Do “women prefer men with more stomach, as opposed to those who are well defined or muscly”?
“Researchers at Yale University have proven as much in a new study,” readers of the clickbaity en.newsner.com site were told earlier this month.
Not surprisingly, large numbers of people found the idea appealing. The story, such as it was, racked up nearly 700,000 Facebook interactions, or about 47,000 a day, according to Newswhip.
Newsner.com linked for its attribution, such as it was, to a story in the Telegraph from October of 2016.
We should pause here and note that the careful reader, given a link to support an assertion, will go and see if the linked content actually does support that assertion.
The first thing we notice in the Telegraph story is that it doesn’t reference a study, or researchers, plural, but a book by Yale professor Richard Bribiescas about male aging. (Of ‘new,’ ‘study,’ ‘researchers,’ and ‘Yale,’ one out of four is correct.)
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The book, How Men Age: What Evolution Reveals about Male Health and Mortality, argues (in short) that the falling testosterone, loss of muscle mass and increasing body fat in some men as they age leads to increased lifespan, compared to leaner men with higher testosterone.
We spent longer than we should have unsuccessfully trying to track down any basis for the assertion that women, as a group, are especially attracted to middle-aged, overweight men, as a group, or at what point Bribiescas seemed to support it. (Along the way, we’ve come across a great deal of indirect evidence that middle-aged, overweight men find this idea appealing.)
Coverage of Bribiescas’s book, when it came out, was heavy on assertions that he had said that women find overweight men more attractive and painfully short on showing that he actually had said this, or developing the premise. Maxim had a good example, under the headline, ‘Women find the ‘dad bod’ more attractive, says Yale professor;’ those who give in and click will find only a bare assertion, without links or quotes.
The entire edifice, as far as we can tell, is based (1) largely on wishful thinking and (2) to a single paragraph in Bribiescas’s book where he writes that, supposing a woman was attracted to older men as a category, (” … it might be that an older male has demonstrated the ability to outlive many of his competitors, perhaps indicating good genes that a female might want to pass on to her offspring.”) she might look for signs of age, such as grey hair. Love handles don’t come into it.
Newsner’s Whois information is locked down; its IP address is unhelpfully geolocated to a pond near the geographic centre of the United States, west of Wichita, Kansas, but it appears to be based in Sweden.
(The centre of the U.S. for Internet purposes was moved to the pond from a rural property, also in Kansas. The family living there found it an endless nuisance: ” … countless” law enforcement officials and individuals turn(ed) up at their farm day and night looking for links to alleged theft and other supposed crime. All of these people are arriving because of a rounding error on a GPS location, which wrongly points people to their farm.”)
In brief:
- Russia took several Swedish news sites offline through cyberattacks in 2016, U.S. State Department cables released to BuzzFeed show. “The attacks weren’t sophisticated … but they were powerful enough to keep readers from accessing at least nine of the country’s biggest news sites.”
- Facebook is (still) failing to stop hate propaganda against Rohingya Muslims on the platform, Reuters reports. Reuters found over 1,000 examples of “posts, comments, images and videos attacking the Rohingya or other Myanmar Muslims that were on Facebook as of last week,” some of which had been there for as long as six years. Part of the problem: Facebook employs almost no Burmese-language speakers, and its automated system for translating and screening hate speech in Burmese works very badly. For example, the original “Kill all the (Rohingya) that you see in Myanmar; none of them should be left alive” was translated to “I shouldn’t have a rainbow in Myanmar” in English.
- At the Atlantic Council’s Disinfo Portal: a look at Russian disinformation directed at Finland. “The goal seems to be about provoking tensions within the 75,000 Russian-speaking community in Finland, by eroding their trust in local officials, which is traditionally high in Finland.”
- Zeynep Tufekci looks at how social media was twisted from an enemy of authoritarian regimes to one of their tools: “Power always learns, and powerful tools always fall into its hands. This is a hard lesson of history but a solid one. It is key to understanding how, in seven years, digital technologies have gone from being hailed as tools of freedom and change to being blamed for upheavals in Western democracies — for enabling increased polarization, rising authoritarianism, and meddling in national elections by Russia and others.”
- A reporter at Motherboard recently watched as a cybersecurity expert showed how he could manipulate video from police body cameras. He demonstrated “how a hacker could manipulate or delete footage and associated metadata (such as the location, time, and date where the video was shot) as well as expose police officers to tracking and surveillance.”
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