Most of the time, econo-blogger Megan McArdle writes about boring money stuff like budgets, recessions, and credit crunches (and, of course, politics), but occasionally she'll venture into the "Huh? Is that really 'economics'?" world of economists like Stephen Levitt (Freakonomics) or Tyler Cowen (Marginal Revolution). In either mode, her quirky point of view or a felicitous turn of phrase will charm me just often enough that her blog lingers in the second tier of those I sometimes read when I'm caught up on my regular ones.

A recurring pet topic of hers is obesity as a socioeconomic phenomenon. A while back she wrote a post suggesting that if the pharmaceutical industry succeeds in creating an anti-obesity pill, and if it's inexpensive enough that anyone can afford it, it will no longer be quite so fashionable to be thin.

That's an intriguing idea, but what really caught my attention was a sentence in the last paragraph:

This is why I love Megan McArdle. Almost any other writer, male or female, would blame the skinny aesthetic on men, not women. But she has it right.

Only somewhat apropos: My own hypothesis, based on observations over the years of both myself and others, is that men whose primary aesthetic interest is looking at women (or pictures thereof) are more likely to lean toward a thinner ideal, whereas men engaging in some sort of tactile interaction with women are more inclined to appreciate a curvier shape. That's an untested theory. Really more like idle speculation.

Note that the former group includes most younger men and boys. It seems like it's the 14-year-olds who go on celebrity gossip sites to post comments like "omigod, so-and-so is so fat," where so-and-so is the name of some TV celebrity who is slightly less thin than her co-stars.

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