August 11, 2010 • 28 mins
According to stereotypes, men find women with small feet more attractive than large-footed ladies. Is there any science to back up that claim? Molly and Cristen discuss what studies reveal about foot size and sexual attractiveness in this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff Mom never told you?
From house Stuff Works dot Com. Hey there, and welcome
to the podcast. It's Kristen Mrs Molly, Molly. What size
(00:21):
shoe do you wear? Where? Size ten? Kristen and I
learned from some tabloids yesterday that Mandy Moore wears the
same size shoe as I do. Well, well, whoa you know,
if us Weekly or of the like is to be believed.
I don't want to say that was definitely as Weekly
because they kind of blended together side note, but yeah,
it was in some some celebrity gassip Meg the other
(00:43):
Day stars shoe size and what a cool celebrity to
share a shoe size with Mandy Moore. I don't know why.
That's the one that stuck in my head. And the
other thing that stuck in my head was the Adie
clue was a size eight, which seemed kind of big
to me. It seems small. She's so tall. I feel like,
you know, Uma Thurman, I bet she's up there with you. Yeah. Well,
(01:06):
there were some size elevens in that celebrity magazine but
I didn't even pay attention to them because clearly we
weren't cosmically aligned at all. Exactly. Well, um, you and
I aren't cosmically aligned either, Molly, because I'm a size nine.
That's I mean, that's up there, Kristen. You gotta admit
it is getting up there. It is. It's a burden
to there. Really, no, I don't mind it. It's fine.
They generally have have my size, except when looking at
(01:30):
vintage shoes. Well, I mean, that's that's gonna be. One
of the things we talked about is how the American
well around the world, how feet are getting bigger, heal
fee are getting bigger, and whether or not bigger footed
women like you and I, Molly, are just hideously unattractive
to the opposite sex. I know, we always we like
to think we can get buy on our sparkling personalities
(01:52):
and are quick wit. But according to the research we're
going to talk about today, we might as well just
put a scarlet a on our ourselves. Yeah, or just
start wearing bring back the trend of you know, when
with pants going over the shoes, covering shoes, just trip
around on the prairie dresses, things like that. I like
to exaggerate, and just for our clown shoes, I just
(02:14):
want to embrace it. Um. That's well, that's that's one idea.
Probably and Mandy Moore wearing our clown shoes together. The
reason why Molly and I are talking about foot size
today is thanks to an email that we got from
listener Diana in response to a recent podcast we did
about foot binding. And this tied into work from Diana's
(02:38):
colleague about foot size and gender and interpersonal attraction. Because
while we might just kind of generally assume that men
typically have larger feet than women, this has actually been
a rather controversial topic among researchers in that specific specific field.
(02:59):
And moreover, the question of whether or not foot size
is an indicator of interpersonal attraction or not is something
that this researcher, Daniel Fessler, has paid a lot of
attention to. So let's start with one of his studies
that Diana sentest that came from two thousand four, which
was when he wanted to, you know, sort of firmly
(03:21):
establish using all these old studies, what how you know
the relationship between your height and your foot size. Because
I'm a tall girl, I think that's part of the
reason why I've got this big old ten boo to mind.
Christens very tall, but you know, someone needs to do
some science to make sure we're huge. We're the gull
(03:44):
over of podcasters sou So here here's the thing though,
that Fessler I really wanted to figure out with this
first study in terms of foot size, because practically speaking,
it's not It doesn't really make the much sense that
women have smaller feet than men because of pregnancy, because
(04:07):
it would it would be more advantageous for women to
have a larger feet to support our bodies when we
get buns in our ovens um and because our center
of gravity shifts and uh, you know, it changes the
way we actually stand on our feet. But Fessler looked
(04:30):
into this and found that it might be that that
small female foot size is a queue for youth and
Noah parody, or that a woman has never had a
child before. So it was more based on sexual selection
rather than natural selection to explain why women have smaller
feet proportionately than men. So in that first study he
(04:53):
does make this you know link using all this data
from around the world about the difference between female and
male footside and then he starts talking about um, a
question that's going to dominate the other two studies we're
going to talk about that came out in oh four
and oh five about what role foot size might play
and physical attractiveness, because their whole host of things we
(05:16):
think of when we're thinking about what makes a person
attractive to us. It might be their face, it might
be their eyes, it might be you know, breast size. Like,
what are some of the other cues that people have
studied in terms of physical attraction? Well, I guess to
be hard to study, you know, charm and a winning personality,
but there's also sex specific patterns of fat deposition, um height,
(05:40):
greater male high greater male muscularity. But he wanted to
with with some other researchers. He wanted to see our
men and our women really attracted to an idea, to
the idea of a woman with a really small foot.
Is this a marker for predicting, you know, interpersonal relationships, right,
because it's a sexually dimorphic trade, meaning that it is specific.
(06:03):
You know, men have larger feet, women have tend to
have smaller feet, So it does seem to be, you know,
a marker between genders just biologically um so to him
that seemed like acute for uh sexual attraction. And it's
also something that really hadn't been investigated before, you know,
(06:24):
Daniel Fessler decided to take a closer look at it.
So why he starts with is this with two hypotheses.
One is the observational hypothesis, which is foot size would
be attractive to people because you can see that's the
difference between males and females. You would see, oh, females
always seem to have smaller feet, Thus smaller feet or
(06:46):
a sign of being female. Thus I am attracted to it.
And we've talked about this idea before about how you
know something like uh, facial hair marks men and that
maybe why women can immediately spot a man with a
facial and know that he is sexually available to them.
