Sunday, November 25, 2007

Heights of female adult film stars: Perfectly average   posted by agnostic @ 11/25/2007 12:04:00 AM
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As a follow-up on a previous post about the heights of female sex symbols picked from the pool of celebrities, which found that they're about 1/2 SD above-average, let's now look at how tall adult film stars are. They're worth examining since they are chosen almost exclusively based on how attractive they are to the average male consumer, not how elegant or confident they appear. The website of the modeling agency that hosts the more elite stars -- LA Direct Models (NSFW) -- has height data for all but a couple of their members. If anything, these data are probably biased toward taller height since everyone lies in the upward direction.

Here is the frequency distribution of this sample of 121:


The mean is 64.5 in., the SD is 2.6 in., and the skewness is 0.24, which indicates it is weakly positively skewed (more of the points are bunch around the lower end). In a representative sample of the general population (see this PDF, p.10), females aged 20-29 have a mean height of 64.1 in. Because the adult film star sample could easily by biased by a half-inch, and because the means are close enough anyway, I won't bother running a t-test. If you really want to, feel free to post it in the comments, but it's clear that the adult film stars are not taller or shorter than the population at large.

Because the females are chosen only based on how physically attractive they are, this result goes against the hypothesis that long legs are in general physically attractive to men (although some men may find them sexy). There is another, non-physical reason why tall women may be preferred as mates, which I'll post about soon.

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