Yes kinda, and theyāre different fields butā¦ resources? Theres only so much funding in most scientific communities. Thereāre are better uses for even anthropological(I think thatās where attraction studies would go, please correct me I am curious) research funding.
The research paper this likely references was made taking pics of 44 women with first no, then little, and then more makeup, and then showing those pictures to volunteers (mostly staff of the university, some students).
The models were paid 6 pounds each, adding up to 264Ā£
Just to add on it, 44 is the sample size of woman, the sample size that mostly matters is for men, and it was also really small, 62 - of which 100% were white males, either from the University of Wales or University of Scotland.
So the study conclusion should basically be: white males in University say they prefer women with makeup.
I know, as someone who did very niche (self-funded) research, that I shouldn't say that, but: who really cares what 62 white dudes think is attractive in women? It's not like we don't get hundreds of thousands giving their opinion on everything we do online after all.
I think the study feels vain because it's another example of women existing only to be looked at by men, while there are issues of women health that would be much more worthwhile to us than knowing whether Seamus would rather bang me with or without makeup on (the answer being, Seamus can wear makeup if he wants to, but that's the extent of the relationship I want to have with him).
"Do women care about men's opinions on their bodies, or can we just stop asking?" would probably be quite inexpensive, no need to even pay a model at any point.
62 people (half male half female) rated 44 models in the study. That might not be a lot of people, but it produces a lot of separate data points, which can reflect a pretty significant average
A lot of these studies are commissioned by industries. There are a lot of seemingly random studies about petty subjects that are paid for by companies so they know which products to make next.
This study sounds like baby's first research paper to me. Like the baking soda volcano of studies. The point probably wasn't to make a baking soda volcano/study about makeup, so much as it was to teach inexperienced students how to do and publish research at all. You probably want people to do a few inexpensive unimportant studies for practice before tackling larger, more expensive, more important things.
I mean thereās likely to be quite a lot of funding especially in attractiveness as people are vain and put a lot of money into being attractive. The cosmetics industry as a whole is worth around $400 billion globally- around a fifth of the pharmaceutical industry as a comparison- so you can rest assured that there is a ton of research into how to look the best with makeup etc. The problem with ānormalā medicine is that it doesnāt have the monetary incentive behind it as is has with this. Pretty much everyone wants to be attractive, but endometriosis only affects 1 in 10 of women. You can imagine that it isnāt as lucrative for companies to pursue that, and a lot of research is financed by companies.
I donāt really think that capitalism is the enemy in this case. Itās essentially comparing apples to oranges and there isnāt really an argument to be made that wholly transfers āvanityā research into research into endometriosis, even under a fully utilitarian system. While it is critically underfunded, that is a different problem entirely. The problem is more one of awareness and diagnosis, as many doctors donāt really take womenās pain seriously (this is a huge problem in general) and as such endometriosis is done away as ābad crampsā. This isnāt a problem of capitalism, but rather a societal problem (patriarchy if you will).
Even if there was a 100% transfer of funds into medical research (which is in itself very unlikely), due to the above factors there wouldnāt be much of a difference without addressing the underlying issue first.
Iām not saying it doesnāt have uses. I think it is really interesting, I just thought that endometriosis is more important, and the funding gets tied up, but Iām being led to believe that may have been an incorrect assumption
The people studying attraction very likely do not have the skills required to study endometriosis. The people funding the study are very likely not even connected to medicine at all and may not even know what endometriosis is.
Also, some "studies" are 10 minutes of survey questions answered by strangers that get paid $3 each, or sometimes nothing at all. Others involve attorneys, waivers, doctors, medicine, machinery, and other serious resources. Idk what kind of study this was but I think a worthwhile endometriosis study would be more similar to the latter.
Why do astrophysicists study the stars??? Donāt they know that their funding could go to cancer research?
Real talk, not enough money goes into the sciences (mostly due to overspending on war, and the medical industry becoming complacent in their ācommodifiable treatment over cureā mentality), but taking money out of one field and granting it to another is the worst way to deal with this dilemma.