And then there's the evolutionary hypothesis. Yes, and the evolutionary
(07:08):
hypothesis maintains that evolution might have prompted men to prefer
women with small feet because women with smaller feet would
tend to indicate than being young and having never had
a child, So it would have been more advantageous for
a man to go for women with smaller feet because
(07:29):
that maximizes, if you will, his return on his reproductive
investment investment. Something also that we've talked about before, how
we're all on the hunt for the best partner, and
what if it all comes down to our feet. Now, first,
he's got to do something that in a different study
is called the Fessler task, and that says, I think
(07:53):
one of my favorite terms we've learned for this podcast
Christen is the Fessler task. And what he did was
he had drawings made of five women. Well, I guess
he started with one woman, and then what he did
was he would subtly increase relative to her size, the
size of her foot. And there's a picture of it
in his study, and it's very hard to tell if
you didn't know that the feet were slightly bigger, slightly smaller,
(08:15):
I don't think you could tell. And that's the point,
you know, he wants to pick up on these unconscious
desires we have for small feet or do you even
see if that exists. So what he's got is five
five women and then five men. They've all got varying
levels of foot size, and in several areas of the world,
they ask people to look at these people, these drawings
(08:37):
and say what's most attractive? Which one is the most
beautiful person? And then who is the least attractive or
the least beautiful, And so what do you know, small
footed women attractive to everyone? They win the Vesseler's beauty pageant.
Men and women both identified smaller foot sizes as more attractive. Now,
(09:01):
what does this have to do with the evolutionary versus
observational hypothesis? Well, if the observational hypothesis held true, then
what you would want to see, or what you would
expect to see in your results would be that everyone
would pick the small footed females and the large footed males.
That would be just a huge difference between the two
(09:21):
because you'd be going extremes on either end. But instead,
what they found was when they ask which of the
male drawings were most attractive, people always picked an average
sized footed male. So that indicates that the evolutionary hypothesis
is probably the true one, because you don't need that
sort of um polar opposite finding for it to hold true.
(09:43):
Just women have small feet because it's just part of
you know, a good way to spot them, versus saying,
oh that's a female thing, and that's a male thing.
So special dimorphism is not the only thing to blame
for this preference for were more daintily footed women. So
let's talk about one more Fessler study. And this came
(10:05):
out in two thousand seven. I think I said two
thousand five earlier, it was actually two thousand seven, And
this one again used the Fessler task. That's where it's
that's where it acquired its name if I'm reading these
studies correctly. And uh, but they did different sample groups
and they changed the drawings just a little bit because, um,
there's this theory and seems like evanus is kind of
(10:26):
contradictory about whether, um, one foot is bigger in one
sex or the other. So they did it more so
that uh, the feet, you know, it didn't just look
like a sex specific foot larging and enlarging thing. So
they were looking at a few things in this two
thousand seven study. They were, um looking to see relationships
between foot size and body of physique. They would, you know,
(10:49):
look at the b M I and look at the
foot length and try to investigate whether, uh, you know,
the people with smaller feet were smaller and slimmer in
other ways in the body. They were looking at the
kind of shoes that people who are really happy with
their foot size would wear, Whether people who saw their
feet as small would wear high heels, which also has
different effects on the body as well, can elongate the legs.
(11:10):
So they we're looking at ways that you can use
your feet to kind of increase your overall attractiveness or
what we may think of as you know, traits of
overall attractiveness. Yeah, because this was based on some observations
that Bestler had made, um and that a lot of
women with say, larger feet would actually kind of cram
(11:31):
their cram their chip season too smaller size shoes to
mask the real size of their feet. Um. The fact
that smaller, slimmer women tend to wear pointed toe and
high heeled shoes more often, and things like that. So
we wanted to find out like why, why exactly? Um,
you know, we have these like strange kind of relationships
(11:53):
with our shoes, and we do, I mean, every stereotype
you would think the would be kind of held true
in that study as far as I could tell, um.
And and I you know, it's one thing to see
a lady wearing a high heel and you can see
that she's got a small foot, and you can see
that the high heels along in your leg. You can
see she slim. And you know, I was sort of like,
(12:13):
I mean, this seems kind of obvious, but I was
really blown away by another length that Diana sent you
as from new scientists, which showed that even if you
can't see all that, if you're a guy, you still
will pick those women as the most attractive. Yeah. Jeremy Atkinson,
who is an evolutionary psychologist at the University at Albany
in New York, isolated there he removed the feet, actually
(12:39):
seeing the feet from this equation, and what he did
was he made composite faces or morphs out of the
faces of eight women with unusually small feet, and then
he made a composite face out of eight women with
unusually large feet. And what he did was bring in
um heterosexual in and have them rate the attractiveness of
(13:03):
these two faces. And we've seen the faces. It's in
the it's in the article, and they aren't drastically different.
But I will say, you know, there was there was
one that was a little bit more attractive shed she
had more um typically feminine features. I guess if you
will her face was a little bit softer. See, I couldn't.
(13:23):
I would have never picked when I was looking at
the two, I was really trying to figure out before
I read the article. I knew the premise of the study.
I was trying to figure out which was which, and
I couldn't tell. Yeah, but I mean, I guess I
don't spend my time going around looking for women, So
I mean they aren't drastically different. And yeah, you actually
did that better because I I'm saying this because I've
looked at the pictures more closely after reading the articles,
(13:44):
so I'm basically just confirming um, their data. But well
they listen, yeah, listen to how extreme it was. The
men were three and a half times more likely to
pick the short footed morph as more attractive and almost
ten times likely to say it was more feminine. Yeah, astounding.
I mean, it's a morph of like several women's faces.
When you hear that description, you don't even think it'd
(14:06):
be attractive at all. But like, this composite picture was
more astoundingly more attractive to men and who couldn't even
see these small foot sides. Yeah, And the thing is
that the other the more from the women women with
unusually large feet was not an unattractive person. Now, like
I said, I couldn't tell a huge difference. I really
would have been able to tell, like you know, which
(14:27):
was which, or I couldn't have deemed one of them
more attractive than the other. Yeah, and this evolution maybe
that's my large footed instincts coming up. Um, But this
evolutionary evolutionary psychologist was blown away by the extremity of
these results. But it wasn't just the foot size to um.
