We love to play the “grass is always greener” game when staring at other women. We imagine that the willowy size four must be perfectly content with her body and never get caught in the trap of body self-hatred, but a study in England has found that as a group, women who are U.K. size 14 (or a U.S. size 12) report being overall the happiest about their weight.
More than 43 per cent of size 14 women also said they were as happy as they could be with their career, while almost a third say they couldn’t be more content with their love life. Second happiest, according to the research by Special K, are size 12 women, with almost three quarters saying they are completely satisfied with their friendships. (Source)
The five happiest dress sizes, as groups, fell between the range of 8-14 (or U.S. size 6-12). Four out of the five least happy dress sizes, as groups, were sizes 16-22 but one standout in the Least Happy grouping makes my eyebrow twitch: size 6, which is a U.S. size 4.
How can you be in the happiest sizes if you’re a U.S. 6 but in the depths of depression if you’re a U.S. 4? How does that work? Is the data suggesting that size 6 and higher is resigned to their fate while the size 4s are OH SO CLOSE to reaching the bony ideal of the moment that they can focus on nothing else? And does the gulf in body acceptance between size 12 and size 16 have anything to do with the fact that size 12s can happily shop in “normal” stores while size 16s are sent to the dungeon of fugly plus-size sections?
I’d really like to see the raw numbers. How many women did they poll? Did the sizes only go up to U.S. 22? Where did the 0s and the 28s fall? Do we have a bell curve of body satisfaction or a roller-coaster of peaks and valleys? It’s an intriguing conundrum. Any graduate students in Women’s Studies want to tackle this? I smell a master’s thesis!