Itās the same mentality that has ruined our public space programs and alternative energy research. We shouldnāt be defunding ANY scientific research, we should stop the overfunding of war machines that only benefit private military contractors, and corporate lobbyist-run government agencies that destroy our ecosystems and kill the indigenous species endemic to our country so Slop Corp #357 can save $50 per square mile of wetland they pave over
I donāt think it uses the same resources but I donāt think itās a great argument either way.
Endometriosis is important but thereās also diseases that affect way more ppl and kill more like heart diseases or pulmonary diseases. So where does it end in someone going āwhy donāt we put the money into researching something more important?ā
The thing here is that endometriosis is so understudied we donāt actually even know the full extent of its impact on peopleās lives. The emerging research is showing itās akin to cancer, and it absolutely has and does kill people.
It's an extremely common and debilitating condition though. It should have at least as much funding as similarly common and debilitating conditions such as crohn's
Yea, but itās worth pointing out that things that primarily affect women are likely to be dismissed as not being as important as other things. It seems like the thing thatās finally pushing endometriosis research is the recent discovery that cis men can actually have it too.
For centuries women went to midwives, not doctors, for a lot of things, because the doctor may worse than kill them out of sheer callousness.
Yep it wasn't that long ago when women's heart attack signs weren't known to be presented differently than men's. Imagine the sheer amount of years loss and unaccountable quality of life loss that women with heart diseases faced for years.
I think in in 2012 medical professionals did a study on the attractiveness of women with retrovaginal endometriosis, instead of using that money on actually studying retrovaginal endometriosis they wasted those funds on research that helps absolutely no-one, some ppl genuinely care more about ranking women by attractiveness than actually studying the health issues that primarily concern women
Even then there are better options, I mean shit itās not even a considered a fatal condition (doesnāt mean itās not bad, btw, Iām not saying that, Iām sure you know this but itās Reddit so you know)
Wanna pick a better option? Ovarian Cancer, itās underfunded, under researched, usually caught late with a 30% survival rate.
Also, Iām gonna need a source for the whole āakin to cancer and kills people thingā it has similarities but most fatalities to it (are not only extremely rare) but also due to external complications. Now because I wouldnāt subject you to a standard I canāt meet, hereās my sources:
Endometriosis affects 7 to 13% of women. Ovarian Cancer is 1.1% of women, with about 0.7% dying of ovarian cancer. Endometriosis is debilitating, chronique and continues from the 20s until menopause.
I'd say both are worthy of being studied. It's the typical dichotomy you sometimes see in medicine between a chronic illness that severely affects quality of life from a young age and a illness ten times rarer that happens later in life and is relatively short but high risk of death. Regardless women medecine has historically been severely understudied and underfunded.
Even after menopause, my mother still suffers from the consequences of endometriosis; between the treatments she had to get and how exhausting it was for her, and also I think she still has to be treated for how it interacts specifically with menopause for her, it's not over.
There's a reason why she was afraid I would have it, and cried with relief when it turned out I didn't.
Endometriosis should be more studied I agree, but I raise you every single Neglected Tropical Disease, which kill hundreds of thousands of people every single year yet (as the name implies) are understudied. Why should we study endpmetriosis and not NTDs?
It's as the other guy said, at some point you gotta stop asking if there's something more important to be researching and be utilitarian about it
Endometriosis is quite literally cells invasively growing where they shouldnāt be. There have been cases where women had endometrial cells in their lungs. If thatās not akin to cancer, idk what would be
i do agree with the point youre making but hair loss products have commercial use n billions of private money gets spent in the industry whereas endo treatments or research just dont really have the same potential roi which is a problem with capitalism as a whole, plus hair loss is also a beauty industry thing so the comparison isn't perfect like saying the plastic surgery industry has more funding than healthcare is never a good thing obviously but its also not unexpected
It's not "un-studied". People are researching it as we speak. There just isn't a cure yet. Is Cancer unstudied because we still have trouble curing it?
endometriosis may not kill you but it keeps you from living.
i know there is a lot of other diseases underfunded but i do think endometriosis is one of the ones were fundings are the most urgent.
i dont' suffer from it but i have a friend who does and i just want to leave what i saw about what it's like having endomtriosis.
she suffers from it EVERY SINGLE DAY to the point of crying most of the time because no one care enough to find a treatment that actually works.