(14:47):
These um, these different morphs found that men were far
more They were more than eleven times is likely to
pick narrow hipped morphs eight times as likely to choose long,
thighed more worths. But the question, of course is why
is this? Why are these faces, namely more attractive? And
Atkinson thinks that men are more attractive features because they
(15:09):
serve as markers of a healthy childhood, because biologists know
that stress and poor nutrition during fetal development puberty, according
to the new scientists, can affect sex hormone level levels
and cause earlier puberty, which generally results in bodies that
are shorter and stouter. So is it possible that this
(15:30):
would contradict that evolutionary hypothesis to just be something to
add into addition to it. I guess if you're trying
to pick someone to bury your children, you want someone
a healthy childhood. Sure, yeah, because they would be healthier overall.
And I think this feeds into Fessler's evolutionary hypothesis because
when you're looking for someone to bear all your children, uh,
you're gonna want someone at healthy childhood had all the
(15:53):
growth that they needed. Now, the interesting thing is is
when they turn the tables and it made the morphs
out of men's aces and allow the women to judge them,
the results were far more scattered. There was not this
clear cut indicator of preference for you know, the unusually
small over unusually um large. And that's something that happens
(16:18):
a lot um from research that I've noticed in terms
of women reading men's attractiveness is there we are far
more um disparate in our ideas of what we considered
to be an attractive guy. Um. There's actually a study
that I found um recently that concluded that men have
come to much more of a quick consensus about whether
(16:39):
a woman is hot or not, if you will, whereas
with women were all over the board, you know, like
some and think about the you know, your girlfriends, like,
I'm sure that you all have like kind of different types,
if you will, And the study confirmed this, saying that
you know, like some women would chose uh typically unattractive
features that really you know, ring their bills and uh so,
(17:03):
I don't know, I think I think this is an
interesting example of how of how that is, Yeah, because
you really don't think of your type as small footed necessarily.
I mean, like, yes, we all have types. But it's
amazing to the extent, you know, based on just this
new Scientist article that things were not even conscious of
our affecting our idea of type and attractiveness. Because one
(17:25):
thing that Atkinson points out is that the reason that
women might not have picked those attractive features is again
going back to this evolutionary bet that we all make
in that you know, men are looking to spread their
seed and women are looking to have a lot of
babies and to keep a partner invested in their babies.
If you pick someone who's not conventionally attractive, isn't there
(17:46):
a better chance they're going to stick around and continue
to pay for your children? I mean, you know, it's
always amazing how often that these things go back to evolution.
But but um, I think we need to emphasize that
this vesseler pointed out, this isn't necessary early a case
of natural selection. It's more sexual selection because contrary to
what natural selection would probably hold, um our feet are enlarging.
(18:12):
They are. And this is where you know, I don't know.
I think I could detect it in my own voice
at the beginning of this podcast, and I kept talking
about how big my feet are, and I'm not like, man,
I just say, I've never noticed your garganan feet. I
thank you, And I would have never considered them gargano
and they just would have been what I always, you know,
grew up with until I started reading some articles you
(18:33):
sent me from Slate and the Daily Mail and the
Telegraph that we're all just like large foot shaming articles.
It's true. Well, it's because back in the day women
I don't know how they got around on these teen set,
tiny little platforms of feet. Yeah. At the beginning of
the twentieth century, the average American woman, according to Jennifer Howard,
(18:54):
it slate or a three point five or a four.
By the nineteen forties, it was a five point five,
by the nineties, sixties a five point five or six,
and now in the eighties, well in the eighties it
is eight or eight point five. And now they don't
have you know, the nineties or the O O S
statistics yet, but you can see that there's obviously a
growing trend and a lot of researchers are tripping in
(19:16):
it to um obesity, you know, to the rising how
much more food we're eating, and other ways our bodies
are changing. But I mean, just even when these reporters
are commenting on this, the puns in the and a
little asides they get across to the large footed ladies,
just it gave me a complex. I have never had
any complex about like media images in my own body
(19:38):
until we did this freaking foot podcasts. A lot of
large foot prejudice out there in the mainstream media, my goodness.
But that explains though, why you know, shoving for vintage
shoes can be so frustrating because they're these narrow, dainty,
little little heels and you know what, my my wide
(19:59):
size nine ain't ain't gonna fit in that. But the
same thing is happening to men, to uh. This light
article points out that are going into army records the
average shoe size or by mail recruits, he's gone up
from a six to about a nine point five since
the American Revolution. But um, also, uh, there was a
(20:20):
pair of articles. There's like a his her pair of
articles from the Daily Mail being like, oh, no, male
size is getting larger, and the next day Breaking News
women's feet to getting larger too. So this is not
just happening, um in the States. This is going on
everywhere and people are freaking out about how the average
(20:43):
man's shoe size has gone up in the past five years.
As then this is based on shoes, shoe sales, she
manufacturers reporting this. Um, Can I just say one, thank Kristen. Yeah,
when you sent me these articles from the Daily Mail.
One I was really mad because they just talked about
how big my feet were. But two I was like,
I bet Christen just picked these Sish could do her
British accent really and I think that I'm sure I'll
(21:05):
everyone enjoyed that little interludion just there. I did not purpose,
but Breaking News can use it an accent. It is
so much more important. According to the Daily Mail, the
average shoe size is for men is roughly a size eleven,
and for women it's still it's still holding fast, so
at eight point five for women, but that is a
(21:27):
lot bigger than it was thirty years ago. And think
about in evolutionary terms, thirty years is nothing. I know,
that is nothing. I mean, these people are growing like wheat.
