People stating their preferences are often at odds with what they actually prefer, especially when there’s social expectations.
If you had a dating profile of both, you could more directly test people’s true preferences. Anecdotally, for every woman who says she prefers a dad bod, there are ten who would swipe right on the muscled gym rat.
I’ve also heard anecdotally that for a woman in a relationship, dad bods means there’s less attention from other woman so it reduces competition, whereas for women who aren’t in a relationship they actually prefer a man who is popular with the ladies. Both sexes have differences in preference for when in a relationship vs single.
mmh0000 · 1d ago
[citation needed]
archagon · 22h ago
The first picture is definitely not "dad bod". The man is already in relatively good shape and looks like a normal human. It's not some sort of virtue to disappear every last bit of flab¹, and it should be no surprise that many people would find the "before" more attractive.
¹ (But no judgement if that's what you like, of course.)
dogleash · 1d ago
>In the first shot, a smiling Murs stands in a relaxed posture, against a gym backdrop. He’s carrying a few extra pounds but looks within normal range, and well-muscled underneath. He seems as though he’s mid-workout; it could have been a candid snap made in passing, between sets. In the second, by contrast, Murs stands in a pair of iddy biddy shorts, under stark lighting in a changing room, weighing scales visible in-shot. The background connotes not action but self-reflexive activities such as dressing, examining one’s reflection, watching one’s weight. Murs faces the camera, tense, flexing his muscles to show off the definition. In relation to the photographer he is not acting; he is appearing.
This is what too much analysis class does to a person. These two photographs are the same photograph. Stanly Kubrick did not labor over the composition of these shots for weeks. Some dude was regularly training and over time got a couple progress pics taken.
dooglius · 1d ago
You might need an analysis class to verbalize things like that, but is it such a stretch to think that a typical woman might go notice these things implicitly/non-verbally?
dogleash · 1d ago
No, I think everyone always interprets composition. That's why directors labor over it in the first place. Regardless of how consciously tuned in or trained in the visual language any particular viewer is.
I just made that little j to point out the absurdity of picking apart progress pics like this. Of course every shot is deliberately planned. Perhaps progress pics doubly so. But that idea can be a tarpit. The thin edge of the wedge where we forget the intent of two progress pics taken at the gym is the same, the only deliberate difference is the physique, every other difference is incidental.
IAmBroom · 1d ago
If those two photographs are the same to you, you lack perception.
One is a casual "Hey!", albeit shirtless in the gym. The other is quite intentionally posed. One is in scruffy gym shorts; the other a near-naked Speedo.
They are not the same. And having the intellectual ability to dissect what a trained genius like Kubrick can do quickly is not a liability. You also dismiss the literal decades of study that Kubrick undertook to "not labor" over the composition of his shots (which, in fact, he labored fastidiously). Are you buying into the myth of the talented artist, wholly untrained but a natural genius? They don't exist.
dogleash · 1d ago
The guy on the left would be wearing nut huggers if he had the body for it.
And he wouldn’t wear them onto the weight room floor, causing an equally deliberate photo to seem less casual.
ofcourseyoudo · 17h ago
It's because the personality attached to the guy on the right is no doubt way more into how he looks, and how impressed he wants people to be by how he looks.
It also means that dating him will include leaving chunks of every day for him to workout, and counting macronutrients at every meal.
The guy on the right looks like a self-involved boring person to hang out with. Well fit for sure! But what are you going to talk about beyond the benefits of creatine and whether or not you should get protein from whey?
bradyd · 1d ago
I think the main reason people choose the image of the man on the left is because the lighting in the picture on the right is worse. It casts sharp shadows which makes his neck and face look weird. I bet if the lighting was more diffuse, like the photo on the left, the results would be different.
alistairSH · 1d ago
Not just that, but the pose is completely different as well. It very well could be that women are reading into the poses. The left is casual and relaxed. The right is a very posed "flexed" look. Maybe women see the right and jump to "narcissist, would not bang".
i_love_retros · 1d ago
I think in the right side photo he looks like he's riddled with steroids and has an unsustainable training and eating regimen. I find it weird when a 40+ year old has zero percent body fat and a six pack.
Left side he looks natural but still in good shape.
Retr0id · 1d ago
You absolutely do not need steroids to look like the picture on the right, it's both attainable and sustainable (with effort!).
