Why men get furious at women who say they prefer the “dad bod”

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“Dad bods” are stirring up trouble again. Last week, Evo Psych researcher William Costello posted an informal poll on X asking men and women (separately) which version of Olly Murs they thought looked the most attractive–a “normal” version of the English singer, looking basically fit but with a slight hint of a belly, or a muscled-up version of him after 12 weeks of intense workouts at the gym. The poll went viral, garnering some 725,000 views. And not surprisingly, if you’ve ever waded into the dad bod discourse before, the men mostly thought that muscley Murs looked better; women even more overwhelmingly preferred the “before” version.

In the comments, women offered a lot of pretty clear explanations as to why they preferred Murs before his gym transformation.

Some women (and some men) thought that Murs looked gay in the second picture, which is kind of a shitty reason to reject someone but it is what it is. No one seemed to like the tiny shorts, which some interpreted as gay-coded.

A lot of men weren’t buying that any women preferred the first picture, and angrily accused the women of lying.

I’m not sure how it’s possible to “virtue signal” in an anonymous poll where no “signal” is being given out, but whatever.

Other men suggested that the women saying they preferred the “before” picture did so because they were fat and/or insecure.

Men, or at least some men, have been angry about “dad bods” since the term was first popularized in 2015 by a viral blog post called “Why Girls Love The Dad Bod” by then Clemson University student Mackenzie Pearson. She defined the dad bod as “a nice balance between a beer gut and working out,” which would roughly describe the “before” picture of Murs, though in popular culture the term has come to mean someone a bit chubbier and less defined, with a Seth Rogan-esque physique.

The question of just how much girls love the dad bod seemed to be answered by several later polls from Dating.com, which reported that 75% of women respondents preferred the dad bod, and Planet Fitness, which found 59% reporting the same preference. The polls made men even madder, though they might have been at least somewhat mollified by an assortment of less-publicized academic studies claiming that, contrary to the polls, women pretty much overwhelmingly prefer muscley guys. But given the ongoing replication crisis in science I’m not sure I necessarily trust the “scientific” papers more than a survey by Dating.com. So I don’t think we know a definite percentage. Clearly some women prefer dad bods, just as some guys prefer curvy women, and anecdotal evidence suggests that in both cases this “some” may be “a lot.”

Why do these women prefer men with at least a little meat on their bones? The comments I quoted above give us some big hints that the reasons behind it aren’t purely aesthetic; the “before” version of Murs looks good, no question about it, but in that picture he also looks like a nice guy who is comfortable in his own skin and who might enjoy a bit of cuddling. The pumped up Murs in the second picture looks like he’s trying way too hard, which suggests a degree of insecurity and even desperation. Not to mention narcissism, which combined with insecurity can turn someone into a real dick. That assessment may be completely unfair to Murs in real life, but that’s the vibe the second picture gives off. Also, his hair and the lighting are bad.

The pollsters for Dating.com and Planet Fitness similarly found that women associated dad bods with confidence, relatability, and a more relaxed, body-positive attitude. It tends to be men (and not just gay and bi men) who think the musclebound physique is more attractive, and who therefore assume that women think so too.

It’s worth pointing out that the academic research into women’s preferences for male body types usually doesn’t address the overmuscled types that many men see as the epitome of the so-called Chad. I had an email exchange with Aaron Sell, an Associate Professor of Psychology & Criminology at Heidelberg University who has done some of this research. He and his colleagues have found, he says, that women have “a very powerful preference for physically strong bodies” and that “there was no evidence in our samples of any man that looked ‘too strong’” for his female subjects. “That said,” he adds tellingly, “our samples were of normal male bodies.” In other words, not Mr. Universe.

“There is data by other researchers,” he goes on to note, “that women don’t prefer … fatless bodybuilders. Images of the Hulk, for example, are not widely used as masturbatory aids by women.” Indeed, he adds,

If you juxtapose a bodybuilder at peak performance (with approximately 5% body fat) with a regular looking but strong man, the regular guy may be more attractive. … It’s not surprising, 5% body fat is borderline starvation and there’s no reason to believe that women evolved mechanisms that prefer men on the verge of starvation.

