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Best Female Figure Not an Hourglass
www.livescience.com ^

Posted on 12/03/2008 8:36:45 AM PST by Lucky9teen

An imperfect body might be just what the doctor ordered for women and key to their economic success, an anthropologist now says.

While pop culture seems to worship the hourglass figure for females, with a tiny waist, big boobs and curvy hips à la Marilyn Monroe, this may not be optimal, says Elizabeth Cashdan of the University of Utah.

That's because the hormones that make women physically stronger, more competitive and better able to deal with stress also tend to redistribute fat from the hips to the waist.

So in societies and situations where women are under pressure to procure resources and otherwise bring home the bacon, they may be less likely to have the classic hourglass figure, Cashdan hypothesizes in the December issue of the journal Current Anthropology.

Curve crazy

Until now, scientists (and apparently Western society) thought a curvy figure trumped other body shapes. The idea was based on results from medical studies that suggested a curvy waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7 or lower (meaning the waist is significantly narrower than the hips) is associated with higher fertility and lower rates of chronic disease.

In addition, past research has revealed that men prefer a ratio of 0.7 or lower when looking for a mate. The preference makes perfect sense, according to evolutionary psychologists, because the low ratio is a reliable signal of a healthy, fertile woman. Along those lines, Playboy centerfolds tend to have a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.68, Cashdan found.

However, women around the world tend to have larger waist-to-hip ratios (more cylindrical than hourglass-shaped) than is considered optimal by these medical and social standards.

(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...


TOPICS: Miscellaneous; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: anthropologist; anthropology; culturewar; currentanthropology; damnedintellectuals; elizabethcashdan; female; feminism; figure; sociologist
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To: Lucky9teen

121 posted on 12/03/2008 10:18:22 AM PST by FormerLib (Sacrificing our land and our blood cannot buy protection from jihad.-Bishop Artemije of Kosovo)
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To: Secret Agent Man
Lots of people still walked to go places then. Or biked. And had to do a lot more physical labor in their work.

And empty calories were expensive and hard to come by. Now they are cheap and plentiful.

122 posted on 12/03/2008 10:21:57 AM PST by Poison Pill (Hauser's Law can't be repealed.)
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To: Lucky9teen

Have six kids. The youngest is seven. When the smallest kids were 7, 4, and newborn we found a gym with childcare.

Spare me your excuses....


123 posted on 12/03/2008 10:27:43 AM PST by freebilly
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To: Lucky9teen
According to EVERY guy (except maybe one or 2) that I've ever talked to.... Most want a woman with a bit of "meat" on her, something they can grab on to.

I'm a little smaller than that photo, but my measurements are awkward, rather than ideal. Yet, I have more guys trying to pick up on me as a size 10-12, than when I was size 3. Not long ago I was all about trying to lose weight, but decided to just do what I've been doing.

124 posted on 12/03/2008 10:28:59 AM PST by HungarianGypsy
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To: Canedawg
Biels and Johannsen nail it. Biels is near genetic perfection, neither of them spend hours at the gym either.

Don't need to; just lucky.

125 posted on 12/03/2008 10:36:19 AM PST by xsrdx (Diligentia, Vis, Celeritas)
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To: xsrdx

Biels=Biel. Must have Flashdance on the brain.


126 posted on 12/03/2008 10:38:54 AM PST by xsrdx (Diligentia, Vis, Celeritas)
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To: Old Professer

Just another damned intellectual saying that men are sexist pigs.

The abstract for this 1998 meeting she attended included a number of liberal cj forums (not a complete list, check the link for even more psychobabble). I did find “Sexual Behavior Stereotype and Reality of Women Differing in the Size of their Waist-to-Hip Ratio” and “Male Preference for Female Waist-To-Hip Ratio and Body Height”:

Sexual Behavior Stereotype and Reality of Women Differing in the Size of their Waist-to-Hip Ratio
Singh, D., Dijkstra, P.
Department of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin, TX
Department of Social Psychology, University of Groningen, Netherlands.;

We argue that attractive women successfully use certain mating strategies to attract, retain, and replace mates and that such strategies are not available to unattractive women. To test this hypothesis we asked American women and Dutch men and women to rate female line drawings differing in attractiveness, as defined by waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), for various sexual behaviors. Both American and Dutch participants rated line drawings with lower WHRs as more attractive but believed that they would have engaged in intercourse at an earlier age and had a greater number of lifetime sexual partners than figures with higher WHRs. American women aged 25-50 years differing in their WHR reported sexual behavior consistent with these sexual behavior stereotypes. The match between attractiveness based sexual behavior stereotypes and self-reports suggests that attractive and unattractive women use different mating strategies.

