractive as a cope even as some hypothetical revealed preferences experiment would show otherwise… [I]s it really about what’s available to you in a given society and developing (or just self-reporting) preferences that let you deal with it better? I’m not sure how to test this.

So the first thing I can say in response is that the idea that romantic preferences are influenced by the exigencies of the mating market is reasonable. A general principle in the social sciences is that “If a cause can be imagined, it probably plays some role.”

In this case, however, I think the size of that role is likely to be small. Some of my reasons for saying this relate to my personal experiences, others to things I’ve read, and others to broad societal trends, but taken altogether they paint a very clear picture that there is a deep spectrum that exists at a very basic, instinctive level:

• Some people are totally repelled by cellulite, rolls, turkey neck, and other signs of obesity to the point that they will stringently avoid these in a woman, and don’t care about curves very much at all. They describe the ideal woman as elegant, perfect, delicate, or streamlined.

• Most people look for womanly curves, but also prefer that they go along with a slim waist and some athleticism. Some tend towards prefering thinner women and others tend towards preferring curvier women, but they generally like women who are both slim and curvaceous at the same time.

• Then, some people crave voluptuous breasts, hips, and/or thighs. These people will tolerate signs of obesity like cellulite or belly fat, which they consider somewhat negotiable in a woman. For the most part, they don’t explicitly like fat, but describe the ideal woman as curvy, shapely, or thick. Most tellingly, they seem to show this preference even when there are no constraints whatsoever.

The most obvious way to demonstrate that some people show this preference even in the absence of constraints is to consider pornography, where BBW appears as a top-30 search term.¹

Incidentally, since some of my commenters are mentioning that ethnicity might play a role in attractiveness patterns, I can verify that it does. State-by-state data on the relative frequency of BBW content searches in America² correlates strongly positively with the proportion of the state population identifying as African American (r = 0.64, p < 0.0000005), and moderately negatively with the proportion identifying as Asian (r = -0.49, p < 0.0003).

But this isn’t the entire story. In 2006, a study on 201 respondents in Britain reported,

[T]here are striking differences in attractiveness preferences for female bodies between United Kingdom (UK) Caucasian and South African Zulu observers. These differences can be explained by different local optima for survival and reproduction in the two environments. In the UK, a high body mass is correlated with low health and low fertility, and the converse is true in rural South Africa… Britons of African origin, who were born and who grew up in the UK, have exactly the same preferences as our UK Caucasian observers.³

What appears to be important in the development and maintanence of these preferences is resource scarcity. According to a 2013 article in PLOS One,

two studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that men experiencing relative resource insecurity should perceive larger breast size as more physically attractive than men experiencing resource security. In Study 1, 266 men from three sites in Malaysia varying in relative socioeconomic status (high to low) rated a series of animated figures varying in breast size for physical attractiveness. Results showed that men from the low socioeconomic context rated larger breasts as more attractive than did men from the medium socioeconomic context, who in turn perceived larger breasts as attractive than men from a high socioeconomic context. Study 2 compared the breast size judgements of 66 hungry versus 58 satiated men within the same environmental context in Britain. Results showed that hungry men rated larger breasts as significantly more attractive than satiated men. Taken together, these studies provide evidence that resource security impacts upon men’s attractiveness ratings based on women’s breast size.⁴

In other words, people at the right side of factor 1—that is, people who appreciate curvy women more—are, on the average, poorer and hungrier than people at the left side of factor 1. As an aside, it’s hard not to notice that this creates an unfortunate kind of paradox: Now that we’ve developed food security and surrounded ourselves with mountains of tasty, high-variety foods, we’re less attracted to people in our own societies who have been eating these very same foods. Maybe we’d be better off with just a bit less food, and a bit more attraction to curvier women, if that meant our average attraction to weight met up with our actual average weight. Right now, it seems Westerners’ weight averages have unfortunately overshot their attraction patterns.

But there’s more to the argument that our romantic preferences are not merely a result of settling. I’d also like to point out that factor 1 also shows up in fiction, where these preferences can be observed in writers by looking at their heroines. I’m not going to pretend this is a random sample of authors; I’m just going to look at three writers that I like: Jack Vance, Robert Howard, and Robert Heinlein.

Factor 1 in Fiction

I’ll start out with Jack Vance. Not only is Vance one of my favorite authors, but he’s been known to populate his stories with “waifish love-pixies.” One of his earlier heroines, ZAP-210, is introduced as “older than her underdeveloped figure suggested… anemic and neurasthenic.”⁵ He describes her as a “fairy princess,” and all of her features, “the thin face, the pallor, the fragile bones of jaw and forehead, the straight nose and pale mouth,”⁶ hint at a delicate frame. She has been prevented from developing by her captors; freed from their regimen, she gains some color, but any actual change to her shape is indicated only by a question: “had her body become fuller and rounder?”⁷ That’s enough for Vance.