That’s part of what I think makes the second picture of Murs so offputting. He looks like he hasn’t eaten anything other than maybe one power bar in a week. Sell, for his part, says that this is a borderline case. “Based on my data the man on the right should be somewhat more attractive as he’s leaner,” he writes, “but he might have ranged into the outlier territory that my original study didn’t cover.” He also points out that the poses are different, the lighting is bad in the second picture, and that Murs’ smile “is more genuine” in the first picture.

It makes eminent sense to me that many if not most women would prefer the “before” picture of Murs. So why do so many men get so mad at the very notion that women might like the meatier Olly Murs (or Seth Rogan) rather than Mr. Universe or one of his many imitators? So mad that they convince themselves that the women are deliberately trying to deceive them?

As I learned while rooting around in the sewer that is the Manosphere for more than a decade, a lot of guys who consider themselves “red pilled”–or, like incels, “black pilled”–have a weird and elaborate (and completely delusional) set of ideas about dating and sexual attraction. I think these ideas, in some form, have leaked out of the original fringey manosphere and become the default assumptions of many men (especially young men) today. The central assumption in this cursed incel ideology is that women (at least at their supposed hottest in their twenties) spend all their time having sex with an endless succession of handsome, hyper-masculine Chads. Like, hundreds of Chads, even if they themselves are only average looking. That this is completely absurd, and not backed up with any sort of evidence outside of their own imaginations, doesn’t stop these guys from believing it with all their heart.

Meanwhile, this delusional ideology insists, these sex-having women look down on “ordinary” men like them and utterly refuse to even consider them as suitable for dating or sex. Which makes these “ordinary” guys very angry and bitter.

This may seem like a completely self-defeating, bordering on masochistic, ideology. But it also gives these guys an excuse for their failures with women. The problem isn’t that they’re too boring or insecure or misogynist to attract women; the problem (they think) is that they don’t look like Chad, and that (young, conventionally attractive) women are too shallow and mean to give them a chance. They need to lower their standards!

And these guys seem to have absolute proof that they’re right about this. Because, in the real world, they’re not having much sex, if any. That’s actually true, and not just true for them–it’s a real trend, particularly for younger men. What they don’t realize is that women, especially young women, are also having less sex, not riding the proverbial “cock carousel” with every Chad they see.

The idea that women actually like men, maybe even prefer men, who look a lot like most incels (who turn out to be mostly average looking in real life, if not in their own imaginations) is too much to handle, because it robs them of the central excuse for their romantic and sexual failures. It gives them such cognitive dissonance that they assume the women are lying, either “virtue signalling” or simply being perverse and mean.

Meanwhile, the guys who have decided to spend their lives “gymmaxxing” in order to turn themselves into Chad are also angry at women who say they prefer dad bods because they don’t want to believe that women will still reject them and their supposedly improved bodies. So they too insist that the women are lying.

Sell, for his part, notes that

There are a lot of bitter men online (women too, but that’s another discussion). Rates of marriage are down, young people are having less sex, etc. You can see this in the incel crowd. I’m not an expert on incels, but there are surely men who feel like they are not getting what everyone else has (namely sex) and probably ascribe the cause of that (at least in part) to women’s mate choice mechanisms.

This is absolutely the case. He continues:

A weak, short, overweight man will have noticed that women are not attracted to his body type. To be told by women that “women like that kind of body” will likely cause anger. If he believed the woman, he might have hope, but if his experience suggests she is lying about that preference, then he will likely conclude that she is lying for some nefarious purpose.

Now this I don’t really buy. I don’t think these guys necessarily “notice” that women aren’t attracted to their body type. I think they assume this. Because women, a lot of women anyway, are attracted to “weak, short, overweight men.” We all know fat and/or short and/or “weak” guys who do extraordinarily well with women, often dating well “out of their league” because they have the confidence and charisma and the sense of humor that women tend to like more than muscles–at least in real life, even if they enjoy looking at the extremely buff dudes on the covers of romance novels from time to time. Angry incels, and those non-incels who have absorbed a lot of the incel ideology, aren’t likely to have “experience” that suggests women are lying about their preferences; again, they’re simply assuming this based on their own preconceived notions about women.

It’s confusing and frustrating when the evidence before your eyes belies your deeply held beliefs. That’s why some women’s preference for dad bods makes so many guys–with dad bods or not–so angry.

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