I am almost 5’7. Early teens, to most of my twenties about 115-125. Not underweight, but not well endowed, so that makes me look skinny. I always have described myself as having the body of a twelve year old boy. Half a dozen kids later and a couple more years, I am around 130-135. Never have paid attention to my weight, never dieted, don’t exercise, etc. Been asked ad nauseum if I am anorexic, if I eat, what I eat, blah, blah, blah. Now that I am 37, I look around, and I am smokin’ in comparison to most women my age. Still not well endowed, but gravity ignores me, and the extra weight has padded me nicely. Hubby is appreciative.
But the more I spend on clothes, the smaller my size.
I believe the ones responsible for the “thin is perfect” female ideal, is quite simply the media, and all these Beauty magazines. I mean, if you read most of the posts in this thread, you find out that people are mostly talking about actresses or other famous female figures that are often viewed as “attractive” by males.
Turn on the T.V, read a magazine, look at poster signs in the street, and you will not find a SINGLE “ugly” woman (of course, I am exagerating, men have diffrent taste in women, hence not all men will find the same woman attractive, but you get the general idea). This has an obvious impact in the females, and the males who are exposed to these images:
For one thing, Men will start associating the “beautiful woman” with the images he is oftenly exposed too. True, there is a biological reason for which men like women with curves (women with big breasts usually simbolised that she could have healthy babies, etc, etc). But the fact still remains that if we had fatter women in magazines, and in the T.V much more often than now, I’d be pretty sure that women all over the world would not sress as much over there physical appearance as they do now.
Women, on the other hand, tend to like to resemble the people they look at in the magazines. This happens for various reasons: many people that they read about in magazines may be role models, women over hear men talking about which women they find attractive (suprise, suprese, the women men tend to describe are those they are oftenly exposed to:actresses, models, etc), women may tend to associate a beautiful figure with “happiness” or “the ability to conquer all males” etc, etc.
Hence, I conclude that if you drastically reduce the amount of exposure both men and women recieve from the media, magazines, street poster, etc, you would see a lot of “fatter” (I cant believe they say Angelina Jolie is fat, damn these beauty magazines, and society in general, are becoming way too strict on “womans weight in relation to there physical attractivness”. And for what purpose?) women walking around.
I’m not being facetious when I ask this: where are you getting your numbers from? The common idea is that the camera adds 10 pounds. Not 20 or 30. I’ve never heard that, nor, frankly, have I seen it when watching people I know on camera.
I’ve never heard anyone before, either in the industry or outside of it, say that the camera adds 20 or 30lbs. Where did you hear this?
That is, unfortunately, why I rarely give my weight - especially to men. The fact that I’m a misses size 14 freaks them out enough; if they knew the weight, I’d never stand a chance. 
VCNJ~
Yes, you would. At least in my neck of the woods. 
Look, forget the specific numbers. I think it’s a hell of a lot more than ten pounds - ten pounds is just a barely noticeable difference, not really significant at all - but it doesn’t matter. You’re missing the real point:
Someone who would look very skinny in real life does not look nearly as skinny on film.
Clear enough?
Thank you for linking to those.
A few months ago, the Toronto subway was covered in posters from that campaign. At Royal York station, the wall above the main stairs that go down to the trains bore a poster that must have been five metres on a side, showing those lovely women. Every time I went down those stairs, I had to hang onto the handrail so that I didn’t get distracted and lose my footing. 
Re: fashion drawing… When I was in art school, we were told that the human figure in fashion drawing was drawn abnormally tall with abnormally-long legs.
In drawing the human figure, heights and lengths are related to the size of the human head. A human figure of regular porportions is drawn around 8 times the height of the head. Fashion drawing? Nine or more times. And most of that is leg.
Interestingly, the other school or art that distorts the human figure like that, while retaining some semblance of anatomical accuracy, is superhero comics.
A few days ago, my friends and I went to the wax museum in Las Vegas. I was completely surprised by how SKINNY the Marilyn Monroe figure was, especially after having people tout how “big” she supposedly was.
This is a picture of my friend with the wax figure (she’s ok with me posting this)
My friend is 7 months pregnant (and the cutest pregnant girl EVER!) and currently hovering at around 135 lbs. Pre-pregnancy, she was under 115. She wore a size 4 (or something around there) and, even though she’s heavily pregnant, she can still fit into her size 4 jeans.
Big, indeed.
My two cents.
I am a tall, skinny guy. I have the weight and height any female model would love (5’11", currently 130 pounds but that’s only because i work hard to bulk up…i used to be 5’10", 100 pounds…and i am a man, mind you). I absolutely hate being skinny. Anyways…
As far as what i see as highly desirable…basically, any girl that is shorter than me and weighs less than me. I find it awkward to be with someone physically larger than i am.
