Attention Carney Folk: Don't Hire Marvel Editors!
Kanen Healey has made a remarkable discovery that will be of great interest to carnival operator’s everywhere! It turns out that the guys who enter the heights and weights for the character bios at Marvel.com are terrible, just terrible, at guessing a woman’s weight. Ms. Healey and some readers of her report come to some conclusions about this discovery that I think are somewhat off the mark, which I’ll look at in a moment, but the big thing to note from her research is that those Marvel guys should never be offered jobs at the guess-your-weight booths at carnivals. These guys would be giving away stuffed animals right and left. And not just those 10 inch, crappy Sponge Bob knockoffs that probably cost just a few cents (and some Indonesian sweatshop worker her childhood) to make, but the jumbo-sized animals that might crush a child if he got one! Those Marvel guys are that bad!
You can read Karen’s study here, but I recommend that you read the comments that she made here too because they’re more nuanced and show that she has a better understanding of what’s going on than the report alone does. Basically, what she found was that when calculating the body mass index (BMI) of Marvel characters based on the heights and weights found in the bios of Marvel.com, one sees that the women have a much narrower range of BMI scores than men do and that the scores for women center around the low end of normal while the scores of men center around the high end of normal. She’s absolutely correct on this despite the limitations of her study that she herself recognizes. Where she and other readers start to fly off the rails, IMAO, is in the conclusions they make from these facts.
Ms. Healey writes:
Check it out – it is vaguely possible that one physically capable superheroine might have a smaller BMI than MJ Watson-Parker, supermodel/actress. That twenty percent of a random sample of Marvel women have a BMI lower than a working supermodel is bizarre. That four of those women are Kitty Pryde (ninja), Storm (extremely capable martial artist), Felicia Hardy (martial artist; acrobat) and Ms Marvel (punches starships) is beyond belief.
Ms Marvel, apparently, is an inch off six foot even, and weighs 124 pounds. Her bones must be hollow.
...
In most cases, the female BMI stats bear little resemblance to the women as depicted in the art. Unless she’s made of helium, a woman of Ms Marvel’s height with her (lavishly illustrated) breasts, hips and thighs does not weigh 124 pounds, and is not depicted with that weight.
This is the picture of Ms. Marvel posted at her bio.
The sash doesn’t make her look fat, but neither does it make her look like she’s underweight. According to her BMI score calculated by her height and weight in her bio, she’s one of the most underweight of the characters Karen examined. But according to her picture, Ms. Marvel is by no stretch of the imagination underweight. This is the picture of a woman with a good deal of muscle, who exercises intensely, and has a diet full of protein and not lacking in calories. There is no way she has a BMI score of 17.33 unless her Kree/human hybrid has turned her tissue into carbon nanotubes, which actually would explain a lot!
The character Karen found with the lowest BMI was the Black Cat with a score of 17.25, which is also underweight by BMI standards. The picture in her bio is this:
There is simply no way a woman with an ass that sweet is underweight. And her thighs and arms look muscular. She’s thin in the waist, but not so thin that her overall classification would be underweight.
So far, Karen and I are on the same page, but with the quote below, we start to part company a wee bit:
And by Western standards sexy includes being tall and slim. In this case, sexy has been translated into absurd numbers for height and weight. Clearly, very little thought has gone into this, but the lack of thought is indicative both of the common cultural perception of what “attractive” weight is for a woman and the utter lack of realism in that perception.
I would suggest that Karen is correct that very little thought has gone into deciding on the weights of these women, but I would go even further and say that the weights chosen are not chosen because they are what the editors think is a sexy weight, but rather they are chosen because guys are extremely poor at guessing a woman’s weight. By this I mean that while it is true that American guys mostly prefer lean women who aren’t too skinny, they tell a woman is lean but not skinny by looking at her, not by hearing a number. For instance, if a guy was looking at Ms. Marvel and deciding if she was sexy or not (which studies have found happens nearly instantaneously), the guy would probably not be affected one way or the other if I told him she weighed 124 or 155 (Psylocke’s given weight and she’s the same height as Ms. Marvel.)
This, btw, is the picture of Psylocke on her bio page:
I don’t know about you, but when I look at that picture, I’m seeing someone less muscular and less busty than Ms. Marvel, someone who should have a lower BMI. But I’m not at all convinced that I’m looking at woman who is supposed to be less attractive than Ms. Marvel, who was, therefore, given a substantively higher BMI to show that she is less attractive. Moreover, when I look at the list of women listed I don’t see a real correlation between having greater sexiness and a lower BMI. It isn’t as if the women on the list with reputations for being sexy have lower BMI scores than those who might be considered less sexy. If anything, I might see the opposite. Kitty, Aunt May, and Destiny, none of whom do I think have been played as real sex pots, are near the low end, but none of the less sexy types are near the high end. Emma Frost Madam Hydra, and both Black Widows, who have all had their sexiness highlighted throughout their histories, are all near the high end of the BMI list. I’m not going to push that too much because there are plenty of very sexy women near the bottom of the list too. But what I think we see is that there is little if any correlation between the character’s given BMI and the character’s sexiness.
