Daily Loaf

I’ve always had a sweet spot for shapely women with pretty faces. New research may offer clues as to why: big women have sex more than their skinny counterparts.

According to research published in the September issue of Obstetrics & Gynecology, overweight and obese women are more likely than their skinny sisters to report that they’ve had sex with a man — 92% of overweight or obese women reported having had sexual intercourse with a man vs. 87% of women of normal weight.

“It’s totally unexpected,” says Marie Harvey, the Oregon State University professor who co-authored the study with Dr. Bliss Kaneshiro, assistant professor at the school of medicine at the University of Hawaii. The results were based on secondary data already collected by the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth, which collects a variety of reproductive health outcomes and behaviors for a sample of more than 7,000 women aged 15 to 44.

The study’s objective was to look at the impact of body mass index on sexual behavior, and all other measures — such as age of first intercourse, number of partners, frequency of intercourse and sexual orientation — showed no difference between normal weight women and overweight and obese women.
Prior to the release of the study’s results, many hypothesized that overweight and obese women would be less sexually active than their normal-weight counterparts. “It’s our stereotype that men are attracted to slender women,” says Harvey, who adds that thin women are often perceived as more sexually empowered.

Neither Harvey nor Kaneshiro care to speculate on why their study garnered such results, but others have interpreted the results in myriad ways. Some have suggested that overweight or obese women are more likely to seek out validation through engagement in sexual activity, while others have taken the interpretation that the sexual activities of overweight and obese women are often underestimated.

Harvey added that the study did not assess more subjective measures, such as the quality of or levels of satisfaction with sexual experiences. The debate over who’s having better sex is still up for grabs, but past studies have linked obesity to a diminished libido, finding a reported improvement in some of the subjective measures of sexual experience among women who have undergone weight loss.

Read the rest of the story at The Star Phoenix

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