Take It From a Woman: We Don’t Care About Your Muscle Definition

Every day, I am reminded of how opposing women’s and men’s ideas of male attractiveness are, especially as it relates to the male physique. 

This debate resurfaced yesterday, as I was served a few posts on X surrounding a discussion over U.K. singer Olly Murs’ recent fitness transformation. The discourse was spawned from a poll posted on the social media platform by William Costello, who, according to his bio, is a doctoral researcher at The University of Texas at Austin. Along with a before-and-after photo of Murs at the gym, Costello posed a question to both men and women: Does Murs look better before or after his transformation? According to the poll results, of the 4,920 votes, it was split down the middle. Most women found Murs more attractive before his fitness transformation, while 42% of men said after. 

Costello’s initial post, though, isn’t what spurred the larger discourse. Rather, another X account posted a screenshot of the results side by side the photo of Murs, writing, “why are women lying about this? like what’s the actual cause?” clearly puzzled as to why women would find the arguably not-as-fit body type more attractive. The post caught the attention of many female users who quote-tweeted it with a very simple explanation: We’re not lying.

A lot has been written on the link between attractiveness and body fat. A 2016 study asked men and women to manipulate body images in terms of their fat to demonstrate the body types they deemed were healthy and attractive. The study found that the body types women found the healthiest were also the types they found the most desirable. (And if you were curious how women’s bodies fared in this experiment, “the amount of fat chosen to optimise the healthy and attractive appearance of female bodies … fell significantly below the established healthy range” because we live in hell.) Another study from 2020 concluded that “men tend to overemphasize the heaviness and muscularity of bodies that women prefer.” It’s speculated that men’s media has a lot to do with forming this misperception. Magazines targeted to male audiences feature more muscular, shredded actors compared to how Hollywood men are portrayed in women’s magazines. Overall, the many peer-reviewed articles on this subject seemed to have aligned results. When women are asked to rank various male physiques by attractiveness, they tend to Goldilocks it and find a normal-looking man with an average build and some muscles to be the sweet spot. 

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Of course, asking people to assess computer-generated body types in a controlled environment is very different than going out in the real world and interacting with real humans. Maybe I’m in the minority here, but I have never once looked at another person and pondered their body fat percentage. Quite frankly, I think it’s super weird to reduce a potential romantic interest to their BMI.

Not to mention, your obsession with getting freakishly jacked and reducing your body fat to 6% is scaring the hoes. In my experience, men I’ve dated who are a bit too into working out and their physical appearance tend to push their orthorexia onto me. And as you might imagine, I do not appreciate that.

What I find odd, and even more concerning, about this discourse is that when women voice the traits they find desirable, men don’t believe us. 

A few weeks ago, I had a very similar discussion on the Take It From a Woman Instagram account. On the topic of whether women prefer dad bods or the physiques of ripped actors like Jeremy Allen White, I answered honestly. The men in the comment section weren’t convinced that I preferred a normal-looking man (one even accused me of not really knowing what a dad bod looked like). 

Of course, if women found Olly Murs more attractive after his 12-week gym transformation, or we espoused the need for every man we date to have a six-pack of defined abs — no exceptions — we’d receive flak for having too-high standards. It’s clear that the male gaze has clouded men’s perception of their own attractiveness and desirability. Or, it’s just easier for some men to hit the gym seven times a week instead of, you know, developing a personality of someone women would want to date.

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