// posted March 28, 2007 by Lou Schuler

Rannoch Donald sends along this study from my alma mater:

A new University of Missouri-Columbia study found that all women were equally and negatively affected after viewing pictures of models in magazine ads for just three minutes.


"Surprisingly, we found that weight was not a factor. Viewing these pictures was just bad for everyone," said Laurie Mintz, associate professor of education, school and counseling psychology in the MU College of Education. "It had been thought that women who are heavier feel worse than a thinner woman after viewing pictures of the thin ideal in the mass media. The study results do not support that theory." ...


The study suggests that the majority of women would benefit from interventions aimed at decreasing the effects of the media, regardless of weight.

So how do you "intervene" when it comes to the media? Lock the women up in a dungeon with no access to the Internet or cable TV?

I was also curious about how "all women" are defined (the study's abstract isn't any help). Were the 81 women in the study college students, or all ages? Mostly single, mostly married, or somewhere in between? Exclusively hetero? All we know is that they were "European-American" -- white chicks.

If they were predominately single and hetero, there is some good news:

According to a New Zealand study on women and aging, single women have more orgasms than those with partners, leading researchers to conclude that removing men from the equation allows women to "better connect with themselves." ...


It found that 56 percent of sexually active women could reach orgasm every time they masturbated, while only 24 percent of the women with partners could bring themselves to orgasm.

Looks like all us married guys owe our wives an apology, assuming that 100 percent of us can reach orgasm 100 percent of the time during masturbation, and that that doesn't change with marriage.

Finally, in the interests of gender equality, I should mention this study, which got some attention when it came out two years ago:

[M]en's self-rated body satisfaction decreased after viewing images of muscular men but did not change after viewing images of average men. Thus, it appears that men's body satisfaction may be influenced by exposure to brief images of muscular models. These results are congruent with results of previous investigations of the effects of viewing images of thin models on womens body satisfaction.

So we're all screwed, which is only fair.

Tags: Mental Health