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January 16, 2009

Bad statistics at wired

There is a bad article in this month's issue of Wired that isn't yet online. Titled "Belle Curves: Playmates are becoming less like women and more like anime cartoon girls".

There crux of the argument is that the BMI (body mass index), a widely accepted but flawed measure of body fat, has diverged between women in general and Playboy Playmates. Yes, Playmates have lower BMI. The average age of a playmate is 22, so they were always going to have a lower BMI than women in the 20-29 group that the article compares them with (because about 70% will be older than the average playmate), but that wouldn't explain how the difference in the two group's BMI changed over time.

In the early years, the average playmate had a BMI of 19.4. In 1999 to 2002, the most recent data indicated, the average playmate BMI is 18.2. So the average playmate is 1.2 BMI smaller. On the other hand, the average american young woman (20 to 29) had a BMI of 22.2 in those same early years of 1960-1962. They've thickened up to an average BMI of 26.8 in 1999-2002, an increase of 6.6. So it isn't so much that playmates have become freakishly thin as American women have become substantially heavier. In fact, according to their statistics, the average playboy weight has increased about a pound since the sixties, and the average height increased about two inches. At 115 pounds and a height of 5'6" today, gives the BMI of the current average of 18.6 and puts the BMI of 1960's average at 19.6, which is close to the average of the BMI that Wired found. Finally, I found that woman in the Philippines in the 1980s had an average BMI of 18.7, and no one would describe them as a nation of anime cartoon bodied women.

The best piece of inference in the article concerns the relationships between playmate bust and cup size. Playmate cup size has had fairly constant between a C and D cup. The average bust size has declined from a 35 to a 33. That is pretty good evidence that more playmates are packing silicone. Using my back of the envelope calculations, the average playmate of 5'6" would have had to put 7 pounds on the average 1960's playmate (5'4") to have the exact same BMI. So current playmates are 6 pounds skinnier for their height. As such, they probably have smaller natural breasts. To augment their breasts to a perceived optimum of desirability, they then get implants.

Posted by OneEyedMan at January 16, 2009 12:11 PM

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