1. Female college students reporting satisfaction with the shape of their bodies were unlikely to choose their own identified silhouette as their ideal body type. Surprisingly, only 5 of 60 female participants (8%) identified their own body type as the type considered most attractive by other female college students and only 2 of the 15 female participants (13%) who self-reported having the body shape deemed most attractive thought others would consider it as the most attractive. Many external factors have been thought to influence body image, such as media exposure (Eyal & Te’en-Harari, 2013) and use of the social networking website Facebook (Rutledge, Gillmor, & Gillen, 2013). However, there are also internal factors at play that can affect the way people see themselves. Research has shown that compared to men, women tend to compare themselves to other women whom they perceive to have better physical qualities than their own. In other words, women are self-critical in comparison whereas men are self-hopeful (Franzoi, Vasquez, Sparapani, Frost, Martin, & Abely, 2012). Some studies have even found that normal/healthy weight women actually desire to be underweight (Desai & Patoliya, 2011). Gillen and Lefkowitz (2011) found a significant discrepancy between women’s perceptions of their own body size and the size they believe men see as ideal and that this discrepancy was the best predictor of body image and self-esteem. We already know that a negative body image can contribute to low self-esteem, and this is especially true in a culture where thinness is so highly valued. Fernandez and Pritchard (2012) found a relationship between self-esteem and drive for thinness in women and found that social pressures were a significant predictor of drive for thinness. This study sought to explore what factors are associated with a woman’s perception of her own body type. We asked college women to rate their own satisfaction with their body, to select a silhouette that most closely resembled her own, to indicate the silhouette she would prefer to have, how men and other women might view her body type, and so on. Primarily, we were curious about the relationship between a woman’s degree of satisfaction with her own body type and her views of what men and other women would think about body type in general and most importantly, what our female participants would think about others’ views of their own body types. Female students enrolled in advanced psychology courses at a small university were administered a 15-item survey, a set of seven female silhouettes varying in shape, and a set of five male silhouettes also varying in shape. The students were asked to consider the given silhouettes when answering the questions. The survey asked participants to rate their satisfaction with their own body type, how attractive the opposite sex would find their body type, to identify their own body type from the female silhouettes given, identify the body type they would prefer to have, what body type men would find most attractive, what body type women would find most attractive, their preference for male body type, and a series of questions regarding their use of social media. Satisfaction with one’s own body type and perception of men’s attraction to one’s own body type were assessed using seven point Likert scales. Satisfaction and attraction were both operationally defined as a five or above on the 7-point Likert scale. For questions pertaining to the attached male and female silhouettes, participants were asked to circle the letter corresponding to a specific silhouette. We expected that self- reported satisfaction would have the most influence on a female selecting the same silhouette for the questions, “Which female silhouette most closely resembles your own?” and “Which female silhouette would you most prefer to have?” Thirty-eight of 60 female participants (63.3%) reported that they were satisfied with their body types. In other words, these participants “want what they’ve got.” Surprisingly, only 5 of 60 female participants (8%) identified their own body type as the type considered most attractive by other female college students and only 2 of the 15 female participants (13%) who self-reported having the body shape deemed most attractive by our participants thought others would consider it as the most attractive. In sum, the overwhelming majority of women did not report that other women find their body types attractive. No statistics are required to see that this is an alarming finding. We were surprised to find that despite claiming to be satisfied with their body types, most women still did not choose their current body type as their ideal body type. This suggests a degree of discontinuity in responses that may be attributable to the power of the specific question employed to elicit particular responses related to body image or possibly to a realistic and healthy assessment of one’s own body image; perhaps women are thinking “I’m OK with my body image although having something more perfect wouldn’t be bad.” We think this latter explanation is likely to be untrue given the current literature on women’s dissatisfaction with their bodies and our finding that only 5 of the 60 women in our current sample thought their own body types would be viewed as most attractive by other women and even more persuasive is the finding that only 2 of the 15 women with the body shape deemed most attractive by the entire sample of women thought that other women would find their particular shape as most attractive. So even when a woman has the ideal body shape insofar as other women are concerned, she does not think this is likely to be the case. This supports a finding by Gillen and Lefkowitz (2011) that a racially diverse group of women believed that their male and female peers’ ideal body size did not match their own size. Our findings are important because they suggest that women have succumbed to the objectification of their bodies by other people and perceive others’ expectations of their bodies to be higher than their own expectations. We were surprised and a little sad to see the results indicate that females’ own satisfaction was insufficient to lead them to “want what they’ve got” nor to think that others may be more accepting of how they look than they are themselves. Abstract Introduction Methodology Conclusion Findings Do Women “Want What They’ve Got”? Shannon Gunnip, Arthur Frankel, Debra Curtis Salve Regina University Newport, RI