But it's amazing. To go back to the Slate article,
it was about Jennifer Howard's searched to find cute shoes
in a size eleven, and I think that knowing sort
of this evolutionary background of it, it kind of puts
into perspective that search for really cute shoes and the
(21:50):
bigger sizes, because it is hard to find the cute
style of shoes in the bigger sizes. And it takes
me back to the Clothing size podcast we did about
how design nerves will make you know, a bunch of
size fours because they want the slim people in their clothes.
And yeah, I've seen a few shoes on me that
don't look good because they're just so big that it
(22:10):
kind of, you know, puts that fashion uh perspective in
combination with this idea that if if men find small
foot of women, the most attractive, then yeah, designer probably
wouldn't want to be known for his boat shoes. But Molly,
you know what. Howard also makes the point that you
should also remember, and that is she interviewed an agent
(22:31):
from Elite Model Management who confirmed the average shoe size
for models has climbed too and nine or a tin. So, Molly, really,
you you and I have model feet. Okay, I mean
we're we're a couple of we're a cuple models sitting here.
But you know, practically they were talking about how the
models couldn't model if they couldn't get their feet into
(22:52):
these like handmade boots, and I mean, you know, it's
you know, it's a sad thing. But a lot of
models have eating disorders to get themselves into the size
for clothing. What if they start having foot disorders to
get themselves into the size six shoes? Foot binding among models?
You know, if if there was foot binding once, there
could be footbinding again. Man, you just wrote a new story.
(23:14):
I mean, I am nervous, and it's all because of
the large foot shaming I've read in the mainstream media lately.
Oh Molly, since you're so nervous, have you noticed whether
or not your feet are moving much beneath our podcasting table.
Come on, let's just listen to this. Listen to this
podcast on a high note here, Yeah, they have been
twitching a little bit, and let's talk about foot body language.
(23:36):
Because um, of all of this wonderful information I found
about feet and attraction. Um, no matter the size of
your foot women. According to this study, which um really
has probably been featured in Cosmo magazine at some point,
but it's studied by Professor Jeff Beaty, who is apparently
(23:57):
one of Britain's leading psychology just Um says that your
foot movement broadcast just everything you need to know about attraction. Yeah.
I mean they say that you can tell from a
twinkle on the eye or this small smile how a
girl feels about you. Oh no, no, fellas, look at
(24:17):
our feet. We don't look at mine. They're so big.
What are our feet saying? Uh? Yeah? He says that, oh,
if a woman is attracted, then if she is moving
her feet while she laughs at you, you are golden.
If a woman is repulsed by you, she will cross
her legs or keep them tucked beneath her body to
(24:39):
signal that she does not welcome your advances. Now, I
thought that this was that this was interesting. He says
that alpha males and females have a low level of
leg and foot movement because they want to dominate and
control the conversation. Now, one tip that I found on
cosmopolitan dot com for how to for women to podcasts
(25:00):
There Come hithers two men using their body language was
that they should dangle their shoes. And I wonder if
they're so emphatic about uh women dangling waggling their feet
all which a ways to establish that they are not
an alpha female, or to establish that they've got really
small feet, because apparently that's the only thing that can
(25:22):
hook you a man these days. Molly, I'm worried about
this complex this podcast is giving me. But you know
what I'm saying, so you know the more maybe you
know women, you know, moving there up, let's feet around,
it's a sign of submission, exactly, exactly. It's amazing how
science and Cosmopolitan can come together. Watch I'm Never moving
(25:42):
my feet bar again. By the way, if you haven't
seen Christians video that she did for our blog about
Cosmos body language tips, you should really head over there
and check it out. It's it's a good time. So
I think, Molly, we've we've covered this, we have walked
all over, especially with our gigantic feet. Yeah, we can
(26:02):
come out and I but let us know, um what
you think? Men? Please write in and tell us do
you ever pay attention to a woman's foot? Have foot?
Has foot size ever really played a role? And has
it been a make or break? In other words type
of thing for you. We want to hear your thoughts.
(26:23):
It's mom stuff at how stuff works dot com and Molly,
let's read an email. All right, I'm gonna start with
a reading list really quick from Shannon. A few of
her books this summer have been Played As It Lays
by Joan Didion, Waiting for Teddy Williams by Howard Frank Mosher,
Catch Her on the Ride by JD. Salinger, Blockade Billy
(26:44):
by Stephen King, Living Den in Dallas by Sharlene Harris,
Once Upon a Game Baseball's Greatest Memories by Alan Schwartz,
Open and Autobiography by Andrea A. Grassy and This Time
Together by Carol Burnett. So casting a wide nut there. Indeed, Um,
I've got one here from Gwen And this is in
(27:05):
response to our episode on proposals, She says, back when
my husband and I were having our first tentative talks
about marriage, my husband of four years felt very wary
of the one sidedness of proposals. I thought this very
enlightened of him, although he did consider a couple of
very creative proposed ideas. In the end, we had a
very two sided conversation about the matter and made the
(27:25):
mutual decision that marriage was the right option for us.
We felt very modern. However, now, four years later, we
both regret a little that we don't have a more
interesting or romantic story to tell as part of our narrative.
And if we had to do over, we would have
both chosen something different, especially knowing that things were doubt
so well, it's been four years and we're still very happy,
although maybe less enlightened and modern than our younger academic selves.
(27:49):
And to Gwen, I say, just make something up. Thank
you Gwen for reading in. Aren't we always advocating honesty? Kristen,
that's that was a joke. Um well, speaking of honest
to you, I honestly love it. If you guys here
us an email writes emails and we would honestly love
it too. If you would find us on Facebook and
(28:11):
like us and also follow us on Twitter, and who knows,
maybe if like five thousand people will join us on Facebook,
will post figures of her feet just like we're gonna know.
I did not make that promise, Kristendens gonna make people
leave our Facebook page, but anyway, Yeah, check us out
online and also head over to our blog. It's stuff
(28:33):
I've never told you and you can find it at
how stuff works dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com.
