7 ms·
Short men and fat women 'get fewer chances in life', research says
- pklausler 11y agoFewer.
- SquirrelOnFire 11y ago's British. The Queen's and allat.
- eric_h 11y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY (Stephen Fry explaining his position on this particular form of pedantry, amongst other things). It rubs me the wrong way as well, since my parents (well, my mother; my father grew up bilingual, so precision in english was certainly not as strong a part of his upbringing) were quite insistent that I used the correct adjectives and conjugations in english as I was growing up. However, the less vs. fewer debate is over, common usage replacing 'fewer' with 'less' vastly outnumbers proper usage of fewer v. less; time to drop the pedantry as it is of nebulous benefit to begin with (in this particular case). "You can't pour a glass of <some obviously enumerable item>" really doesn't matter anymore, and I feel the difference in the adjective never really conferred any meaning at all (unless, perhaps, the item you were speaking of was not obviously enumerable, but I can't think of any reasonable examples of that).
- pklausler 11y agoIf X has a plural Xs, say "fewer Xs", else "less X". That simple rule will get you the right usage most of the time.
- eric_h 11y agoYes, that's what I meant by "you can't pour a glass of <some obviously enumerable item>" - same principle, pithier expression of it, said in response to an incorrect usage of "less", e.g.: "He has less dogs than I do", "you mean 'fewer' since you can't pour a glass of dogs"
- dang 11y agoAgreed.
- Mz 11y agoYeah, this is incredibly old news. We already know this. When are they going to investigate why or come up with a new hypothesis? My hypothesis: Most women reject short men as mates and most men reject fat women as mates. A successful marriage tends to strongly correlate to socioeconomic success, longevity, etc.
- guard-of-terra 11y ago"Most women reject short men as mates" Are you sure? Because this, why being `obvious' after 15 seconds of thinking, may be or not be true. My anecdotal observations reveal an unusual number of pairs where a tall woman happily dates below average height man. It works the other way too, short women often date tall men. Anyway, no person really need most people of opposite genre accepting them as a mate. A few is usually enough. If you'll prove that tall men have more successful marriages, it would be a huge deal, so I assume that no such correlation exist. Successful marriage is a complicated thing and I assume that its relation to ease of dating and partner selectivity is very non-linear.
- Mz 11y agoThis is pretty well established. Most women, even quite short women, want taller men. My ex husband was slightly shorter than me, so it isn't all women. But, yes, bias by women against short men is a well known thing. If they will not even accept a first date because of your height, the odds of marriage go down pretty seriously. You need to get your foot in the door and get to the altar as some minimum prerequisites for achieving a successful marriage.
- colmvp 11y agoOnline dating stats, at least from OKTrends, show tall men have more sexual partners than men below the average height. I also wouldn't be surprised if that also holds true for receiving more responses compared to short men. Furthermore, my recorded stats of women's profiles in the online dating site Match.com show a significantly higher number of women prefer to date men of their own height or taller than women who are willing to date men shorter than them. Plus, it's also not uncommon for short women to exclusively date tall men, whereas it's very rare for even tall women to date guys who are significantly shorter than them.
- colund 11y agoWhat's up with depressing topics on HN?
- tristanj 11y agoI don't think this is unique to HN. Western news in general tends to cover negative stories more often than positive ones. Quite a few studies have been done trying to explain the effect; there's no bulletproof theory yet, but one theory is that people are more likely to read negative articles than positive articles and journalists are just catering to demand. http://hij.sagepub.com/content/19/3/360?etoc http://hij.sagepub.com/content/19/3/360?etoc
- Mz 11y agoI sometimes post positive stuff, both here and elsewhere. It tends to get little to no attention. This is possibly in part because good news tends to not be a danger to your welfare, whereas bad news is something we need to pay attention to for purposes of self preservation. Similarly, you see endless arguing online in part because there is more to say if you disagree with someone then if you agree. I largely stopped following mainstream news years ago because news = bad news.
