Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Lose All Your Weight, Fly for Free

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Samoa Air—which is sadly not an airplane made out of Girl Scout cookies and which is an airline with mini planes that appear to come pre-packaged in a box that you can order on Amazon—is beginning to charge its customers based on how much they weigh. As in, however many kilograms you bring on the plane—on your body and in your bags—you'll multiply that by whatever set per-kilogram rate the airline is charging at the time. From news.com.au: "People have always traveled on the basis of their seat but as many airline operators know airlines don't run on seats they run on weight and ... Read More

Body Language

(ILLUSTRATION: DANIEL STOLLE)

Listen to Life in the Data, Episode 2, featuring Daniel Duane: It all started with 229, 178, and 24.8, back in 2006. Before that, I thought of my health in words: surfer, jogger, farmers’-market shopper, nonsmoker, prudent father of two young girls. Put another way, I thought I lived too sensibly to worry about cholesterol. Then I discovered French cooking and home butchery, started buying whole hogs and keeping all those chops in a freezer. Plus, I turned 38. I’m not sure what it was about 38; maybe the view it provided of 40. I decided to get a checkup. That first number, 229, ... Read More

Chick Lit May Be Hazardous to Your Self-Esteem

We have been warned of the impact of violent video games and sexually aggressive song lyrics. But little attention has been paid to another media phenomenon that may influence its fans to think and act in unwanted ways. Psychological danger may lurk between the covers of that beach book. Reading “chick lit” may lead women to think of themselves as less attractive and express more concern about their weight. That’s the conclusion of new research from Virginia Tech, published in the journal Body Image. As co-authors Melissa Kaminski and Robert Magee note, previous research has ... Read More

Large Looks Lovely to the Stressed-Out Male

New research suggests a promising strategy for larger ladies who are looking for love: Find a singles bar near a workplace where the men are really stressed out. Researchers writing in the journal PLOS ONE report men who had just been experiencing acute stress were more likely than their calm counterparts to find overweight women attractive. When it comes to changing a man’s perspective, beer goggles may be less effective than frazzle frames. Psychologists Viren Swami of the University of Westminster and Martin Tovee of Newcastle University describe an experiment involving 81 male ... Read More

Thinner Wife, Happier Marriage

Ladies: Are you nervously watching your weight to stay attractive for your husband or boyfriend? Well, put down those salad forks. It turns out you don’t have to starve yourself — unless he’s doing so, too. A study just published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science finds a correlation between weight (as measured by body mass index, or BMI) and marital satisfaction. But the key variable is the relationship between the spouses’ BMIs. It seems a couple is more likely to experience marital bliss when the wife is at least somewhat thinner than her ... Read More

Academic Research Does Not Take Holidays Off

We gather together some of the more provocative papers of recent years, which are guaranteed to enliven the dinner table by providing fresh fodder for family squabbles. Genocide, With Stuffing and Gravy Anthropologist Janet Siskind of Rutgers University views the Thanksgiving holiday in sociopolitical terms in her 1992 paper “The Invention of Thanksgiving.” The traditional gathering, she writes, “subtly expresses and reaffirms values and assumptions about cultural and social unity, about identity and history, about inclusion and exclusion.” She views the holiday, which ritually ... Read More

For Older Women, Up Side to Body Fat

Given the myriad problems associated with the obesity epidemic, science has not had much good to say about body fat in recent years. But a new paper in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology reports heavier women have one advantage over their gaunt girlfriends: They are less likely to experience menopause-related cognitive decline. The issue of whether there's a connection between menopause and cognition — a term that encompasses awareness, reasoning, perception and judgment — has yet to be conclusively resolved. Some studies report menopausal status has no effect on this key brain ... Read More

Hungry Men Love Larger Ladies

A man's image of the perfect romantic partner varies depending upon whether he is feeling hungry. That's the conclusion of a newly published study, which finds peckish males prefer females who are heavier, taller and older. The research, published in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology, confirms and expands upon two previous papers: a 2005 study that concluded heavier women are preferred in cultures with scarce resources, and a 2006 British study that found hunger influences judgments of female physical attractiveness. The latter report, in the British Journal of ... Read More

The Danger of Fat-Think

Obesity causes severe health problems. It's also a source of severe shame. Just perceiving oneself as fat, in fact, may produce greater emotional damage than actually being overweight. A German study by Bärbel-Maria Kurth and Ute Ellert in the June Deutsches Ärzteblatt International finds that young people who think they're fat suffer a poorer quality of life than truly fat people. In their study — "Perceived or True Obesity: Which Causes More Suffering in Adolescents?" — Kurth and Ellert asked 6,654 German boys and girls, aged 11 to 17, questions about six aspects of their quality of ... Read More

Policy-Heavy Play

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" became something of a cyberspace scandal in 2005, when gleeful gamers discovered its graphic sex scenes. But Ian Bogost found himself intrigued by the best-selling video game for another reason entirely. He was fascinated by one of the characters, a thug whose physical appearance was virtually unheard of in the gaming universe. This gangbanger had a gut. "Depending on what and how much he ate, he would get fatter," says the veteran video game designer, a faculty member of the Georgia Institute of Technology. "You could have him work out and get buff. That ... Read More