Want more how stuff works? Check out our blogs on
the house stuff works dot com home page. Brought to
(28:54):
you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready,
are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff Mom never told you?
From house Stuff Works dot Com. Hey there, and welcome
to the podcast. It's Kristen Mrs Molly, Molly. What size
(00:21):
shoe do you wear? Where? Size ten? Kristen and I
learned from some tabloids yesterday that Mandy Moore wears the
same size shoe as I do. Well, well, whoa you know,
if us Weekly or of the like is to be believed.
I don't want to say that was definitely as Weekly
because they kind of blended together side note, but yeah,
it was in some some celebrity gassip Meg the other
(00:43):
Day stars shoe size and what a cool celebrity to
share a shoe size with Mandy Moore. I don't know why.
That's the one that stuck in my head. And the
other thing that stuck in my head was the Adie
clue was a size eight, which seemed kind of big
to me. It seems small. She's so tall. I feel like,
you know, Uma Thurman, I bet she's up there with you. Yeah. Well,
(01:06):
there were some size elevens in that celebrity magazine but
I didn't even pay attention to them because clearly we
weren't cosmically aligned at all. Exactly. Well, um, you and
I aren't cosmically aligned either, Molly, because I'm a size nine.
That's I mean, that's up there, Kristen. You gotta admit
it is getting up there. It is. It's a burden
to there. Really, no, I don't mind it. It's fine.
They generally have have my size, except when looking at
(01:30):
vintage shoes. Well, I mean, that's that's gonna be. One
of the things we talked about is how the American
well around the world, how feet are getting bigger, heal
fee are getting bigger, and whether or not bigger footed
women like you and I, Molly, are just hideously unattractive
to the opposite sex. I know, we always we like
to think we can get buy on our sparkling personalities
(01:52):
and are quick wit. But according to the research we're
going to talk about today, we might as well just
put a scarlet a on our ourselves. Yeah, or just
start wearing bring back the trend of you know, when
with pants going over the shoes, covering shoes, just trip
around on the prairie dresses, things like that. I like
to exaggerate, and just for our clown shoes, I just
(02:14):
want to embrace it. Um. That's well, that's that's one idea.
Probably and Mandy Moore wearing our clown shoes together. The
reason why Molly and I are talking about foot size
today is thanks to an email that we got from
listener Diana in response to a recent podcast we did
about foot binding. And this tied into work from Diana's
(02:38):
colleague about foot size and gender and interpersonal attraction. Because
while we might just kind of generally assume that men
typically have larger feet than women, this has actually been
a rather controversial topic among researchers in that specific specific field.
(02:59):
And moreover, the question of whether or not foot size
is an indicator of interpersonal attraction or not is something
that this researcher, Daniel Fessler, has paid a lot of
attention to. So let's start with one of his studies
that Diana sentest that came from two thousand four, which
was when he wanted to, you know, sort of firmly
(03:21):
establish using all these old studies, what how you know
the relationship between your height and your foot size. Because
I'm a tall girl, I think that's part of the
reason why I've got this big old ten boo to mind.
Christens very tall, but you know, someone needs to do
some science to make sure we're huge. We're the gull
(03:44):
over of podcasters sou So here here's the thing though,
that Fessler I really wanted to figure out with this
first study in terms of foot size, because practically speaking,
it's not It doesn't really make the much sense that
women have smaller feet than men because of pregnancy, because
(04:07):
it would it would be more advantageous for women to
have a larger feet to support our bodies when we
get buns in our ovens um and because our center
of gravity shifts and uh, you know, it changes the
way we actually stand on our feet. But Fessler looked
(04:30):
into this and found that it might be that that
small female foot size is a queue for youth and
Noah parody, or that a woman has never had a
child before. So it was more based on sexual selection
rather than natural selection to explain why women have smaller
feet proportionately than men. So in that first study he
(04:53):
does make this you know link using all this data
from around the world about the difference between female and
male footside and then he starts talking about um, a
question that's going to dominate the other two studies we're
going to talk about that came out in oh four
and oh five about what role foot size might play
and physical attractiveness, because their whole host of things we
(05:16):
think of when we're thinking about what makes a person
attractive to us. It might be their face, it might
be their eyes, it might be you know, breast size. Like,
what are some of the other cues that people have
studied in terms of physical attraction? Well, I guess to
be hard to study, you know, charm and a winning personality,
but there's also sex specific patterns of fat deposition, um height,
(05:40):
greater male high greater male muscularity. But he wanted to
with with some other researchers. He wanted to see our
men and our women really attracted to an idea, to
the idea of a woman with a really small foot.
Is this a marker for predicting, you know, interpersonal relationships, right,
because it's a sexually dimorphic trade, meaning that it is specific.
(06:03):
You know, men have larger feet, women have tend to
have smaller feet, So it does seem to be, you know,
a marker between genders just biologically um so to him
that seemed like acute for uh sexual attraction. And it's
also something that really hadn't been investigated before, you know,
(06:24):
Daniel Fessler decided to take a closer look at it.
So why he starts with is this with two hypotheses.
One is the observational hypothesis, which is foot size would
be attractive to people because you can see that's the
difference between males and females. You would see, oh, females
always seem to have smaller feet, Thus smaller feet or
(06:46):
a sign of being female. Thus I am attracted to it.
And we've talked about this idea before about how you
know something like uh, facial hair marks men and that
maybe why women can immediately spot a man with a
facial and know that he is sexually available to them.
