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In the United States, 84% of men and 80% of women are overweight or obese. Or if you look at obesity alone 50.8% of men and 53.4% of women are obese. This is lower for younger people, so the dating market is a bit better, but not so much as to obviate the point. This is not a population where women are "pushing the envelope" of attractiveness or where they are heavily optimizing their attractiveness from a young age. It is a population where both men and women are unhealthy in a visible way that makes them less attractive, in roughly equal proportions. And weight seems to have an even bigger impact of female attractiveness than male attractiveness. (Now, this makes the rise in overweight/obese people itself a prime candidate for the rise in sexlessness, it seems to make sense that if people were less attractive they would be less interested in having sex with each other. But people seem to think there isn't enough of a correlation for this to make sense, though I haven't looked into the statistics to check. I also don't know what the statistics look like if you look into something a bit more subtle, like if a sedentary lifestyle reduces sex-drive or motivation or something.)
The idea of women relentlessly optimizing for attractiveness is prominent in our culture, not only because the people doing that are more visible but because of its role in feminist rhetoric and pop culture discourse. Similarly, overweight and obese people are stratified by education/class/intelligence/race/social-circle, such that for many people their prevalence might seem like societal dark-matter which shows up in statistics but not real life. (Similar to that large chunk of the population which can't do simple intellectual tasks like reading a bar graph.) But we shouldn't mistake their prominence in discourse for something with much relevance to population-level statistics.
Now, one upshot of this is that if you're a normal weight it's unclear how much statistics about dating apply to you. But normal weight people probably tend to want to date someone else who is also normal weight, not just for an attractive and healthy partner but because of all the other things like class/intelligence/social-circle it correlates with, so this doesn't really correspond to being favored in pursuing that goal either.
Is this true? Maybe it was back in the 90s. I'm sure some of these "overweight or obese" women look like fertility goddesses (though not all of them obviously).
I was just going off anecdotes regarding what people on the internet say influences attractiveness for them and others. I tried looking for a study to provide something a bit more substantial but didn't find anything useful after a couple searches on Google Scholar. So I tried asking ChatGPT ("Is the impact of obesity on attractiveness different for men and women? Cite your sources.") and it actually gave me real studies, one of which was what I was looking for, though its description of what the study said was not accurate. And looking up the study found there was also an equivalent one done for women. This is the first time ChatGPT has provided me with useful information, out of the 4 times I have tried using it as an information source.
Anyway, it's a pretty small study so maybe there's a better one out there, but it shows what I would expect. It's from 2005 if you think it has dramatically changed for some reason, but I doubt that, particularly since the results were broadly similar for the different cultures of Britain and Malaysia.
Male physical attractiveness in Britain and Malaysia: A cross-cultural study
Female physical attractiveness in Britain and Malaysia: A cross-cultural study
Per Table 2 in both studies, BMI accounted for 84.1% of the variance in female attractiveness rated by British men, but only 53.7% of the variance in male attractiveness rated by British women.
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