When Karen suggests that the given weights are indicative the cultural perception of what an attractive weight is for a woman and the utter lack of realism in that perception, I kind of agree with her, but only with the caveat that men don’t tend to know or care how much women weigh. This isn’t to say that men don’t care if women are skinny, fat, or in-between. They do. But they don’t care about how that translates into numbers. When guys talk about how sexy a woman is, they rarely mention her actual weight. You’ll hear guys say they like large or small breasts, full figured or slender women, big or small butts, etc., but you’ll rarely hear a guy say, “I like a woman to be average height and weigh between 120 and 135 lbs.” Most guys aren’t doctors, sports trainers, or carnival weight guessers, who have an idea of what women actually weigh. They don’t ask women how much they weigh. They aren’t involved in conversations where women say how much they weigh. They don’t ask women to step on a scale before they’ll ask them out. I suspect their idea of how much women weigh goes very little beyond the idea that women tend to weigh less than men. I suspect that the knowledge that lean, athletic women will tend to weigh less than lean, athletic men has more to do with the weights the Marvel guys gave to women than any idea they have of what the ideal weight of a woman is. In other words, I think the guiding principle that generated these unrealistic numbers was “women weigh less,” not “130 lbs is sexy” and the only reason the editors even created the numbers is because there were spaces for height and weight on the forms they had to fill out.
I’m assuming that straight men are like gay men, in that we know what we like when we see it, but we don’t know how much it actually weighs. I know guys who like heavy guys, skinny guys, body builder types, etc., but I have never heard even one use a number in relation to the weight of the guys he likes. Never. I couldn’t tell you much any of the guys I’ve found attractive weigh. Because I don’t believe that guys tend to have an ideal weight with an actual number attached to it, I suspect that Karen is engaging in a little projection; i.e., she knows women tend to have ideal weights in mind for themselves that they think will make them the most attractive and that those weights tend to be lower than what doctors would suggest is their ideal weights for good health, so she assumes that men also have ideal weights in mind for women. Multiple studies have confirmed that women think about weight more than men and that women are more likely to have targeted ideal weights for themselves than men do. It doesn’t surprise me to find that Karen appears to think that the weights associated with the Marvel characters are associated with ideal weights while I think they have more to do with men being relatively oblivious to what women weigh. I’m assuming straight men think more like gay men, and she’s assuming they think more like women. (And of course, I think I’m right!)
So let’s look at the concentration of women into an extremely narrow range of BMI scores. Again, Karen is absolutely right that the numbers for women are far more narrowly distributed than the numbers for men. Frankly, I doubt that if comic readers or Marvel editors saw the silhouettes of these women that they’d be able to tell most of them apart. Male comic characters have a significantly greater diversity of BMI scores despite the fact that in real life, women’s scores are less concentrated than men’s. However, I believe this data is being misinterpreted. For instance, Mickle writes about this phenomenon here:
Note how the spikes for the men's BMI occur at roughly the same place, but the Marvel BMI has a higher spike than the real life BMI. So on the one hand, the Marvel average - or ideal - still corresponds pretty well with the real life average, but on the other, Marvel men are more "average" than real men. They are, in fact, about doubly likely to be "average" than real men.
Mickle is mistaking the scores for Marvel characters as being affected by the same factors that are affecting the scores of real men. The problem with this is that while both Marvel men and real men tend to be overweight based on their BMI scores, the Marvel men are overweight because of muscle and real men because of fat. The BMI scoring does not take into account variances of muscle mass among men nor does it note that muscle is denser than fat. Marvel men aren’t “average.” They are vastly superior, but you can’t tell that by looking at BMI scores alone. Captain America’s BMI score has him as obese, but he is by no stretch of the imagination obese in the way the average obese American man is.