And then there's the evolutionary hypothesis. Yes, and the evolutionary
(07:08):
hypothesis maintains that evolution might have prompted men to prefer
women with small feet because women with smaller feet would
tend to indicate than being young and having never had
a child, So it would have been more advantageous for
a man to go for women with smaller feet because
(07:29):
that maximizes, if you will, his return on his reproductive
investment investment. Something also that we've talked about before, how
we're all on the hunt for the best partner, and
what if it all comes down to our feet. Now, first,
he's got to do something that in a different study
is called the Fessler task, and that says, I think
(07:53):
one of my favorite terms we've learned for this podcast
Christen is the Fessler task. And what he did was
he had drawings made of five women. Well, I guess
he started with one woman, and then what he did
was he would subtly increase relative to her size, the
size of her foot. And there's a picture of it
in his study, and it's very hard to tell if
you didn't know that the feet were slightly bigger, slightly smaller,
(08:15):
I don't think you could tell. And that's the point,
you know, he wants to pick up on these unconscious
desires we have for small feet or do you even
see if that exists. So what he's got is five
five women and then five men. They've all got varying
levels of foot size, and in several areas of the world,
they ask people to look at these people, these drawings
(08:37):
and say what's most attractive? Which one is the most
beautiful person? And then who is the least attractive or
the least beautiful, And so what do you know, small
footed women attractive to everyone? They win the Vesseler's beauty pageant.
Men and women both identified smaller foot sizes as more attractive. Now,
(09:01):
what does this have to do with the evolutionary versus
observational hypothesis? Well, if the observational hypothesis held true, then
what you would want to see, or what you would
expect to see in your results would be that everyone
would pick the small footed females and the large footed males.
That would be just a huge difference between the two
(09:21):
because you'd be going extremes on either end. But instead,
what they found was when they ask which of the
male drawings were most attractive, people always picked an average
sized footed male. So that indicates that the evolutionary hypothesis
is probably the true one, because you don't need that
sort of um polar opposite finding for it to hold true.
(09:43):
Just women have small feet because it's just part of
you know, a good way to spot them, versus saying,
oh that's a female thing, and that's a male thing.
So special dimorphism is not the only thing to blame
for this preference for were more daintily footed women. So
let's talk about one more Fessler study. And this came
(10:05):
out in two thousand seven. I think I said two
thousand five earlier, it was actually two thousand seven, And
this one again used the Fessler task. That's where it's
that's where it acquired its name if I'm reading these
studies correctly. And uh, but they did different sample groups
and they changed the drawings just a little bit because, um,
there's this theory and seems like evanus is kind of
(10:26):
contradictory about whether, um, one foot is bigger in one
sex or the other. So they did it more so
that uh, the feet, you know, it didn't just look
like a sex specific foot larging and enlarging thing. So
they were looking at a few things in this two
thousand seven study. They were, um looking to see relationships
between foot size and body of physique. They would, you know,
(10:49):
look at the b M I and look at the
foot length and try to investigate whether, uh, you know,
the people with smaller feet were smaller and slimmer in
other ways in the body. They were looking at the
kind of shoes that people who are really happy with
their foot size would wear, Whether people who saw their
feet as small would wear high heels, which also has
different effects on the body as well, can elongate the legs.
(11:10):
So they we're looking at ways that you can use
your feet to kind of increase your overall attractiveness or
what we may think of as you know, traits of
overall attractiveness. Yeah, because this was based on some observations
that Bestler had made, um and that a lot of
women with say, larger feet would actually kind of cram
(11:31):
their cram their chip season too smaller size shoes to
mask the real size of their feet. Um. The fact
that smaller, slimmer women tend to wear pointed toe and
high heeled shoes more often, and things like that. So
we wanted to find out like why, why exactly? Um,
you know, we have these like strange kind of relationships
(11:53):
with our shoes, and we do, I mean, every stereotype
you would think the would be kind of held true
in that study as far as I could tell, um.
And and I you know, it's one thing to see
a lady wearing a high heel and you can see
that she's got a small foot, and you can see
that the high heels along in your leg. You can
see she slim. And you know, I was sort of like,
(12:13):
I mean, this seems kind of obvious, but I was
really blown away by another length that Diana sent you
as from new scientists, which showed that even if you
can't see all that, if you're a guy, you still
will pick those women as the most attractive. Yeah. Jeremy Atkinson,
who is an evolutionary psychologist at the University at Albany
in New York, isolated there he removed the feet, actually
(12:39):
seeing the feet from this equation, and what he did
was he made composite faces or morphs out of the
faces of eight women with unusually small feet, and then
he made a composite face out of eight women with
unusually large feet. And what he did was bring in
um heterosexual in and have them rate the attractiveness of
(13:03):
these two faces. And we've seen the faces. It's in
the it's in the article, and they aren't drastically different.
But I will say, you know, there was there was
one that was a little bit more attractive shed she
had more um typically feminine features. I guess if you
will her face was a little bit softer. See, I couldn't.
(13:23):
I would have never picked when I was looking at
the two, I was really trying to figure out before
I read the article. I knew the premise of the study.
I was trying to figure out which was which, and
I couldn't tell. Yeah, but I mean, I guess I
don't spend my time going around looking for women, So
I mean they aren't drastically different. And yeah, you actually
did that better because I I'm saying this because I've
looked at the pictures more closely after reading the articles,
(13:44):
so I'm basically just confirming um, their data. But well
they listen, yeah, listen to how extreme it was. The
men were three and a half times more likely to
pick the short footed morph as more attractive and almost
ten times likely to say it was more feminine. Yeah, astounding.
I mean, it's a morph of like several women's faces.
When you hear that description, you don't even think it'd
(14:06):
be attractive at all. But like, this composite picture was
more astoundingly more attractive to men and who couldn't even
see these small foot sides. Yeah, And the thing is
that the other the more from the women women with
unusually large feet was not an unattractive person. Now, like
I said, I couldn't tell a huge difference. I really
would have been able to tell, like you know, which
(14:27):
was which, or I couldn't have deemed one of them
more attractive than the other. Yeah, and this evolution maybe
that's my large footed instincts coming up. Um, But this
evolutionary evolutionary psychologist was blown away by the extremity of
these results. But it wasn't just the foot size to um.