Robert Howard’s writing provides a clear contrast. Howard’s best known creation is Conan, and Conan’s most noteworthy love interest was Belit. In Queen of the Black Coast, he writes, “She was slender, yet formed like a goddess: at once lithe and voluptuous… untamed as a desert wind, supple and dangerous as a she-panther.”⁸ Here we have a fictional love interest appealing to the more typical preference.

But keep going, and eventually we find authors like Robert Heinlein. Fortunately for us, Heinlein was not an easily embarassed man, because otherwise he might have been a bit more circumspect about his preferences (or more careful about naming his characters). So here’s how he describes the unparalleled beauty of Star from the novel Glory Road:

“Her shoulders were broad for a woman, as broad as her very female hips; her waist might have seemed thick on a lesser woman…”⁹ You may read this differently, but to me it seems like a careful way of saying Star really has got a bit of a belly, but it’s OK because she’s so voluptuous. And regarding her breasts, well, “only her big rib cage could carry such large ones without appearing too much of a good thing.”¹⁰ This is a woman in proportion, but the proportions are definitely large.

(Also, I am hesitant to mention another Heinlein character with even larger proportions, but, well, in case you’re thinking Star was a fluke, there’s also Deety.)

Is Heinlein merely settling for a fat woman in fiction because he can’t imagine someone thinner? Is he unable to get a date in a competitive marriage market? (Possibly relevant: He married three times.)

Now I should stress that, how much of these writer’s romantic preferences really, genuinely made it into their fiction is questionable, given that they were all writing for money and trying to be published. Maybe Vance figured his readers liked thin women, and Heinlein figured they liked curvy ones. But these are the writers I liked growing up, and this brings me around to the last reason why I think developmental factors are what underlie romantic preferences: this what I observed as my friends were growing up.

Factor 1 Growing Up

Although attempts to understand the origins of sexuality are still ongoing, the general agreement is that sexual preferences gel pretty early in development:

People discover rather than choose their sexual interests. The process of discovery typically begins before the onset of puberty and is associated with an increase in he secretion of sex hormoves from the adrenal glands. However, the determinants of the direction of sexual interest… appear to be caused by the neural organizational effects of intrauterine hormonal events.¹¹

While this quote comes from an article on male homosexuality, there is good reason to suspect that other romantic preferences are similar, particularly given the way individuals are often helpless to change their preferences. Homosexual conversion therapy is largely regarded as ineffective,¹² but that’s only one example. The attraction to children is another; after generations of searching, there is no cure,¹³ and some evidence suggests that it has an origin in the womb, as individuals with such preferences average a greater number of minor physical anomalies, such as attached earlobes.¹⁴

The general story appears to be romantic preferences gel early on in development. Is the attraction to curvaceous or overweight women likely to be different? While this is an interesting question, I also have plenty of personal experience with chubby chasers during their development, suggesting they discovered what they like early on, without paying any attention to the kind of girls they could get.

For example, growing up in the days before the Internet, I made a drawing of a sultry, curvaceous woman, posed like the ladies you see on truckers' mudflaps, and gave it to one of my friends whom I’ll call R. This guy was known to be, well... high on factor 1, so I drew the woman to be extremely curvy, and not too thin in the waist. When he saw it, R was quite pleased, and thanked me for it, but immediately asked me to make her belly bigger.

Note well: this wasn't some dude in his 30's who'd been settling for fat chicks for so long he no longer responded to thin women. This guy was seventeen.

Artistic representation is definitely a givaway that people at the right side of this dimension aren’t settling because they have to, but acting on a basic preference. So are the Fat Farms of Mauritania, where girls are force fed to meet a romantic ideal which, in Mauritanian culture, is obese. Such preferences are obviously not universal, and in Western culture today, they’re not even common. But evidence suggests they are a part of the deep history of humankind.

Here at left is the Venus of Villendorf. At right is the Venus of Dolní Věstonice. Sure, maybe they were never depicting anyone’s romantic interests. Maybe they were, uh, ritual goddess talismans, or something. But one thing they are not is evidence that prehistoric man was settling for fat chicks because he didn’t know how to carve someone skinnier.

Finally, I have one more experience I’d like to mention. This is a rather more melancholy story about B, another friend who successfully committed suicide, and it happened many years before then, while we were still both in our teens.

One day at work, B encountered an attractive young woman, and struck up a conversation. He’d been learning Swedish, and here she was, a Swedish girl to speak Swedish with. B was head over heels. Although I never met the Swedish girl, B described her in terms that made me think of a blonde girl, somewhere around 4 or 5 on the pictures above. Unfortunately after making somewhat informal plans to meet her and her family, he felt too shy and awkward to go, and stood her up, losing touch with her in the process.

Why he did this, he wasn’t really able to explain. Possibly there was more to the story I didn’t get; for his part, B seemed to think about it for a long time, trying to understand why he hadn’t just gone to meet her with her parents. But whatever had really been going on, after B lost touch with her, he pined after the Swedish girl for months. During this time she became a regular feature of conversation. Eventually she appeared in one of his dreams to say “I’m coming back in March.” This never happened.