Retr0id · 1d ago
Also I'd eyeball his body fat percentage at around 15%. He'd look a lot more natural if he wasn't actively flexing.
i_love_retros · 20h ago
I'm sorry but I'm calling bullshit.
Maybe a genetic freak could look like that without steroids, but most people could not.
Especially after 40
Retr0id · 17h ago
I wouldn't be terribly surprised if he is using steroids, being a celebrity and all, but I still think it's feasible for a regular person to achieve this without.
drcongo · 1d ago
His head looks way too big for his body on the right side pic.
jaredcwhite · 1d ago
I think the Before picture looked better, and I'm a man.
What an utterly silly and pointless article. I wish I could get my five minutes back.
Retr0id · 1d ago
It's still unclear to me whether people (of either gender) are judging the picture and pose, or the body itself, or something else entirely.
IAmBroom · 1d ago
Why not both? The whole is greater than the parts.
johnea · 23h ago
I thought it was a good read.
It's refreshing to hear someone acknowledge that there are differences between biologically male and female people. Like the author expresses, this shouldn't be controversial, and the assertion is in no way anti-anything. How a person feels about their sexuality is a totally different thing, in a totally different category, from their biological gender. I liken it to arguing that there is no such thing as a person having a natural hair color, because they choose to dye their hair a different color.
It was also refreshing to hear the author express that females do indeed possess sexuality, and that human sexuality guides a lot of behaviours, including female behaviours, especially behaviours involving interfacing to the "other" gender.
Accepting the physical reality that humans are comprised of two sexual genders (with some small percentage of people having phenotypes that are intermediary between these two), and allowing for people to express their sexuality in whatever way they choose or whatever way feels right for them, are in no way mutually exclusive, or even antagonistic.
WRT the before-after photo, again I agree with the author in the sense that it depends on what you're looking at. For me, a biological male, while the person's body is certainly more muscular and thin in the after photo, I would have to say his face looks more naturally shaped and "attractive" in the before photo. The after photo face looks almost skeletal and stretched compared to the smiling nicely rounded face of the before photo. All of this is, of course, a matter of opinion.
Maybe (MAYBE) women are looking more at the cute face, and men are mostly considering which body they'd prefer to pin to the mat?
1659447091 · 20h ago
It's an issue of language, unfortunately.
She correctly uses "sexes" with is the biological term but seems to have a problem with "female" as it's often in quotes; (I mean, don't get incensed and go on tirade like she did when trying to make a point between biological sexes while using socially defined terms instead of simple science based terms that convey the exact meaning meant - then wonder why it's unclear.)
Your choice of "biologically male and female" is clear in definition. But saying things like ["other" gender] becomes muddled unless you meant to include someone's identity label(gender)? And not simply the other sex? I am not sure which you meant. Gender is such a loaded word with a meaning not grounded in a solid/root usage (in this case sex and female/male in science for a topic related to science). Using the words that best describe what we mean could provide less confusion and generate more understanding of what people from various "sides" are trying to say.
My interest in the topic is the language part. It's crazy how much misunderstand between people there is based on a stubborn refusal to use, or simply, lazy choosing of words wrt to the topic of distinguishing sexes. Otherwise, for other non-related topics use what ever. But this article seems to be mostly a veiled rant against, "central liberal delusion" of sexes and gender from her pov.
EPWN3D · 19h ago
I kept waiting for this piece to get really racist.
techpineapple · 1d ago
Maybe these aren't the "same men", but it's interesting that men see and admit this phenomenon exists in the reverse (Men prefer cuter/sportier/more natural looking women and that a lot of what women do to look good is meant to appeal to other women) but not the reverse?
But even I can sort of look at the two pictures, and my gut reaction is, I'd like to look like the guy on the right, but I'd rather be friends with the guy on the left. Maybe it's a feeling of safety? Maybe a little pudge is like imagining being curled up on a warm sofa rather than a cot of metal coils? But then maybe, just to sort of give this a little credence. While I'd like to be friends with the guy on the left. There is a part of me that's like. Maybe I'd ask the guy on the right for advice on my stock portfolio? Tips to get ahead in the workplace? I do value some of those things, but not in my close personal life. I am transactional in the spaces it matters.
"It is, after all, a special case of the central liberal delusion that all people are the same"
lol this was not going the direction I thought, this person apparently has the completely opposite thesis I do.
