Sydney - The average Australian woman wants to be 15 kilos lighter, a recent survey of 2,000 women found. The average Australian man, by contrast, is likely to want them to stay just the way they are.
We know this because researchers at Sydney's University of New South Wales asked 100 men to judge the attractiveness of 201 line drawings of female figures. The average figure, one that would fit in a size 14 dress, won hands down.
"I thought there would be different types but there was just one and it was the average," evolutionary biologist Rob Brooks said.
Ms Average was preferred over the curvaceous types who get into Playboy and the beanpoles that fill the pages of fashion magazines. The respondents also ticked the girl-next-door shape over the hourglass silhouette popular in the 1920s and 1930s.
The least pleasing outlines, the men said, were those with wide shoulders and narrow waists and hips. Pear-shaped torsos, with narrow shoulders and wide waists and hips, also got the thumbs-down.
Professor Brooks tried the same experiment with women. There wasn't a clear winner, but a figure with broad shoulders and narrow waist and hips - one disliked by the men - was popular.
Could it be that the emancipation of women means that they now hanker after a body shape that appeals to other women rather than to men?
"It's an interesting idea," Brooks said. "But it's not what's driving our experiment."
The finding that men didn't rate fashion models above Jill Doe was of no consequence to Sydney-based modelling agency Chic Management.
"In Australia we have always had very healthy looking girls," Chic spokesperson Kathy Ward said. "We don't have any waif-thin models on our books."