The vast majority of Marvel characters are remarkably lean. They’re at that “shredded,” near 0% fat, state that body builders get into just before competition that they couldn’t stay in for any protracted length of time and remain as healthy, active, or muscular as they are. If you removed the fat from real Americans, I strongly suspect that you’d find that the BMI scores for women would be more tightly concentrated than the scores for men. Once you eliminate fat from the equation, the vast majority of difference in BMI scores is going to come from muscle mass, and women don’t tend to put on the as much muscle mass as men. While men and women can be about equally thin (or even emaciated) when it comes to muscle, the upper limits of muscle mass are far more common among men than women. Karen talks about the muscle on martial arts as a guide to where BMI scores should be for most of these comic characters, and I agree. However, I’m a fan of martial arts, and I know that while there are both male and female martial artists that are quite thin, there don’t tend to be female martial artists with the kind of muscle mass of the upper weight classes of wrestlers, who tend to be the beefiest of the lot even when they are really lean. Therefore, it doesn’t seem to me that it should come as a surprise to anyone that Marvel would have some thin athletic guys with builds like runners (e.g. Quicksilver) and some beefy athletic guys with builds like heavy weight wrestlers (e.g. Colossus) while Marvel would have many women with builds closer to Quicksilver’s and few with builds like Colossus’s. Having said that, none of the women in Karen’s study have BMI scores equal to Quicksilver’s. I would suggest that this goes to the “women weigh less” guide that the editors used so poorly. But again let me emphasize that virtually all of the guys in Karen’s study have levels of body fat so low that they might be considered unhealthful by doctors, so I’m not convinced that Marvel men are any closer to “average” than Marvel women are because both are unrealistically lean.
Marvel does have some beefy, high BMI women who I don’t think have their high BMI scores because of having denser bodies. Man-Killer and Thundra stats aren’t on Marvel.com, but they’re heights and weights were in The Appendix to the Handbook of the Marvel Universe, which I believe got most of its data on height and weight from official Marvel sources. There Man-Killer has a BMI of 28.09 and Thundra 33.26. As a side note, I calculated the BMI of the guy who holds most of the strength records in the world, Hossein Rezazadeh, and his BMI was 45.26, over 150% of Captain America’s 28.31. I don’t know what all this means, but there it is.
Karen boils down her research thusly:
To sum up:
Men: Strong. Women: Sexy.
And
The point isn’t “Hey, everyone in comics has a weirdass body!”. It’s “Despite argument to the contrary, men and women are not portrayed with a comparable lack of realism, and this gendered portrayal says a lot about the depiction of women in comics as determinedly “sexy” at all time.”
While she is correct that the men in comics tend to be strong and the women tend to be sexy, what I think she is missing is that in the minds of most men
Strong = Sexy.
At least for male characters. Karen correctly recognizes that “busty” and “lean” are qualities that are added to comic women to make them sexy (as incongruous as those qualities tend to be.) Their bodies are idealized, i.e. the most sexy. But when Karen looks at the male bodies, she sees them as idealized but stops at “strong” without realizing that “strong = sexy” in virtually the same way as “busty = sexy.”
Studies on what women find physically sexy include traits like broad shoulders and narrow hips, lean, tall, and muscular. Studies have found that men tend to think that women like men to be more muscular than women actually like. Men add about 30 lbs more muscle to the ideal sexy man than women do. In looking at the guys Karen used in her study, we’ll find that the majority of them (and all the heroes) have broad shoulders and narrow hips and are lean. 75% of them are above average height, and most of them are a bit more muscular than women tend to like but are in the range that men tend to think women like, pushing them toward the upper end of normal in the BMI. In other words, they are almost universally sexy.
Male Marvel heroes don’t look like the standard strong men of the world. They are far leaner. If “strong” was the look male Marvel heroes were to achieve, it seems they look more weight lifters and be less narrow in the hips. But the type of strong that male Marvel heroes have is a leaner, more narrow-hipped, broad-shouldered look that is made to make them look sexier. (Although, I think guys who look like Gerard Denderoth are sexier because I'm fond of beefy guys. TMI?)
This isn’t to say that men and women aren’t portrayed differently in comics. The posing of the characters, for instance, is different. Women tend to be put in poses that suggest that the artist intends for the reader (who is usually a heterosexual male) to see the women as someone he’d want to have sex with while male characters are posed in such a way as to suggest that the hero (the idealized self of that same heterosexual male reader) is someone with whom a women would want to have sex. But they are equally sexy. They are equally idealized. They are equally lacking in realistic portrayal.
There is something odd about how so many people seem to fail to see “sexy” in male characters. Karen’s blindness here regarding body types is similar to the people who seem to ignore costumes on male comic heroes that are revealing (e.g. Hawkman, Conan, Namor, Plastic Man, Black Condor, Hulk, Grunge, Warlord, Ka-Zar, Martian Manhunter, Colossus, Son of Satan, Iron Fist, Hercules, Brother Voodoo, Lobo, Kid Devil, etc.) and claim that they are terribly rare while spotting every bare midriff on a female costumes. While it is true that female characters on average have sexier costumes and are posed more provocatively, this blindness to the sexuality of male characters is odd. It's just as odd as those Marvel editors' strange guesses about the weights of women.
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