(14:47):
These um, these different morphs found that men were far
more They were more than eleven times is likely to
pick narrow hipped morphs eight times as likely to choose long,
thighed more worths. But the question, of course is why
is this? Why are these faces, namely more attractive? And
Atkinson thinks that men are more attractive features because they
(15:09):
serve as markers of a healthy childhood, because biologists know
that stress and poor nutrition during fetal development puberty, according
to the new scientists, can affect sex hormone level levels
and cause earlier puberty, which generally results in bodies that
are shorter and stouter. So is it possible that this
(15:30):
would contradict that evolutionary hypothesis to just be something to
add into addition to it. I guess if you're trying
to pick someone to bury your children, you want someone
a healthy childhood. Sure, yeah, because they would be healthier overall.
And I think this feeds into Fessler's evolutionary hypothesis because
when you're looking for someone to bear all your children, uh,
you're gonna want someone at healthy childhood had all the
(15:53):
growth that they needed. Now, the interesting thing is is
when they turn the tables and it made the morphs
out of men's aces and allow the women to judge them,
the results were far more scattered. There was not this
clear cut indicator of preference for you know, the unusually
small over unusually um large. And that's something that happens
(16:18):
a lot um from research that I've noticed in terms
of women reading men's attractiveness is there we are far
more um disparate in our ideas of what we considered
to be an attractive guy. Um. There's actually a study
that I found um recently that concluded that men have
come to much more of a quick consensus about whether
(16:39):
a woman is hot or not, if you will, whereas
with women were all over the board, you know, like
some and think about the you know, your girlfriends, like,
I'm sure that you all have like kind of different types,
if you will, And the study confirmed this, saying that
you know, like some women would chose uh typically unattractive
features that really you know, ring their bills and uh so,
(17:03):
I don't know, I think I think this is an
interesting example of how of how that is, Yeah, because
you really don't think of your type as small footed necessarily.
I mean, like, yes, we all have types. But it's
amazing to the extent, you know, based on just this
new Scientist article that things were not even conscious of
our affecting our idea of type and attractiveness. Because one
(17:25):
thing that Atkinson points out is that the reason that
women might not have picked those attractive features is again
going back to this evolutionary bet that we all make
in that you know, men are looking to spread their
seed and women are looking to have a lot of
babies and to keep a partner invested in their babies.
If you pick someone who's not conventionally attractive, isn't there
(17:46):
a better chance they're going to stick around and continue
to pay for your children? I mean, you know, it's
always amazing how often that these things go back to evolution.
But but um, I think we need to emphasize that
this vesseler pointed out, this isn't necessary early a case
of natural selection. It's more sexual selection because contrary to
what natural selection would probably hold, um our feet are enlarging.
(18:12):
They are. And this is where you know, I don't know.
I think I could detect it in my own voice
at the beginning of this podcast, and I kept talking
about how big my feet are, and I'm not like, man,
I just say, I've never noticed your garganan feet. I
thank you, And I would have never considered them gargano
and they just would have been what I always, you know,
grew up with until I started reading some articles you
(18:33):
sent me from Slate and the Daily Mail and the
Telegraph that we're all just like large foot shaming articles.
It's true. Well, it's because back in the day women
I don't know how they got around on these teen set,
tiny little platforms of feet. Yeah. At the beginning of
the twentieth century, the average American woman, according to Jennifer Howard,
(18:54):
it slate or a three point five or a four.
By the nineteen forties, it was a five point five,
by the nineties, sixties a five point five or six,
and now in the eighties, well in the eighties it
is eight or eight point five. And now they don't
have you know, the nineties or the O O S
statistics yet, but you can see that there's obviously a
growing trend and a lot of researchers are tripping in
(19:16):
it to um obesity, you know, to the rising how
much more food we're eating, and other ways our bodies
are changing. But I mean, just even when these reporters
are commenting on this, the puns in the and a
little asides they get across to the large footed ladies,
just it gave me a complex. I have never had
any complex about like media images in my own body
(19:38):
until we did this freaking foot podcasts. A lot of
large foot prejudice out there in the mainstream media, my goodness.
But that explains though, why you know, shoving for vintage
shoes can be so frustrating because they're these narrow, dainty,
little little heels and you know what, my my wide
(19:59):
size nine ain't ain't gonna fit in that. But the
same thing is happening to men, to uh. This light
article points out that are going into army records the
average shoe size or by mail recruits, he's gone up
from a six to about a nine point five since
the American Revolution. But um, also, uh, there was a
(20:20):
pair of articles. There's like a his her pair of
articles from the Daily Mail being like, oh, no, male
size is getting larger, and the next day Breaking News
women's feet to getting larger too. So this is not
just happening, um in the States. This is going on
everywhere and people are freaking out about how the average
(20:43):
man's shoe size has gone up in the past five years.
As then this is based on shoes, shoe sales, she
manufacturers reporting this. Um, Can I just say one, thank Kristen. Yeah,
when you sent me these articles from the Daily Mail.
One I was really mad because they just talked about
how big my feet were. But two I was like,
I bet Christen just picked these Sish could do her
British accent really and I think that I'm sure I'll
(21:05):
everyone enjoyed that little interludion just there. I did not purpose,
but Breaking News can use it an accent. It is
so much more important. According to the Daily Mail, the
average shoe size is for men is roughly a size eleven,
and for women it's still it's still holding fast, so
at eight point five for women, but that is a
(21:27):
lot bigger than it was thirty years ago. And think
about in evolutionary terms, thirty years is nothing. I know,
that is nothing. I mean, these people are growing like wheat.
But it's amazing. To go back to the Slate article,
it was about Jennifer Howard's searched to find cute shoes
in a size eleven, and I think that knowing sort
of this evolutionary background of it, it kind of puts
into perspective that search for really cute shoes and the
(21:50):
bigger sizes, because it is hard to find the cute
style of shoes in the bigger sizes. And it takes
me back to the Clothing size podcast we did about
how design nerves will make you know, a bunch of
size fours because they want the slim people in their clothes.
