Fear Itself- “What passes for a hot bod today looks like a skinny teenaged boy with boobs; they have no figure to speak of. Give me a narrow waist over wide hips any day.”
Most men prefer waist-to-hip ratios of about 0.7, regardless of overall body size.
“Results from both tests show that figures with low WHRs were judged to be more attractive than figures with high WHRs, regardless of their degree of breast asymmetry. The figure with low WHR and symmetrical breasts was judged to be most attractive and youngest of all other figures. It appears that men use both WHR and breast asymmetry in judging attractiveness and being willing to develop romantic relationships. It is proposed that WHR and breast asymmetry may signal different aspects of overall female mate quality.”
Wasn’t there a recent change in what the Health Department (or some similar organization) considers “overweight”? I seem to remember reading that there were new guidelines, under which Tom Cruise (for example) was “overweight.”
That’s off-topic, I know, but it popped into my mind.
Monroe’s dress size isn’t as important as what people think of her size, in my opinion. In your cite, for example, they quote Elizabeth Hurley commenting on how fat Monroe was. (I guess we should all comment on how ugly Hurley’s nose is, just to be fair.)
I guess I don’t care as much about what Monroe’s weight was as how she is perceived now. And I think she is perceived by many as now “fat” or “overweight.”
Buuuut, that’s not something I have any sort of cite on or study on. I did a search on alltheweb.com and tried “marilyn monroe” fat just to see what came up. Many thousands of sites. That doesn’t mean all of them are claiming she was fat, but a number of them do. Perception is that she’s fat.
Ran across an interesting, weird statistic on http://www.fatso.com/bmi.html. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but if true, it’s really odd:
From the site, I can’t tell where this stat comes from. I just thought it interesting (if true).
Julie,
I think you kind of get into chicken-and-egg stuff there. Do men want to see skinny chicks because that’s what’s in Playboy? Do they want to read Playboy because the girls are skinny? Maybe they just want to see girls naked and the rest of it is secondary. I think people watch porn for the sex more than the attractiveness of the individuals. Ron Jeremy is freakin’ hideous, for example.
Whether a person is really overweight is a matter of body type; determining an average weight for any given height is unrealistic. I don’t know about the particular change you refer to here, though. If it classifies him this way, one suspects they’re doing something too general (which is what I’m suggesting). Anyway, as you said, this is a matter of perception as well.
I think I’m a little lost on this point. We [Westerners] want women to be thin because it makes them seem more childlike and less sexual - yet the reason we want this is because we’re having so much sex with them?
No, I agree. While I admit to lack of proof, I think that the cause and effect is this: When thinness is overly valued, as today, people frequently go on weight reducing diets. Although some of these work for a year or two, at five year follow-up there is no average weight loss (see classic research by Albert Stunkard), and in fact people wind up heavier. With each swing of the dieting yo-yo, people become heavier.
However, it could be that the meanness and the weight gain are coincidental. This would be consistent with recent research blaming weight gain on an infectious agent.
One thing is for sure. When it comes to diet, weight, and looks, mankind (of course I’m arrogantly excluding myself) is irrational.
Yes - (it’s only my WAG theory) - but not so much less sexual maybe, as more virginal. There are less virgins, so they become more prized, and a very young woman is more likely to be a virgin.
Plus - perhaps also a reaction against sexually confident more womanly women, to go for a very young and skinny, inexperienced girl.
Please note that I am not saying this goes for all men, but the skinnification of models/porn actresses/starlets etc is startling, undeniable and worrying, and must stem from somewhere.
One possibility is that it is part of a century-old trend having its origin in the movies, which seem to, for some technical reason, make people look fatter than they are.
Then there is the old idea that gay men, because of their careers, have a lot of influence in choosing which women will be glamourized. Supposedly gay men prefer boyish looking women. Hey, it’s not original with me, or even particularly insulting to gays as far as I am concerned.
Dumb me. I forgot another obvious one. That it has some obscure male psychological connection to women gradually wearing more and more revealing garments over the past century. Revealing clothing reveals fat, which then becomes disliked by men. If this hypothesis is true, men in the UAE might be more fat tolerant. Are they? Of course, even in Arab countries western media must have an influence.
Well, I don’t know that you could argue with the notion that Norma Jean would be considered “fat” by the standards of today’s Hollywood. She was what would be an 8 by today’s standards, and “plus sized” models are as small as a 12. Actresses “pork up” into a size 4 or 6, for Og’s sake.
All I know is that the tv and the newspaper is telling me I gotta get mine, and a cheeseburger is easiest to get by far.
