During my group discussion with survey team mates Pei Yu and Nicole, we came up with many topics that we were interested in surveying. However, one of the more prominent survey topic was ‘What physical attributes of a female are male Chinese attracted to?’. The female physical attributes include height, build, features like color and size of their eyes, skin color and hair type.
We decided on this topic as we believe that with the change in the social landscape from yesteryear, gender roles and expectations have changed dramatically. In the past, females were expected to assume the domestic and child-bearing role with a subservient and demure attitude. However, with the rise in the standard of living and education level, women now enter the workforce with equal footage as males and command leadership positions. With the advent of the mass media, flashes of anorexic, heavily made up models strutting down fashion walkways has contorted meaning of beauty. Many girls have resorted to health threatening methods to conform to the twisted form of beauty the media portrays as glamorous to gain the attention of males. However, do males really idealize the stereotype of beauty offered by the media?
Problem Statement:
The objective of this study is to analyze the physical features of females that males are attracted to and from the data to see if those features correlate with that portrayed by the media.
Reader:
Females in NUS of any race, culture or religion, NUS Social Relations Office
Purpose Statement:
The objective of this report is to inform females in NUS of the traits that Chinese males are attracted to. This is especially targeted at single females who may tend to be more desperate and thus resort to dangerous means to make themselves more attractive by conforming to the ‘beauty’ that the media portrays it to be.
Another objective of this report is to analyze if the media has had a negative impact on males by contorting their perception of beauty. If such a trend is observed, steps can be taken by NUS to engage external speakers or social work lecturers to educate the students in such areas.
Reflection on Learning
16 years ago
6 comments:
Hello Hui Ming
I find this topic a rather interesting one to work on.
This topic is rather "hot" in the media right now, especially with the low birth rate in Singapore.
However, are you going to include Social Development Unit (SDU) as well? SDU is basically an organisation promoting marriage among university graduates. I believe that it is good to find out more from them with regards to this project.
This is overall an interesting topic to work on and I do hope to see what are the findings! =)
Hi Hui Ming! This is a very interesting topic since I a female too!
I believe that the two genders have equal social standing today and female should not torture themselves just to attract males! I agree that the media plays a major role in defining the superficial "beauty", setting all the fashion trends and fashion icons.
However, should the survey be targeted at males since you are trying to find out what features in females that males are attracted to?
Furthermore, is your research restricted to a particular social group such as NUS students? There was an issue of Singaporean men with lower qualifications not being able to find a wife since many women tend to marry men with equal or higher qualifications.
The Social Development Service (SDS) is for non-university graduate singles while the Social Development Unit (SDU) is for university graduate singles. It has been said that such class division is responsible for class endogamy.
Thus, I think it would also be interesting to find out the features that males are attracted to in different social groups.
Looking forward to your findings!
Hi Hui Ming,
this is indeed a very interesting topic. Maybe we can have another one which discusses about the male physical attributes that a woman finds attractive. Personally, i find beauty hard to quantify, aptly put by the phrase – “ beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder”.
It will be interesting to analyse the survey results and see if different cultural groups will have different likings for different physical attributes. Good luck for the survey and I really hope to see the presentation of your survey results.
Hello Bing Lin,
SDU has been renamed as Love Bites and we did not include this organisation as they cater mainly to the adult and not the undergraduate population. I feel that the adult population would be better insulated against the effect of the media possible due to their higher level of mature. They are also less likely to base the attraction of a female purely on physical attributes due to their previous relationship experiences. Thus including this group of people will cause a problem in our data collection and bias.
Hui Ming
Hello Jia Yi,
We have included the female population to ascertain the discrepency in what female features males like and what features females think males like. This would aid us in our analysis of how to tackle the issue. For example, if we found out that males are indifferent on the physical build of females (Fat, slim, athletic, thin) and found out that females thought males favoured the thin build, then we could advice females not to resort to health programmes and diets to become thinner as it was not a contributing factor to the males.
To your next query on our sample size, we have restricted out sample to NUS as we are focusing on the undergraduate population in Singapore. I admit that this is a limiting factor in the usefullness of our final results, however due to time and man power constraints, my group has concluded that this is possibly the best alternative.
Do you have any suggestions on how we can better overcome this limitation?
Hui Ming
Hello Sabastian,
My group's survey is focused on undergraduates in Singapore. Thus it is race, religious and culturally independent. We did not include such differentiations as we felt that it required more manpower than we had and we were unsure if we could find the similar statistically acceptable sample size across all race, religion and cultre in NUS. Thus, to reduce experimental error and reduce ambiguity, we decided to focus on the male population as a whole.
I agree that beauty lies within the eyes of the beholder and often love grows out of what is unseen, that is, the inner beauty and character of the person.
Hui Ming
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