I'll not another weird thing about this "liberal delusion that all people are the same" is that they seem committed to category theory. They're very committed to the idea that men and women are not the same, but sort of equally suspicious of the idea that there are strong within group differences. i.e. they want to say something like all women are all the same and all men are all the same and all women are different from all men in some substantial way.
jofer · 1d ago
>"I'd like to look like the guy on the right, but I'd rather be friends with the guy on the left"
This exactly. But I think the photo itself plays into that as well. It's not just a "safety" thing. (I'm not disagreeing that that's an aspect of it as well, though.)
The pose in the photo on the left comes off as more casual. "Hey, okay, I'm at the gym. Sure, let's do this before photo thing". The pose on the right comes off as "look at me! I'm showing off!". I mean, sure, nothing wrong with that in this context. I'd be proud too. But it's harder to relate to the person photographed as explicitly trying to be a show off than to the same person in a more casual (but still posed) position. The photograph on the left just comes off as a bit more humble and relatable just due to the pose / general vibe.
kevin_thibedeau · 1d ago
12-weeks for that means Ozempic and steroids to turn oneself into an action figure. A 6-week photo with less dramatic gym rat vibes would have been interesting to poll against.
decompiled_dev · 1d ago
I think a work-life balance lens works well here.
The guy on the right appears to be a better team-mate, that will always give it their all, even if it means hunger.
The guy on the left seems more chill as a room-mate. Which explains my preference for the natural look as a guy.
hnuser123456 · 1d ago
I feel like the way they communicate is very understandable from a male perspective despite it normally being something somewhat frustrating or confusing. Liberals used to be (theoretically) hellbent on equality to such a degree that sometimes it opposed common sense. It is still somewhat controversial to say in a liberal circle that there are some differences in the genders (and the ways they think) that are sometimes significant, but that it's okay and that we don't have to force people to be unnatural to be more "equal" to an infinite extent. There is an innocent sadness to the thought that a significant other will never 100% understand every neuron in your brain, but there's probably positives to that too.
techpineapple · 1d ago
Another interpretation might be. I don't know whether to call this class based or what, but I think there's sort of a divide in the world around what people think there role is.
Like I think my role is to be relatively, I dunno, sort of pro-social. "Middle Class" It's not that I don't occasionally find like models and celebrities attractive, and it's not that I don't gaze at women, but like I don't think it's my role to maximally optimize the partner I'm looking for. Partially probably because I'm an awkward weird nerd, but I'm mostly looking to find the person that best complements me, not the person that maximizes my social value.
But like so many people can't seem to imagine that there are people in this world that don't see things in a completely transactional darwinian way, as evidenced by the core narrative the author recites, and I sort of can't see the opposite - why one would put objective value/beauty over subjective happiness.
allears · 1d ago
From the perspective of an 80-year-old who has been through numerous "serious" relationships, and finally found my match at the age of 55, you seem to be unusually mature. Best of luck in your adventures -- and don't be desperate. Even a relationship with a finite lifetime can be incredibly rewarding, you will definitely develop relationship "skills" that will make the next one even better, and when you find someone with as good an attitude as yours, you have a good shot at a lifetime together.
techpineapple · 1d ago
Fortunately I'm happily married! By luck more than my approach, so I have no advice for the youngins but.
sofixa · 1d ago
> The central structural issue is that by and large, both sexes now unquestioningly accept the flawed premise that men and women are the same. It is, after all, a special case of the central liberal delusion that all people are the same: a dogma so central to the modern world that elaborate systems of law and social dogma exist to encourage compliance.
This is interesting coming from someone in the UK (who I'd expect less to have such an American view of "liberals").
No, the point is that women and men should be treated the same wherever physically possible, to get as close as possible outcomes. Not that men and women are the same, which obviously isn't true. Part of it is biology (which can be changed, before any transphobes jump in), part of it is education and expectations.
As an example, the average woman is weaker than the average man. That doesn't mean that a random non athletic man can win a fight against a female boxer, obviously. But it doesn't make women less human or less worthy of whatever or incapable of being firefighters.
Pregnancy is also an obvious example - women obviously need more time around birth than their partners do. That doesn't mean that only they should do all childcare.