Messages like “Get slim now!” Have the body you always dreamed of!" waltz hand in glove with messages telling me to rush off to Burger King or Applebees or some such.
Just the other day I saw a posterboard in front of a Subway proclaiming “one cookie won’t hurt!”. Geeze, how often has my own failed diet mantra consisted of that phrase?
Anyway, as for the OP, “beauty” is busy selling an alien concept removed from our actual lives.
Yes, we are more health conscious, but for a lot of folks, myself included, that consciousness amounts to an assumed knowledge of all the ways I’m busily destroying my health and not much else.
Media-driven? Like a methadrine dosed cheetah on a rocket-sled.
I don’t think we’re shallow in general, but we are beset by a huge amount of contradictory messages urging us to action, resulting in a lifestyle of cognitive dissonance.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go Obey My Thirst.
P.S. - and for what it’s worth, give me a woman with womanly hips.
Actually, the biggest weight gain decade was the 1990’s, which pretty much throws for a loop almost every theory commonly advanced, except for video games. (Thankfully, blaming the internet won’t work because that came too late.) My vote is for an infectious agent.
I don’t presume to know the cause, but IMHO we are seriously conflicted about weight. In obvious contrast to places where people are literally starving to death, two of our food-related problems are obesity and anorexia/bulemia. WTF???
We could blame it on advertising, but I don’t like the abdication of personal responsibility and the general sheep-like behavior that implies.
Another problem is that too many of us are both overweight and undernourished. By that I mean that we have too much fat, sugar and simple carbohydrates, and not enough fresh and nutritious foods in our diet. I’ve read that there are even cases recently of college students showing signs of vitamin-deficiency diseases. Now, that is really sick, when we have the means to have the most healthy and well-nourished population on the planet, possibly in all of history, and we don’t have the sense to use it properly. (By “we,” please understand I don’t mean everyone, just entirely too many of us.)
And of course, we know that too many of us are sedentary, spending entirely too much time on our butts in front of the boob tube or computer screen. We may pay someone to do our physical labor for us, and then pay somebody else to provide a place for us to go and sweat as we jog to nowhere on a treadmill. We try to park as close as we can to the health club and then try to rack up a couple of miles on a make-believe bicycle.
I also think that we put too much emphasis on appearance and not enough on inner strength and beauty, especially in the minds of young women. This has probably been the case through much of human history, though, so there’s not likely to be any change.
Steve - I have also heard the gay theory, particularly for fashion design. The argument being that many fashion designers are gay, therefore they prefer models with boyish hips, etc etc. I really don’t have enough background on fashion to know if this is true. I DO remember one mega famous designer (St Laurent/Dior, that league) complaining that women’s breasts “spoiled the line” of a dress. That a bit like moaning about arms creating the need for armholes, IMO.
Re uncovering/fat: that is interesting. But in more “primitive” tribal-type societies where women go uncovered still (Africa, South Pacific) they still go for curvier women. That may have more to do with health/fertility issues v times of famine, I don’t know.
And then - this is something I was talking about with some friends of various colours (for want of better word!) - darker skins tend to look better “fatter” than white ones do. Eg, a chunky African girl in a bikini looks better somehow than a chunky European. I don’t know how much this is culture skewing perception, or because darker skin tends to look more even (whiter skins easily show cellulute, red stretch marks and creases, blotchiness). We thought it was interesting, anyway, that we have this perception.
The other issue is that while skeletally thin women look very good in clothes, they look less good out of them. Glamour models look better naked than catwalk models. I think most men - even if they are going for ultra thin hips etc, prefer at least a covering of flesh than actual rips and hip bones, unless they’re into fetish.
I’m glad to hear that. But isn’t it a shame that Kate and Drew are the ones representing overweight people? What are they – size 12?
If Marilyn Monroe was wearing a size 6 or 8, she would have been considered slightly underweight at that time. Jackie Kennedy was often described as “the perfect size 10.”
I think that like most of us, Marilyn’s weight varied. This link is only of her face, but you can see that at times she was chubby even by the standards of the 1950’s.
Considering the broadness of her hips and the fullness of her breasts, I have no doubt that at least sometimes in her career, she wore 14’s and possibly even 16’s. At other times maybe she did wear a size 8.
Let’s not forget that Drew gets some of her work where she’s producing the film (as with Charlie’s Angels) [Hijack - apparently she’s producing and appearing in the upcoming The Confederacy of Dunces film], while Kate was involved in that magazine-cover picture alteration hubbub not all that long ago (and the body double one as well). It’s not like the entertainment media are suddenly rife with images of even remotely normal-sized women.