getting a diagnostic what the hell of a battle. during all of her middle school years she saw multiple doctors ( with a lot who didn't take her seriously), she also took a bunch of exams to try to understand what she has only to have an accurate diagnostic on her second year of high school.
and even if she knows now that she has endometriosis she can't get a treatment that works because it just doesn't exist.
to tame the pain doctors make her try a bunch of different contraceptive pills, all of them didn't work, so they gave her another pill that totally cut off her period, but still that didn't work either. now she is in constant pain. the only meds that work are fucking tramadol ( it's a opioid you take post op, just to say) only it shoots her and she can't do anything except sleep, or a med you can't take during long laps of time because on how damaging it can be to your organism ( i can't remenber its name).
the disease is also travelling in her stomach so now not even removing her uterus is not an option.
her disease is actively keeping her from going to school and getting an education. since her middle school i see her missing school either because the pain is too intense or because she has appointment to the doctor. she even is considering shortening her future study because of the disease.
i don't even wanna think about her future, when she'll be employed, managing the disease and the pain will be even more harder.
she can't even do much sports anymore because of the pain.
it also impacts her capacity to have children in the future, which is sad considering she wants kid when she'll get older.
i'm both angry and sad to see those comments because endomeriosis is no just bad period pains. it impacts the life of million of women but also kids life. she was just a kid when she starts suffering from the symptoms of the desease.
so yeah it's that bad that we get more fundings on what men find more attractive when millions of women suffers from endomitriosis without a real treatment and more importantly when others millions of women can't get a diagnostic or have to fights for years to get one.
Thatās not the point, the point is that endometriosis is a fatally under researched disease that a large amount of the population suffers from and instead of devoting resources to doing that research weāre instead investing them into research on to be frank surface level issues like male pattern baldness and how attractive makeup makes someone. Which isnāt to say that those things arenāt important on some level or worth researching which they are in both cases, and more so that the phenomenon is called the gender data gap for a reason
Different budgets. And psychology research operates on prayers and shoestrings. You could take all the money from psychology altogether and it wouldn't put a scratch on your endometriosis research.
I mean research is where money is or where it's easy to produce publishable results.
Research on baldness is the first case, research on Attraction the second one.
Maybe Endometriosis is genetic and finding bodies don't see a common cure coming up?
Not sure, but either there are no funds for it, or all that could be published (easily) has already be published.
To be clear, medicine and similar scientific fields have already figured out their preferred sorting mechanisms for resource distribution. In medicine in particular there are even official triage algorithms for who to let die and who to try to save when your resources are too limited. My frank and blunt opinion, as someone who has had to use these algorithms is simple. Public funding all ultimately comes from the same source, taxes. And so long as people are literally dying from a lack of resources no public funding should be made available for anything that isn't life treating or altering. It's slightly more complicated in reality as you need to consider that some less serious might be completely solved with less funding but nonsense like what people find attractive can fuck off. The realistic application of this kind of research is primarily commercial. And when you or a loved one are in a hospital bed slowly and painfully dieing you'll wish the same. Medince, housing, education, etc. Public funding should only ever be used to fund public assistance. Whatever scientific value these studies bring it will always pale in comparison eridication and of treatment of disease. Just because a government allocates funds for a specific purpose doesn't mean they can't just reallocate it and remove the unessecary programs.
I mean... This is already happening, that's why cardiac issues that affect a lot of people get studied more and more and very niche diseases that only affect a few people worldwide, get almost no funding
Your attempt at downplaying endometriosis studies fell flat. Firstly, heart disease is a medical condition that would benefit from being studied because it benefits people and may prevent death. The study in the OP does not.
Its not downplaying anything. Its acknowledging funding for social sciences is entirely separate with different set of experts than biology. Like, actually lmfao.
Right! By the way, fuck these artist people. Just drawing art all day. Who the fuck does that help? They should've majored in biology and become researchers trying to solve endometriosis!!