As far as woman being seen as “fat”: my ideal height in a woman 5’3"-5’5". Anything less than 120 i think is great. Anything less than 150 is average. After 150 then i would start inching towards “fat”.
Bear in mind that’s for a 5’3" woman. To me, what matters more is proportion. Larger women look great, but usually that’s if they’re taller.
This sort of reminds me off the “i love small boobs” thread.
I will echo kimera here. I lost weight to the point of being 100 and 5’4" at one time. I then gained weight back up to its current 115. I will tell you that the positive attention & come ons I got from men had an inverse relationship with my weight… in fact, it seemed to skyrocket every pound past 110. You are dead wrong astro, and you’re probably like all those other guys without realizing it except in that you might have slightly “lower” standards; you simply honestly believe that a BMI of 17 is in the middle-to-heavier side of the normal range.
I’m 5’6’’ and have weighed 130 for the last 10 years. I dropped 25 pounds without realizing it (previously undiagnosed GI problem) and my SO insisted I go to the MD. My ribs were sticking out and I looked “wrong”, but I’m still not one of those scrawny model types. A lot of the on-camera types are just teeny people with big photogenic heads.
spends a little while poking at BMI calculators
Apparently, I used to have a BMI of about 21, which was too damn thin even on my fairly lightly-built frame, but which is in the range of ‘normal’ for what some of these sites I’m coming across are saying. So “normal” includes a number in which I know experientially I bruise my arse due to insufficient padding.
Astro was not saying the girls were overweight according to his standards, he was just saying that it was likely that most of them would be classified as overweight on a BMI index. He’s right.
I am about the size of the blond in the middle, and I am right on the line between overweight and normal. I wear a size 4 or 6. I know in my head that I am not fat, and I eat normally and healthfully, but it is really hard to not feel fat when every woman who is labeled “beautiful” in the media is 30 lbs lighter than you are. I would love to loose ten pounds (putting me in a size 2/4) but that basically means starving myself or exercising several hours a day.
I think women and men are equally to blame for the current state of affairs, but I would actually place the blame more on women. The women who are in positions of power with the media should be making more efforts to offer examples of beautiful women who are not all exactly the same. (I remember seeing the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit addition a while back, and every single one of women looked exactly the same, body-wise. It was freakish. They all even had the same color skin–medium tan)
Plus sized models should actually* be * plus sized. I don’t really know how to fix it (hell, I don’t even know how to make my own body-image realistic), but I am completely sick of the constant scrutiny of celebrities’ bodies, and I am sick of feeling fat when I’m not. Bah!
link to the sports illustrated thing I was ranting about.
That was their point: the women they chose would not have been hired as models by anybody else except perhaps for a clothes soap ad.
Small boobs; big boobs; short legs; hips… in their latest ad, the woman in the “daring” dress is a pretty large blonde who would be told by girlie ads how to “hide” her bust: the dress emphasizes it.
I’m kind of amazed at how many women I’m hearing say “I’ve moved to getting everything I can from Dove”. At least here in Spain, it’s been a huge success. After all, most of us have legs 3-4" too short for our bodies… in theory. Construction workers aren’t as likely to whistle as they once were, since so many of them are foreigners, but they still do a good job at compensating for the blows to women’s egos thrown by girlie mags.
(Some mags, like Cosmo, translate the articles from the American version, which btw means that sometimes the advice is completely non-applicable, for example in job-related issues)
In my experience, men are generally terrible about guessing women’s weights. My boyfriend and male friends think I weigh 160 to 180. I don’t. It’s somewhere right over 200. Either everyone I know doesn’t understand weight, or I’m about as dense as lead. And no, they aren’t saying that to make me feel better. My boyfriend flattly refused to believe me until I got a scale.
As for the ideal waist to hip ratio, I saw a thing on human sexuality where then went into the rainforest (not sure which one, it was a long time ago) to a tribe with little to no exposer to the modern world and they all liked the .7 as they said those women could bare strong babies, a concept which was very important when good medical care wasn’t available.
My hip to waist ratio is smaller, ie bigger hips, and I can not buy cloths that fit. I end up with cloths that are too damn big in the waist as otherwise I can’t zip them over my hips. I find it highly annoying.
Except for gay guys, among whom there is a disturbing amount of poor body image, eating disorders, etc.
If men prefer to look at fleshy women rather than skinny ones, shouldn’t the male-oriented web sites show a preponderance of fleshy women rather than skinny ones? Wouldn’t Maxim and Playboy and FHM have fleshy women on the cover rather than boney ones?
They endorse an even more difficult body type to achieve - the big, bubble-boobed, very thin woman.
I’m not willing to let anyone off the hook for so many people having such an adversarial relationship with their bodies - every source in a man or woman’s life who doesn’t contribute to them accepting their bodies the way they are is contributing to the problem, in my opinion.