The recent death of Isabella Caro–a professional model anorexic to a grotesque extreme–makes me wonder if any magazine readers are genuinely attracted to women that thin. Ad directors are selling clothes, not body images, and clothes look best in a wire hanger apparently.
I don’t want to make light of Miss Caro’s tragic life and death, I just wonder who wants their products associated with such obvious illness.
I’m attracted to a pretty broad variety of physical types; Kiera Knightley and Polly Jean Harvey are about as thin as I find beautiful, and I sure wish they’d both eat a sandwich.
How about the rest of you? Where do you draw the line on the thin end?
I can’t really draw a line anywhere as attraction for me involves too much in the way of personality. I definitely have a preference for softer figures though and visible hip-bones need to be made up for by a smashing personality.
Edit: I could never have been attracted to Isabella Caro though as she was a freckle faced ranga. (Seriously that is a sad photo; how do people get like that?)
While I find Keira Knightely attractive, I’d say that once a girl gets to that point I find it unattractive. It’s like I feel Keira is attractive (in certain pictures) in spite of her weight rather than because of it. I’m attracted to average weight, with a tad more slender than average being most attractive for me. But once you get to that level I’d rather you be overweight.
Based on a picture from 2009, Keira Knightly looks good to me. I like women who have an athletic build. Once it goes from athletic to malnourished, that’s where I draw the line.
Yeah, I’d definitely draw the line at Keira, an attraction that is for me, on examination, solely based on her facial beauty. However, if you have a look at this selection of pics, the ones that show her torso reveal a slender but toned body. She looks very healthy despite being so thin.
That said, from a personal aesthetical point of view, I maintain that she would benefit from the consumption of several large pies over a prolonged period.
To answer the OP, I guess I would say “most models I see in real life” - meaning: when I see photos of, say, Victoria’s Secret models, they look luscious and curvy and ::sigh::. But when I have seen the same women in real life, they typically look coltish and knock-kneed.
The weirdest thing about all this body image stuff is that women apparently have no idea what men find attractive. Years ago an Aussie magazine, New Woman, ran an article about men’s and women’s feelings about body shapes. They showed both men and women groups of photos of naked women, from the neck down, and asked them which looked best and which the opposite would think looked best.
The men generally picked women a size or two up from the women as the best looking and correctly picked that the women would choose the skinnier women. The women genuinely, but incorrectly, thought that the men would be attracted to the skinny shapes that they preferred.
The picture of Keira Knightley is pretty typical. I’m sure lots of women would think she looks great but if you couldn’t see her face most blokes wouldn’t look at her twice at the beach. She could be any 14 year old girl.
The counterpoint to this has been said to me by several women, including my ex wife: “We don’t care what men find attractive, we’re doing this to look good to other women.” I.e. in a competitive manner, not a homosexual one.
There may be a point to that, since women who dress/shape themselves solely based on what men find attractive tend to be labelled as “slutty”.
I think **don’t ask’s **point is that women erroneously believe men find the same things attractive. Yes, they may to some degree change their appearance out of competition, but their perception of the body shapes men like versus what men ACTUALLY like is, in a remarkable number of cases, wrong.
And of course your ex was being a little defensive; of course they care what men think.
Poor Keira. I agree that her shape isn’t attractive to me, but she does, by all accounts, eat a healthy diet. And she wouldn’t have that nice muscle definition if she was malnourished. She’s just genetically blessed/cursed with a metabolism I’d kill for, while at the same time wouldn’t want the body from! (But who am I kidding - I’d prefer it to the one I have now, if for no other reason than she’s probably healthier than I am and can do things with her body I never will with mine! But also because, internet sniping aside, there are more social and economic benefits in our society accorded to overly thin people than overly fat people.)
I definitely prefer endomorphs to meso or ectos, even when thin. Amanda Righetti and Morena Baccarin are about as skinny as I find alluring. There are thinner women that I think still have beauty, including Keira, but for “attracted to” with a sexual connotation, I like a bit more smoosh.
But Amanda Righetti isn’t really skinny…
She looks sorta skinny in that FHM pic you posted, but hey, we all know those have little to do with reality. In The Mentalist, she has a pretty strong, athletic physique - if she’s as thin as you find women attractive: there wouldn’t be many celebs left.
I think the point I would make is that there is more than one standard of beauty and attractiveness-I thought that her bikini pic was way hot, but of course YMMV (which is my point). In particular, as we’ve discussedhere before, not all guys like huge boobs.
I know. And yes, you’re right, I don’t find many celebs attractive because of this. I hate skinny bashing as much as I hate fat bashing, but it’s just not pretty to me when I can see ribs and sternum when someone is standing at ease. It might make the clothes pretty, but I don’t find the body in them pretty.
I think the athleticism doesn’t help. She seems to not have that much subcutaneous fat, and so her muscles look more harsh. If she were to gain a little bit of weight, her muscles would soften out.
Of course, if she lost them, I think she’d look anorexic–lack of subcutaneous fat without muscle is the classic anorexic look, and is what I find more unappealing than the actual thick or thinness of the body. If you have the frame to support it, you can be as skinny as you want. If I can see the inner framework, you’ve went too far.
Heck, I used to know a girl who was so skinny I could wrap my (admittedly large) hands around her waist, and have only maybe 3 inches left. She did not look anorexic in the slightest. She’s just tiny.
The actress who plays Dexter’s sister is super-thin, but athletic. I can’t stop staring at her freakish figure. She just about disappears when she turns sideways.
We’ve just started watching Burn Notice and every time Gabrielle Anwar shows up in anything more revealing than a burqa my boyfriend and I both go “YEEEERRRRGH, who the fuck put that in front of a camera?” We theorize that LA people honestly think that looks good and really don’t get that what makes you look younger and less terrifying when you’re trying to hold onto your youth with all ten fingernails is a little bit of subcutaneous fat. She turned around once and her spine looked like a parasitic worm wriggling around under her skin. (Let’s not even discuss her lips and her Botox. To be fair, no foreheads move at all on that show.)
ETA - to answer the question, the line is on the other side of Gabrielle Anwar, for sure!
Came in to mention her. Jennifer Carpenter somehow manages to still be attractive in spite of being weirdly thin enough to recall one of her namesakes.
I keep wondering if I’d still find her hot if I saw her naked. Whenever she’s onscreen in Dexter I am generally preoccupied with trying to visualize her naked. So it goes.