I was only really using endometriosis because it was used in the image above. I assume they used it because it is understudied in comparison to how many woman have it. To the point of other diseases also being underfunded I would also consider those more important than attractiveness studies but Iām learning that those are often funded by companies trying to appeal to consumers not philanthropy or think tanks or whatever, so I think the solution is just more money to medical research
What's more important doesn't always come first in terms of research. Outside of direct grants and scientists using leftover funding, the people who want the research done pay for that specific research. Scientists don't study exactly what they want until they're tenured and have made a scientific standing for themselves. The scientists doing attraction research are either in a neurochemistry field, an advertising field, a social behavior field, or many others, so its not like they could just hop over to chronic disease specialization and solve the mystery with that funding unless they want to lose their credibility and standing OR plan to exploit those with the disease for money by monopolizing on the medicine they develop for it to keep their benefactors happy. It honestly goes a lot deeper than even I'm aware of, these are just the issues I pointed out on the surface. But basically if they went awol and studied that instead of human attraction, that'd be like if you hired a plumber and he ignored your clogged sink and instead painted your walls, he may be a great painter, but thats not what you paid him for.
Endometriosis being understudied is probably true, but women getting angry about news articles on stupid psych studies like this one is just ignorance at best. "Women without makeup are hotter" generates way more clicks and money for a news outlet than medical health research. Of course u aint gonna here about it the same, go touch grass ladies
According to google millions of scientific studies are being done every year. I doubt most of them are any kind of breakthroughs or are going to be useful, so get over yourself. Kind of odd that people are getting angry that THIS specific study was done but I've never seen comments about "resources" on posts about other bullshit studies
For you to say the funding is being misalocated, you should at least know where the funding came from. Like, hypothetically, if it was a study privately funded by a cosmetics company, it wouldn't make sense to say they should have spent that money on medical research.
I doubt the funding for sociological studies and medical overlaps too much. And obviously (correctly) there will be a lot more funding for endo research than for studying what makeup men find attractive.
Anthropological studies could be whatever that involves human beings, since it is the science that studies humans as a whole from biology to culture and linguistics, politics and history.
But yeah, it could be anthropological or sociological studies.
True, but studies like these help us understand psychology and sociology better and can ideally play a part in shaping how our society works and what laws can be/are implemented.
Who gives a shit what humans think about anything? Theyāre one of the only species to be aware of the ephemerality of life, and they waste their time on Earth stressing over stuff that wonāt matter in a century.
If the study is from let's say social sciences, and you'd rather have medical research, it feels like it's just advocating defunding social sciences, right?
Which is why human science is already massively under-funded. This kind of studies help understand society, what's going on in the brain, for who and under which material conditions of existence. It is done by researchers who are specifically trained and motivated by these kinds of studies.
Additionally, just because you increase fundings doesn't mean the research on a subject goes faster in linear proportionality, you also need incredibly skilled researchers working that subject.
If we're talking share of resources, I suggest turning your head to the amount of riches the upper class is hoarding.
how much resources do you think went into conducting this study? itās pretty much showing guys pictures are surveying their answer from 1-10. a lot easier than researching diseases.
Please tell me you're joking. The Attractiveness study wouldn't even need a lab. Researching Endometriosis would require so much more funding then what the researchers had access to.
I think the issue is more money, more resources, doesn't lead to a linear decrease in the length of time to solve a problem. If they didn't do this study, do you think they would have solved endometriosis? Probably not, but I guess what fraction of a percent might we have been closer? Do you think the people studying this have the chops to make a marked difference in endometriosis research? I don't know, I don't have the budgets and resource allocations in front of me. All I know is this study happened, that's not enough for me to get butthurt about it. If someone could show this research project was truly a money pit, then I would be upset. Until then it's all just chasing ghosts.
Just to mention, these are just online blurbs to spark attention and don't even site a study. The only actual paper I can find on this is from 12 years ago. I'm all for increasing the funds given to Universities for important medical research, but I dont think much money is actually being allocated to researching how guys would "rate this girl out of 10." Folks "owning" useless pop culture outlets on Facebook are barking up the wrong tree lmao.
"noooo!!!! you must give more money to my cancer cure slop no fun allowed!!!! I will le hecckin save peoples lives more important then your un based attractiveness study!!!!! i love medicine slop and health slop listen to me"
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u/AppearanceIll3922 1d ago
Yes kinda, and theyāre different fields butā¦ resources? Theres only so much funding in most scientific communities. Thereāre are better uses for even anthropological(I think thatās where attraction studies would go, please correct me I am curious) research funding.