Honestly, none of this is rocket brain surgery, I'm shocked anyone still struggles or manages to misunderstand what feminism (by and large, not fringes) wants, or what "liberals" (I'm assuming this to mean social progressives) have as a worldview with regards to women and men.
b800h · 1d ago
>No, the point is that women and men should be treated the same wherever physically possible, to get as close as possible outcomes.
That doesn't seem to make sense. If women and men are different, then to get the same outcomes, surely you should treat them differently. This is how the famous "equity" illustration in HR materials works: The woman gets a different-sized box.
Alternatively, we can just admit that treating people equally is a good thing even if it results in different outcomes.
Realistically, we treat people as individuals but try to impartially give them a fair stab. Which makes sense.
sexyman48 · 1d ago
JC, would the article just get to the point?! I'm a straight guy, but
even I can tell mild dadbod with fuller hairline will yield sexier sons than
balding try-hard.
If you had a dating profile of both, you could more directly test people’s true preferences. Anecdotally, for every woman who says she prefers a dad bod, there are ten who would swipe right on the muscled gym rat.
I’ve also heard anecdotally that for a woman in a relationship, dad bods means there’s less attention from other woman so it reduces competition, whereas for women who aren’t in a relationship they actually prefer a man who is popular with the ladies. Both sexes have differences in preference for when in a relationship vs single.
¹ (But no judgement if that's what you like, of course.)
This is what too much analysis class does to a person. These two photographs are the same photograph. Stanly Kubrick did not labor over the composition of these shots for weeks. Some dude was regularly training and over time got a couple progress pics taken.
I just made that little j to point out the absurdity of picking apart progress pics like this. Of course every shot is deliberately planned. Perhaps progress pics doubly so. But that idea can be a tarpit. The thin edge of the wedge where we forget the intent of two progress pics taken at the gym is the same, the only deliberate difference is the physique, every other difference is incidental.
One is a casual "Hey!", albeit shirtless in the gym. The other is quite intentionally posed. One is in scruffy gym shorts; the other a near-naked Speedo.
They are not the same. And having the intellectual ability to dissect what a trained genius like Kubrick can do quickly is not a liability. You also dismiss the literal decades of study that Kubrick undertook to "not labor" over the composition of his shots (which, in fact, he labored fastidiously). Are you buying into the myth of the talented artist, wholly untrained but a natural genius? They don't exist.
And he wouldn’t wear them onto the weight room floor, causing an equally deliberate photo to seem less casual.
It also means that dating him will include leaving chunks of every day for him to workout, and counting macronutrients at every meal.
The guy on the right looks like a self-involved boring person to hang out with. Well fit for sure! But what are you going to talk about beyond the benefits of creatine and whether or not you should get protein from whey?
Left side he looks natural but still in good shape.
Maybe a genetic freak could look like that without steroids, but most people could not.
Especially after 40
What an utterly silly and pointless article. I wish I could get my five minutes back.
It's refreshing to hear someone acknowledge that there are differences between biologically male and female people. Like the author expresses, this shouldn't be controversial, and the assertion is in no way anti-anything. How a person feels about their sexuality is a totally different thing, in a totally different category, from their biological gender. I liken it to arguing that there is no such thing as a person having a natural hair color, because they choose to dye their hair a different color.
It was also refreshing to hear the author express that females do indeed possess sexuality, and that human sexuality guides a lot of behaviours, including female behaviours, especially behaviours involving interfacing to the "other" gender.
Accepting the physical reality that humans are comprised of two sexual genders (with some small percentage of people having phenotypes that are intermediary between these two), and allowing for people to express their sexuality in whatever way they choose or whatever way feels right for them, are in no way mutually exclusive, or even antagonistic.
WRT the before-after photo, again I agree with the author in the sense that it depends on what you're looking at. For me, a biological male, while the person's body is certainly more muscular and thin in the after photo, I would have to say his face looks more naturally shaped and "attractive" in the before photo. The after photo face looks almost skeletal and stretched compared to the smiling nicely rounded face of the before photo. All of this is, of course, a matter of opinion.
Maybe (MAYBE) women are looking more at the cute face, and men are mostly considering which body they'd prefer to pin to the mat?
She correctly uses "sexes" with is the biological term but seems to have a problem with "female" as it's often in quotes; (I mean, don't get incensed and go on tirade like she did when trying to make a point between biological sexes while using socially defined terms instead of simple science based terms that convey the exact meaning meant - then wonder why it's unclear.)
