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WHR is a better indicator of female attractiveness than BMI, but they are sufficiently correlated in women that these results are not surprising. There might be some low WHR/high BMI outliers, but even Christina Hendricks, the heaviest conventionally attractive person I could think of (a BMI of 25), has a WHR of 0.77 vs the "ideal" WHR of 0.67.
WHR is significant, but let's not pretend most of us are not thinking of Christina Hendricks's massive round boobs when making that calculus. Which would increase her BMI and not affect her WHR but increase her attractiveness significantly.
BMI is confounded by breast and butt size, so it's not the most reliable indicator of female attractiveness. WHR tackles half of that problem, but personally speaking, sometimes sheer absolute size can compensate for nonideal ratios.
The more I think about it, the more I am bewildered by this "study" and am in the Aella is trolling/baiting camp. Of course, men prefer not fat women; did we need a survey for this? Of course, you can find 100 proxies to show that. I am just irrationally annoyed by studies/experiments that try to rediscover the wheel, and then discussions where people who don't believe in the existence of wheels come out, and we all need to pretend to discover why wheels are good from first principles all over again. Such a waste of time.
I don't really agree. Lots of things that people assume or take for granted sometimes turn out to be not so true under rigorous examination. There is definitely a loud minority of people who insist that slender women are only valued because of societal values that everyone goes along with because they don't want to be low-status. And it's not like millions of science dollars are being taken away from malaria research to fund this. Aella did this in her free time as a project.
It's also worth noting that societal attitudes can change over time. Men prefer not fat women, but it's conceivable that this could change in the future, and it's worth examining the size of the effect.
Well, to me it's more like checking an existing assumption. In this case I think it's appropriate.
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