Depends on the distribution of bodies, which ones you focus on, and your attitudes to beauty in general. Seeing a bunch of normal things doesn't magically make those normal things all suddenly beautiful or okay, beauty and aesthetic desirability are almost always about the exceptional, practically by definition.
Is the problem that it would actually address more the skewed distribution of scantily-clad bodies that people are actually exposed to (e.g. heavily weighted towards thinner and more attractive people in media (social and traditional) and porn)?
I don't think these kinds of "interventions" can do much, because seeing a bunch of people in a room doesn't somehow make you forget what you see in the media, or suddenly lose knowledge of what makes you desirable for dating, sex, appearances and etc.
I.e. it doesn't matter if you know that certain body types that are currently deemed desirable are rare or unrealistic if you still know that those are what are desired. Also, it isn't just desirability, but our knowledge of associations with health (obesity has undesirable health consequences, regardless if it is accepted or not; being fit over just "average" is again better for health and general ability) that also play into this, and are not changed really by any knowledge of the distribution of body types.
At the end of the day, attraction and desirability just aren't purely socially constructed (see: role of symmetry in attraction in basically all species with sexual selection), so you can't fix the problem with naive little things like this.
Agree. I think that the reaction of finding a lean, well proportioned human body to be attractive is the hard-wired norm for most people. It's got nothing to do with social media, fashion models, porn, or anything like that. Those things accentuate and exaggerate what is already naturally attractive to most people, not the other way around.
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Is the problem that it would actually address more the skewed distribution of scantily-clad bodies that people are actually exposed to (e.g. heavily weighted towards thinner and more attractive people in media (social and traditional) and porn)?
I don't think these kinds of "interventions" can do much, because seeing a bunch of people in a room doesn't somehow make you forget what you see in the media, or suddenly lose knowledge of what makes you desirable for dating, sex, appearances and etc.
I.e. it doesn't matter if you know that certain body types that are currently deemed desirable are rare or unrealistic if you still know that those are what are desired. Also, it isn't just desirability, but our knowledge of associations with health (obesity has undesirable health consequences, regardless if it is accepted or not; being fit over just "average" is again better for health and general ability) that also play into this, and are not changed really by any knowledge of the distribution of body types.
At the end of the day, attraction and desirability just aren't purely socially constructed (see: role of symmetry in attraction in basically all species with sexual selection), so you can't fix the problem with naive little things like this.
Agree. I think that the reaction of finding a lean, well proportioned human body to be attractive is the hard-wired norm for most people. It's got nothing to do with social media, fashion models, porn, or anything like that. Those things accentuate and exaggerate what is already naturally attractive to most people, not the other way around.