Your choice of "biologically male and female" is clear in definition. But saying things like ["other" gender] becomes muddled unless you meant to include someone's identity label(gender)? And not simply the other sex? I am not sure which you meant. Gender is such a loaded word with a meaning not grounded in a solid/root usage (in this case sex and female/male in science for a topic related to science). Using the words that best describe what we mean could provide less confusion and generate more understanding of what people from various "sides" are trying to say.
My interest in the topic is the language part. It's crazy how much misunderstand between people there is based on a stubborn refusal to use, or simply, lazy choosing of words wrt to the topic of distinguishing sexes. Otherwise, for other non-related topics use what ever. But this article seems to be mostly a veiled rant against, "central liberal delusion" of sexes and gender from her pov.
But even I can sort of look at the two pictures, and my gut reaction is, I'd like to look like the guy on the right, but I'd rather be friends with the guy on the left. Maybe it's a feeling of safety? Maybe a little pudge is like imagining being curled up on a warm sofa rather than a cot of metal coils? But then maybe, just to sort of give this a little credence. While I'd like to be friends with the guy on the left. There is a part of me that's like. Maybe I'd ask the guy on the right for advice on my stock portfolio? Tips to get ahead in the workplace? I do value some of those things, but not in my close personal life. I am transactional in the spaces it matters.
"It is, after all, a special case of the central liberal delusion that all people are the same"
lol this was not going the direction I thought, this person apparently has the completely opposite thesis I do.
I'll not another weird thing about this "liberal delusion that all people are the same" is that they seem committed to category theory. They're very committed to the idea that men and women are not the same, but sort of equally suspicious of the idea that there are strong within group differences. i.e. they want to say something like all women are all the same and all men are all the same and all women are different from all men in some substantial way.
This exactly. But I think the photo itself plays into that as well. It's not just a "safety" thing. (I'm not disagreeing that that's an aspect of it as well, though.)
The pose in the photo on the left comes off as more casual. "Hey, okay, I'm at the gym. Sure, let's do this before photo thing". The pose on the right comes off as "look at me! I'm showing off!". I mean, sure, nothing wrong with that in this context. I'd be proud too. But it's harder to relate to the person photographed as explicitly trying to be a show off than to the same person in a more casual (but still posed) position. The photograph on the left just comes off as a bit more humble and relatable just due to the pose / general vibe.
The guy on the right appears to be a better team-mate, that will always give it their all, even if it means hunger.
The guy on the left seems more chill as a room-mate. Which explains my preference for the natural look as a guy.
Like I think my role is to be relatively, I dunno, sort of pro-social. "Middle Class" It's not that I don't occasionally find like models and celebrities attractive, and it's not that I don't gaze at women, but like I don't think it's my role to maximally optimize the partner I'm looking for. Partially probably because I'm an awkward weird nerd, but I'm mostly looking to find the person that best complements me, not the person that maximizes my social value.
But like so many people can't seem to imagine that there are people in this world that don't see things in a completely transactional darwinian way, as evidenced by the core narrative the author recites, and I sort of can't see the opposite - why one would put objective value/beauty over subjective happiness.
This is interesting coming from someone in the UK (who I'd expect less to have such an American view of "liberals").
No, the point is that women and men should be treated the same wherever physically possible, to get as close as possible outcomes. Not that men and women are the same, which obviously isn't true. Part of it is biology (which can be changed, before any transphobes jump in), part of it is education and expectations.
As an example, the average woman is weaker than the average man. That doesn't mean that a random non athletic man can win a fight against a female boxer, obviously. But it doesn't make women less human or less worthy of whatever or incapable of being firefighters.
Pregnancy is also an obvious example - women obviously need more time around birth than their partners do. That doesn't mean that only they should do all childcare.
Honestly, none of this is rocket brain surgery, I'm shocked anyone still struggles or manages to misunderstand what feminism (by and large, not fringes) wants, or what "liberals" (I'm assuming this to mean social progressives) have as a worldview with regards to women and men.
That doesn't seem to make sense. If women and men are different, then to get the same outcomes, surely you should treat them differently. This is how the famous "equity" illustration in HR materials works: The woman gets a different-sized box.
Alternatively, we can just admit that treating people equally is a good thing even if it results in different outcomes.
Realistically, we treat people as individuals but try to impartially give them a fair stab. Which makes sense.