Why on earth are you getting so defensive here, Nava? If you don’t mean to sound defensive and shrill… well, you really are. You put a poll up asking where people think the waist is. People who disagree with you are apparently not measuring “what you want to measure”. So basically, we’re only allowed to agree with you?
Which is all well and good, but you realize men and women have distinctly different body types, yes? So, you’re skewing your data by including both apples and oranges.
If this isn’t total clear, let me use this example:
Dopers, how often do you get your period?
Answers: open to all
Interpretation of data: Omg, whoa! 50% of Dopers never get their period! Crazy!
So, basically, rather than finding out how many women fall where on the 28 day scale, you’re skewing your data by including a lot of pointless information. That is, unless you say: WOMEN, where is your waist? MEN, where is your waist?
Nava’s problem is that DiosaBellissima keeps insisting this should only apply to women and Nava is interested in all people’s waists. For instance, a few posts ago DiosaBellissima claimed men would skew the results by having lower waists on average. But Nava isn’t interested in where only women’s waists are, only DiosaBellissima is. We’re 50% of the population so our lower than average waists aren’t actually skewing what Nava is trying to get at.
That would be the correct answer to that question. If you excluded men for some reason you would get dramatically skewed results by excluding half the population.
You would say, “Weird!!! All dopers have periods??? That would imply 100% of all dopers are pre-menopausal post-pubescent women even though the question in the poll was open to everyone. I bet someone skewed the data by excluding men old ladies and girls!”
Which is fine and I’ll bow out of this thread after this post, my point is simply this: there is a legitimate argument to be made that most male waists fall below the belly button, while most female waists fall above. So, what good is done by a pole that doesn’t identify which group you fall under?
I suppose I’m just missing the point. I wont thread shit any further.
I don`t really know what Nava’s point is either but you’re definitely missing it. I don’t really have a vested interest in waist locations but it seemed unfair of zweisamkeit to call Nava defensive and shrill when it was pretty clear you were actually talking about 2 different things and that for whatever reason Nava wants non-gender based data.
Actually, I’m calling Nava defensive because of a lot of what she’s said in the two threads regarding waists.
She started with
which sounds a bit snarky if, like me, your waist is above where your navel is. When she starts this thread, she says
I said no such thing. I said
Note that I agreed that it is not directly under your boobs. But I specified that the waist is the narrowest part of you (torso was not stated but implied) and that for most people with boobs, it will be above your navel, even just by an inch. But I apparently said “is not” in a snotty way. The 
was tongue in cheek.
Then, after she decides to start this thread since I told her that, I reply a bit snarkily because, quite honestly, her tone in that first sentence was snarky as well. But I continue to explain my position and include pictures of natural waist versus “fashion waist”. What does she respond with?
That is defensive. It didn’t respond to any part of what I said. Also, if the narrowest part of her torso is at her navel, then it’s the same freaking definition that I use, which is “the narrowest part of your torso”. She just happens to have a really low waist.
So fine: Nava, sure, I’d like a picture. Because I had insisted for years that my waist was at my navel, too. That’s where my pants went and that’s where my hips grew (widely!) out of. Then I found out that my natural waist is actually 3-4" higher. It’s the narrowest part of my torso by about 4". It just didn’t look like it because the difference between my hips to my navel was so much more dramatic (15" instead of 4").
There are two possible questions here:
One: What do you, as an individual, define as “the waist”? (we’ve had threads like that, “what do you define as ‘poor?’” or “what do yo mean when you say ‘___________’”)
Two: where is your personal waist? (Which assumes everyone agrees on what “the waist” is, which I don’t think is the case)
I think some people are answering the first question and some the second, and that’s causing the confusion.
The poll includes both questions, but I didn’t want to create two separate threads. It’s multiple choice so people can give two answers, one for each question.
So far we’ve got one definition of waist I hadn’t thought of (which was one of the things I wanted, to see what other definitions popped up), and although most of the people who’ve answered that part have gone for “narrowest,” we’ve got a more-than-significant amount of “smallest perimeter.” We’ve also got several people whose typed-out responses ask “what, you mean they aren’t always the same?” And since adding an extra definition requires typing, we also know that this third definition of “waist” came from a man. I personally don’t think that “whether people of different genders use different definitions of waist” can be analyzed properly without accounting for other sociological factors, but to account for those we’d need an “old style” poll.
The “where is your waist” part of the question is intended to be answered using the respondent’s own definition of waist.
It was never my intention to offend you; since I did, I apologize.
<mod>
Off track. OP asks for closure.
Granted. Although it’s a bit of a “waist.”
</mod>