- colund 11y agoI disagree that we need to pay attention to negative news. In fact I think this is a misinterpretation of people who use too much of their 'left' brain. I think there are much more important factors for who gets successful in relationships. - Confidence and good self presentation - Caring about and listening to others - Not living an immature life limited to travelling and partying but being reliable and solid and 'future proof' I disagree with the downvotes my comments received. I think depressing news are a threat to people's psychological well-being and should therefore not be encouraged. It's like trying to get good at a musical instrument or sport via focusing all your energy on your what you're not good at. Not a good way to spend your energy. Try passion, hope, love and daring to make a leap...
- Mz 11y ago
- sixQuarks 11y agoBeing a short man is particularly frustrating, because unlike being fat, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it. Call a man short, or say you only date tall men, nobody bats an eye. Call a woman fat, or say you'll never date a fat woman, everyone goes nuts.
- Mz 11y agoOn the one hand, I agree with you. On the other hand, women get to look forward to being kicked to the curb for being too old. Past a certain age, even men your age will act like "You are too old to be fuckable" and no one bats an eyelash at that either. Even otherwise "enlightened" men routinely say they will happily date a woman who is 10 years younger, but have zero interest in a woman more than a year or two older.
- guard-of-terra 11y ago"men routinely say they will happily date a woman who is 10 years younger" This also have consequence of reducing chances for younger men who would like to compete for these younger women too. Those are same years when adult personality forms, hence we're seeing some really broken men personalities. That then boomerangs to women in form of abusive, ignorant or insecure men.
- maxxxxx 11y agoOn the other hand if you don't have plenty of money as a man of certain age you are pretty much toast too. The good thing is that there are plenty of men whom would date a woman their age and plenty of women that would date a guy who isn't rich. They are just not as vocal and live their lives quietly.
- Mz 11y agoI am aware that if you are male and truly destitute, the odds of getting female companionship are pretty poor. But, in the aggregate, men tend to have more money than women. So, I don't think you need to be rich per se to stay in the game. You just need to be better off than the women you are interested in. That seems like a somewhat low bar to me.
- maxxxxx 11y agoYou could also add shy people, nonathletic people, ugly people, disabled people and other groups to that list.
- nilkn 11y agoI'm a short guy (5'8") and don't doubt this is true. However, I also strongly believe that it can be completely overcome and then some. It would be a little immodest for me to explain why I believe that, but suffice it to say that my height has not held me back in any appreciable way in any area of life. I suppose it might matter more if I were to seek the Presidency, but the present evidence is that it would still be possible for me to at least be a temporary front-runner for a nomination (see Rubio, Cruz, Paul, etc.). Not bad. In fact, there are a lot of elements of my height that I've always enjoyed. It's made me naturally athletic, in the sense that I've always been very agile. I've never not been able to trivially do pull-ups. I can do things in gymnastics without training that some much taller people with twice my strength cannot do with training. I also think that while taller people can be viewed as more dominating or powerful, at the same time shorter people can be viewed as more endearing, relatable, and morally innocent. I honestly believe that on more than one occasion I've been given the benefit of the doubt in some situation because my physical stature caused me to be viewed with more empathy and with less of a competitive spirit.
- guard-of-terra 11y ago"I suppose it might matter more if I were to seek the Presidency" Unless you want to do it in Russia :-/ We literally had garden gnome for "president" forced on us. No offense to capable short people here.
- Jtsummers 11y agoYou're not short, at least not in the US. You're not tall, either. Current average is 5'10", with a standard deviation of 4". You're very nearly average.
- domfletcher 11y agoI'm not saying there isn't hard evidence for this but The Express is a not a reputable newspaper and it's articles should always be looked at with a very skeptical eye. In case that wasn't obvious from clicking around their site for 20-30 seconds.
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- joolze 11y agoSo this is basically a study on success as related to self confidence? Why is this news? Also one of these conditions is basically curable. Two once men become more fashion accepting.
- autotune 11y agoWhat kind of "chances" did they take into account as far as professions go? One of the joys of working with software and servers, for example, and being able to make a living online in general, is code doesn't care if you are a mutated, half-bird, half-walrus, half-human living in a cave in some mountainous region in the wild. As long as you have wifi access, can write efficient and readable code, and communicate over text, you can use almost any picture you want for your avatar on github and contribute to open source projects and get your work noticed, and likely get hired for it at some point assuming you can communicate clearly with your voice as well.