I’ve heard this all the time on the SDMB and real life; in location X, large women are admired and considered more desirable than the thinner and weight-proportionate-to-height women that are generally considered the ideal … well, everywhere else. “If I lived in southern Burundi, men would be tripping over themselves just to have a chance to talk to me!” Really?
I’m curious about where large women really are considered the ideal? I don’t mean like Marilyn Monroe or Christine Hendricks, or with 10 or 15 extra pounds of padding, but big. How about those topping the scales at 300 pounds or more? Is there anyplace where men really would be chasing around those that normally use mobility scooters to get around?
There plenty of paleolithic fertility figurines which depict rather hefty women, particularly the Venus of Willendorf which might be similar to your “300 lb” standard. As far as I know, none of these figures depict skinny women.
Supposedly Uganda has “fattening huts” where women can go to get fat before marriage. At least, that’s what the Internet and Jessica Simpson are telling me.
Not necessarily, that’s true. But (as far as I know) there aren’t any paleolithic depictions of skinny women. And IMO it’s not too much of a stretch to infer that the artists of these figures were giving them desirable traits. Notably the figures have very exaggerated sexual characteristics.
It’s not slam-dunk evidence, but that’s rare in archaeology.
They were at a disadvantage in the war against the Barbie people?
Come on, 2 inch people with no fingers vs. gigantic 6 in breast monsters who apparently have a variety of job skills and professions? They’ll think its a tribute to genocide!
I don’t believe that truly obese women were ever considered the epitome of beauty. Even the Romans disdained being overly fat. Some primitive cultures may like well proportioned “thick” women (I certainly do) but blubbery is not all that attractive to anyone except fetishists.
Having said this, I can’t imagine hard working women in most true subsistence cultures getting much beyond “thick”. There’s just not enough spare calories and indolent leisure time.
Heheh I found what hogarth was talking about: 1 and 2; but I could only watch 5 minutes before my brain started to fry due to an abundance of Jessica Simpson.
So in the case of “fat houses” Uganda, Nigeria and Mauritania **are **interchangeable.
It was true in western Europe only a couple hundred years ago.
Look at the women in painting by Rubens, for example. Nowadays, they would be considered overweight, even close to obese. But back then, that was what was considered the height of feminine beauty.
(Supposedly, it may trace back to the fact that most people didn’t get enough to eat, so they were positively skinny. A person being fat showed that they were well-off and better than the peasants.)
That link you supplied (without a word of commentary) is written by a nutjob racialist on a nutjob racialist website. Or perhaps you didn’t see the articles titled: “Negro penis size” and “Brave Jew world?”
Here where I live the black community highly favors large women as in fat. All the talk shows have numerous callers deriding the fit/skinny women in favor of more rounded curves. I’d guess the ratio is 50:50. They express is in different ways-“more to love”, “women with curves”, “love handles”, “bigger the tush, harder the push”, and so forth with more expressive adjectives. To them Aretha Franklin is a beauty queen.
I thought modern scholarship leaned towards paleolithic female sculptures like the Venus of Willendorf as being not fertility offerings but “safety in childbirth” offerings?
But just becase Rubens liked the BBWs (or was only able to afford… robust girls to model for him) that doesn’t make it true for everybody else from his cultural background.
That’s like deciding that the all the flemish liked’em thin and bug-eyed because you are just looking at Vermeer’s paintings.
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