And yeah, I've seen a few shoes on me that
don't look good because they're just so big that it
(22:10):
kind of, you know, puts that fashion uh perspective in
combination with this idea that if if men find small
foot of women, the most attractive, then yeah, designer probably
wouldn't want to be known for his boat shoes. But Molly,
you know what. Howard also makes the point that you
should also remember, and that is she interviewed an agent
(22:31):
from Elite Model Management who confirmed the average shoe size
for models has climbed too and nine or a tin. So, Molly, really,
you you and I have model feet. Okay, I mean
we're we're a couple of we're a cuple models sitting here.
But you know, practically they were talking about how the
models couldn't model if they couldn't get their feet into
(22:52):
these like handmade boots, and I mean, you know, it's
you know, it's a sad thing. But a lot of
models have eating disorders to get themselves into the size
for clothing. What if they start having foot disorders to
get themselves into the size six shoes? Foot binding among models?
You know, if if there was foot binding once, there
could be footbinding again. Man, you just wrote a new story.
(23:14):
I mean, I am nervous, and it's all because of
the large foot shaming I've read in the mainstream media lately.
Oh Molly, since you're so nervous, have you noticed whether
or not your feet are moving much beneath our podcasting table.
Come on, let's just listen to this. Listen to this
podcast on a high note here, Yeah, they have been
twitching a little bit, and let's talk about foot body language.
(23:36):
Because um, of all of this wonderful information I found
about feet and attraction. Um, no matter the size of
your foot women. According to this study, which um really
has probably been featured in Cosmo magazine at some point,
but it's studied by Professor Jeff Beaty, who is apparently
(23:57):
one of Britain's leading psychology just Um says that your
foot movement broadcast just everything you need to know about attraction. Yeah.
I mean they say that you can tell from a
twinkle on the eye or this small smile how a
girl feels about you. Oh no, no, fellas, look at
(24:17):
our feet. We don't look at mine. They're so big.
What are our feet saying? Uh? Yeah? He says that, oh,
if a woman is attracted, then if she is moving
her feet while she laughs at you, you are golden.
If a woman is repulsed by you, she will cross
her legs or keep them tucked beneath her body to
(24:39):
signal that she does not welcome your advances. Now, I
thought that this was that this was interesting. He says
that alpha males and females have a low level of
leg and foot movement because they want to dominate and
control the conversation. Now, one tip that I found on
cosmopolitan dot com for how to for women to podcasts
(25:00):
There Come hithers two men using their body language was
that they should dangle their shoes. And I wonder if
they're so emphatic about uh women dangling waggling their feet
all which a ways to establish that they are not
an alpha female, or to establish that they've got really
small feet, because apparently that's the only thing that can
(25:22):
hook you a man these days. Molly, I'm worried about
this complex this podcast is giving me. But you know
what I'm saying, so you know the more maybe you
know women, you know, moving there up, let's feet around,
it's a sign of submission, exactly, exactly. It's amazing how
science and Cosmopolitan can come together. Watch I'm Never moving
(25:42):
my feet bar again. By the way, if you haven't
seen Christians video that she did for our blog about
Cosmos body language tips, you should really head over there
and check it out. It's it's a good time. So
I think, Molly, we've we've covered this, we have walked
all over, especially with our gigantic feet. Yeah, we can
(26:02):
come out and I but let us know, um what
you think? Men? Please write in and tell us do
you ever pay attention to a woman's foot? Have foot?
Has foot size ever really played a role? And has
it been a make or break? In other words type
of thing for you. We want to hear your thoughts.
(26:23):
It's mom stuff at how stuff works dot com and Molly,
let's read an email. All right, I'm gonna start with
a reading list really quick from Shannon. A few of
her books this summer have been Played As It Lays
by Joan Didion, Waiting for Teddy Williams by Howard Frank Mosher,
Catch Her on the Ride by JD. Salinger, Blockade Billy
(26:44):
by Stephen King, Living Den in Dallas by Sharlene Harris,
Once Upon a Game Baseball's Greatest Memories by Alan Schwartz,
Open and Autobiography by Andrea A. Grassy and This Time
Together by Carol Burnett. So casting a wide nut there. Indeed, Um,
I've got one here from Gwen And this is in
(27:05):
response to our episode on proposals, She says, back when
my husband and I were having our first tentative talks
about marriage, my husband of four years felt very wary
of the one sidedness of proposals. I thought this very
enlightened of him, although he did consider a couple of
very creative proposed ideas. In the end, we had a
very two sided conversation about the matter and made the
(27:25):
mutual decision that marriage was the right option for us.
We felt very modern. However, now, four years later, we
both regret a little that we don't have a more
interesting or romantic story to tell as part of our narrative.
And if we had to do over, we would have
both chosen something different, especially knowing that things were doubt
so well, it's been four years and we're still very happy,
although maybe less enlightened and modern than our younger academic selves.
(27:49):
And to Gwen, I say, just make something up. Thank
you Gwen for reading in. Aren't we always advocating honesty? Kristen,
that's that was a joke. Um well, speaking of honest
to you, I honestly love it. If you guys here
us an email writes emails and we would honestly love
it too. If you would find us on Facebook and
(28:11):
like us and also follow us on Twitter, and who knows,
maybe if like five thousand people will join us on Facebook,
will post figures of her feet just like we're gonna know.
I did not make that promise, Kristendens gonna make people
leave our Facebook page, but anyway, Yeah, check us out
online and also head over to our blog. It's stuff
(28:33):
I've never told you and you can find it at
how stuff works dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com.
Want more how stuff works? Check out our blogs on
the house stuff works dot com home page. Brought to
(28:54):
you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready,
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