Well, a pretty famous study was done on this subject.
The researchers took a bunch of males and showed them a bunch of drawings of the same woman dressed in the same bathing suit standing in the same pose. The difference was that from picture to picture, her apparent body weight changed. There were (I believe) 8 pictures in all, and the guys preferred the third or fourth skinniest one (interestingly, the next most preferred picture was the plumpest woman. Think on that for a while).
Then the researchers showed the pictures to women and asked them which one they thought the guys preferred. The women chose the skinniest or second skinniest picture.
So the moral of the story is this: girls often think they need to be skinnier than guys think they do.
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