Yeah? How wide is yours?
Whenever I see a thigh gap I think of the large amount of japanese-sourced fanart with waif-like girls. A huge amount of the drawings feature slim, petite girls with a thigh gap. Considering how much anime is a pop culture influence for the young crowd (it has subsided a bit) I’m not surprised if that’s adding fuel to the fire.
It’s just yet another facet of the thin = beautiful “ideal”. If you’re surprised that society pushes ridiculous levels of thin to be an ideal for women, you may have missed the boat by…many decades.
Does corsetry from the 1890’s baffle you as well?
Look at the Target photoshop fiasco this week. 'Shopping in some thigh gap for the jr. swimsuit models and removing part of their torso. It’s been all over the news, and Target can’t apologize fast enough.
StG
Good lord. I can’t even get in the mind of that graphic designer. “Oh shit, I just cut her crotch out. Oh well, no one will notice. And her arm looks… yeah, that’s not right. Fuck it, it’s lunch time.” I can see how it slipped past whoever decided it was okay to publish, but when you’re actually doing the work, you have to notice this, and are just like “No fucks!” and keep going anyway? Is this the kind of work ethic we’re supposed to live with in Obama’s America?
Thighs not to rub is one thing. The gap that fashion is encouraging goes under the name of starvation. The Lands End flyer not only removed the natural bit of looser flesh that women have on the inside but they also shrank down the outside of the hip making it look like the swimsuit was painted on an unnaturally smooth body. Impossible for any woman to match this look in real life.
Some women do have a larger natural gap than others. Some women naturally have no gap at all because that is their body type. But shame on fashion for portraying retouched photos of women with impossible to achieve body types.
This shape of body is pretty common in Japan, at least. It may be that the bone structure of Indians is different from the Japanese, but I suspect it’s just a matter of diet. The exercise book, noted above, is probably like Miss Manners - cultural knowledge that descended from the 19th century without much change, until the 70s. I venture to guess that, like the Japanese, a hundred years ago, probably most young, fit women did have a triple diamond.
I remember that.
I also remember wanting my legs to be like Twiggy’s and Patti Boyd’s back in 1965. They had the thigh gap, but I don’t remember anybody calling it that. With my shape, though, it was never going to happen.
So, nothing new.
The OP’s links say that it’s based on the gap being present when the knees are touching. I can’t speak for you but I don’t walk or run with my knees pressed together. However, my thighs aren’t close to rubbing when I walk or run, either. It’s a different way of holding yourself.
As a male, I’d never paid any attention to it. I recently became aware of it via the usual internet crap osmosis process but the girls pictured looked a little odd to me. That said, I doubt I’d hold it against anyone either since I’m sure I’ve seen people like that my entire life and never noticed it (and forgot about it immediately until this thread). It’s just a complete non-issue for me.
Many models who look as though they have a “thigh gap” in photos really don’t. It’s common when posing with your body square to the camera to tilt your pelvis back and separate your feet just a bit. The idea is not necessarily to make your legs look slimmer – although it generally does that – but to make sure that the camera sees an edge on both sides of each thigh, so that your body doesn’t look like one undifferentiated solid-color blob from the waist down. The more edges you present to the camera, the easier it is for the eye to recognize that you’re a human instead of a random shape.
Like many standard photo poses, when seen from any other angle, this looks very silly. It gives you an awkward swayback look and makes your midsection seem thicker than it is, since you’re effectively thrusting your belly out in front of you. That this is an in-camera trick and not post-production Photoshop is irrelevant; people who make a “thigh gap” their goal are still chasing an optical illusion.
It’s not entirely an optical illusion.
It really depends most on your bone and ligament structure - I am in no way thin or ‘waif-like’ but between my wide-ass hips and my knock-knees, my thighs have never touched in my life.
When I was ill and seriously underweight, I could lock my knees together and lob a softball between my legs without touching either leg. I could even do it while sitting on the edge of a chair. I was bored, and thought it was amusing that my body was killing me and coincidentally accomplishing the very thing other girls were trying to diet and work out to achieve. And it alarmed my family, which was a large part of the amusement - I was pretty morbid by that point.
So, it isn’t just camera angles, and it isn’t necessarily unhealthy, but it can be.
It’s not just women. I’m generally attracted to guys who are thin, and always love to see that space between their legs. I started noticing it back in the 60s, but until recently was unaware that it was a “thing.”
I’m not a huge fan, but as long as people aren’t making themselves unhealthy to achieve it, I don’t think it’s a problem. I first heard about it being promoted on The Chive, which has a weekly post featuring “Future Lower Back Pain”, so I’m suspicious of its harmlessness.
The motorcycle shops I worked in 20 years ago sold hundreds of “No Fat Chick” stickers.
I’m guessing you don’t ride.
I don’t know what year that was, but my high school girlfriend in 1978 pointed out to me that she had perfect legs, with the three gaps. And she wasn’t emaciatedly-skinny, either. She was slender, yes, but curvaceous in the right places too.
Alas, I was too young and naive to know any better and do anything about it.
So I guess she was way ahead of her time, too.
It’s not necessarily a ‘thin’ thing. Some people just have it.
I wouldn’t call Andrea Riseborough skinny, but there are a couple of scenes in Oblivion where you can see she has the thigh gap. I tend to associate it more with curves than stick thin figures.
Awww… Soft curvy thighs are heavenly. What’s the matter with people? Who’s starting these things?
Anyone remember this crazy thread in which a couple of posters felt quite comfortable bashing touching thighs because in their estimation, it indicates fatness?
And to think, I actually sorta-kinda liked those posters.
The way my body’s built, I’m prety sure I’d need to start walking like Yosemite Sam in order to get a thigh gap going. If you don’t have wide enough hips, you need to get almost skeletal to make a thigh gap happen. Ridiculous.
Jumpin’ criminey, that’s a “thing” now?
Wow, it’s one of the few metrics of female body insanity which I can actually meet. Ironically, I was quite pleased when my thighs lost their gap. 
I thought Thigh Gap was a town in the Appalachians.