There Is a Tinder for Fat People

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Some people find fat bodies attractive, and there are apps built for exactly that: WooPlus, the largest, advertises more than twelve million members, and the Play Store lists five million installs. Researchers call these people "fat admirers" and measured them twice in 2009 — in Swami and Tovée's study, 47 men from the scene rated an average BMI of 29.2 as most attractive, while the control group settled on 18.5. A BMI of 29.2 is overweight, not obese. The difference was never really about how high the number went but about how wide the range was: the fat admirers found a broader spectrum attractive, in both directions, down to below BMI 15. In the parallel study by Swami and Furnham, 56 different men from the scene rated the heavy figures as the most attractive and the normal-weight ones as the healthiest. More interesting than the results is where this research stops: the photographic scales top out at BMI 41, and Wang and colleagues wrote in 2015 that they simply could not find images with a higher BMI. For bodies beyond that point, this literature holds no data at all. A scene with millions of users, and the science behind it consists of two studies from 2009 that nobody has replicated since.

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