While he definitely had psychological issues, B was artistic, intelligent, and attractive. If asked, he would most likely have denied an interest in fat women. But so long as I knew him, he showed minimal attraction to slender women; considering his girlfriends, the actresses he liked, or the teachers in college we has attracted to, they were universally curvy—not just curvaceuous, but overweight. He wasn’t settling for them; he wasn’t pushed by circumstance towards them because there weren’t other girls around. He loved them, pined for them, and was so nuts about them he scarcely knew what to do with himself.

While he was still alive, this is just who he was.

But don’t some people settle for women who are fatter than they’d like?

Oh sure, almost definitely! In fact nowadays this happens quite frequently, because the average Western romantic preference is for a woman who is thinner than the average Western woman.

So none of what I’ve written above should be taken to dismiss the idea that men often settle for someone fatter than they’d like. I’m also not trying to say that, after settling, many men don’t gradually acclimate to the person they are with. I do believe training to like something through exposure is typical of the entire human experience to some extent. But what would make us think that sexuality is significantly malleable? How much can the typical heterosexual non-chubby chaser learn to appreciate curves from being unable to date slender women? We already know men’s response isn’t that easy to change—if it were, then homosexual conversion therapy wouldn’t be so widely found to be ineffective.¹⁵

So ultimately the conclusion is that these romantic preference dimensions are much deeper than they might seem. We’re not all drawing from some shared experience of romantic interest. Some of us are variously horrified, amused, or astonished to find out what other people find desirable. That was really what this study shows: there is widespread, deep-seated disagreement about what is ideal in a romantic partner. It’s normal, it’s not a big deal, and frankly it’s probably for the best.

A Final Note About the Other Four Factors of Attraction

This post has been mostly about our preferences for thin vs curvy women. But there were four other factors, and in a comment on my previous post, Anonymous Dude requested more graphs plotting the dimensions of romantic attraction against one another. When I hesitated to provide them, he explained,

I just wondered what would come out of it. Are there other aspects of attraction we're missing? (Theoretically there are 5 choose 2=10 possible combinations.) You're not obligated to make graphs for random commenters, of course.

Now I think “random” is a good choice of words here. Everyone knows average is average, but any random event will tend to differ from the average by an amount equal to the average absolute deviation (a close cousin of, and usually around 80% of, the standard deviation¹⁶). And on average, any random commenter on this blog will differ in quality from the average by one average absolute deviation. So while I may not be thrilled at the prospect of unpaid work, I will absolutely trip over myself to please random commenters who are intelligent, polite, engage with the content of the post they’re commenting about, and interesting to read.

Now I was able to reduce the amount of work by noting that factors 2 + 5 really just form a social desirability dimension; ignoring that leaves only 5 - 2, a factor of conservatism, alogn with three more factors to graph together, which is doable. Moreover, now that I’ve made these specific graphs, I can see Anonymous Dude was right—there is actually something interesting and identifiable there in the corners of one (and maybe two) of them. Rather than giving my own interpretation, I’ll just end this post by leaving them here for you to puzzle over:

1. Pornhub Insights (2025). 2024 year in review. https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2024-year-in-review

2. Pornhub Insights (2015). Big beautiful data. https://www.pornhub.com/insights/bbw-curvy-women-searches

3. Tovée, M. J., Swami, V., Furnham, A., & Mangalparsad, R. (2006). Changing perceptions of attractiveness as observers are exposed to a different culture. Evolution and Human behavior, 27(6), 443-456.

4. Swami, V., & Tovée, M. J. (2013). Resource security impacts men’s female breast size preferences. PLoS One, 8(3), e57623.

5. Vance, J. (1970). The Pnume (Planet of Adventure, Vol. 4). Ace Books. Chapter 3.

6. Ibid, Chapter 4.

7. Ibid, Chapter 5.

8. Howard, R. E. (1934). Queen of the Black Coast. Weird Tales. Chapter 1.

9. Heinlein, R. A. (1963). Glory Road. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Chapter 1.

10. Ibid, Chapter 1.

11. Quinsey, V. L. (2003). The etiology of anomalous sexual preferences in men. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 989(1), 105-117.

12. Andrade, G., & Redondo, M. C. (2022). Is conversion therapy ethical? A renewed discussion in the context of legal efforts to ban it. Ethics, Medicine and Public Health, 20, 100732.

13. Kear-Colwell, J., & Boer, D. P. (2000). The treatment of pedophiles: Clinical experience and the implications of recent research. International journal of offender therapy and comparative criminology, 44(5), 593-605.

14. Dyshniku, F., Murray, M. E., Fazio, R. L., Lykins, A. D., & Cantor, J. M. (2015). Minor physical anomalies as a window into the prenatal origins of pedophilia. Archives of sexual behavior, 44, 2151-2159.

15. Andrade, G., & Redondo, M. C. (2022). Is conversion therapy ethical? A renewed discussion in the context of legal efforts to ban it. Ethics, Medicine and Public Health, 20, 100732.

16. Tenga, R. (2020). Relationship between MAD and standard deviation for a normally distributed random variable. Arkieva Blog. https://blog.arkieva.com/relationship-between-mad-standard-deviation/