Male Preference for Female Waist-to-Hip Ratio and Body Height
Bronstad, P.M., & Singh, D.
Department of Psychology, University of Texas

Body height is a very important consideration for individuals seeking mates. Much research has focused on the relevance of male height to mate selection, perhaps because the finding that taller males are preferred is reliable. Do men select women on the basis of height? Also overlooked by researchers is how various physical characteristics are used simultaneously by individuals to come up with an overall impression of attractiveness. Physiological data show that waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) tracks health and fertility over a woman’s lifespan. Therefore we had men rate female line drawings that varied for height and WHR. It appears that although height is an important morphological feature, height is not a consideration until a woman’s WHR is low and she is thus fertile.

http://www.hbes.com/HBES/abst98.htm

Program for the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society

University of California, Davis
Davis, California
July 8-12, 1998

How Evolution Selects Between Multiple Equilibria: The Crucial New Ideas from Evolutionary Game Theory

Mating & Parental Effort


Extending Sociobiology’s Explanatory Power: Synthetic Materialism - A Unified Theory of Human SocietyParental Care as Mating Effort Among Urban Xhosa in Cape Town, South Africa

Parental Investment and Academic Achievement: A Closer Look

Showoffs or Providers?: The Parenting Effort of Hadza Men

Reproductive Constraints on Dominance Competition in Male Homo sapiens

Evolutionary Philosophy


Evolutionary Psychology and the Philosophy of Science: Are Evolutionary Hypotheses Unfalsifiable?

The Nature, Evolution and Efficacy of Mathematics

An Ecological Organic Paradigm: A Framework of Analysis for Moral and Political Philosophy

Darwinian Politics & Morality


Beyond the Cinderella Effect: Social and Ecological Issues in Child Maltreatment

Support for Affirmative Action and Self-Interest: Testing the Predictions of Symbolic Politics Theory

Politics, Reproductive Analysis Strategy, and the Definition of Child Maltreatment

The Psychological Mechanisms Mediating Incest Avoidance

Traditions: Non-Reproductive but Descendant-Leaving Strategies


Parental Encouragement of Altruism Through Children’s Stories

Social-not Natural, Not Sexual-selection

Gender Differences in Altruism: Establishing a Gender-Based Emic Scale for the Self-Report Altruism Test

Going Against the Groin: Traditional Restraints in Leadership

Fluctuating Asymmetry & Perceptions of Attractiveness


Effects of Exaggerated Femininity and Masculinity on Facial Attractiveness

Fluctuating Asymmetry, Sociosexuality and Women’s Context-Dependent Mate Preferences

Fluctuating Asymmetry and Human Male Life-History Traits in Rural Belize

The Scent of Symmetry: Evidence for a Human Sex Pheromone

Exchange of Information & Labour


Attributions as Social Actions

Must Intelligence Extinguish Itself?

Hierarchical Organization and Collective Action: A Reassessment of Johnson’s Scalar Stress Model

Sexual Dimorphism of Stature and the Sexual Division of Labor

Reproductive Strategies


Lonely Hearts Advertisements in Japan

Relationships and Reproduction: A Role for Social Support

Rich and Monogamous, Poor and Polyandrous: Unraveling Marriage Decisions in a Polyandrous Tibetan Community

Reproductive interests and forager mobility

Religion


The Bases of Religious Systems

What is the Function of Religion?

Content Analysis of Anomalous Experience Memorates: Testing Hypotheses Regarding the Origin of Religion

Moral Intuitions and Evolved Universals

Competition


Rivarly in Same-Sex Friendships

The “Agentic Shift” as a Cognitive Algorithm Underlying Coalition Formation

Brown-Nosing, Passing the Buck, and Stealing Credit: Human Adaptations to Corporate Culture

Gender and Status Effects on Strategic Facilitation and Interference

Emotion I


Gender Differences in Emotion

Jealousy as a Function of Rival Characteristics Among Homosexuals: A Test of the Modularity Hypothesis

Individual Differences in Attachment Styles: A Case for Continuity

Self-Esteem, Social Exclusion, and Domain-Specificity: An Extension of the Sociometer Model

Constraints on Mate Choice


Sexual Behavior Stereotype and Reality of Women Differing in the Size of their Waist-to-Hip Ratio

Within-Sex Differences in Human Mate Choice:The Effects of Subject Self-Perceived Mating Success and Attractiveness

The Necessities and Luxuries of Mate Preferences

Sometimes You Can’t Get What You Want: Willingness to Compromise Mate Preferences as a Function of Sex, Mating Context, and Mate Value

Land Use and Property Rights


Spatial Identity in Humans

Land Tenure and Kinship Among the Dolgan and Nganasan of Northern Siberia

Human Evolution and the Origin of Property Rights

The Influence of Ecology on Scale of Economy

Evolution of Art


Poetry of Evolution of Poetry

Height-To-Head Ratio as a Marker of Status in Idealized Representations of Adult Humans

Of Cuckoos and Trojan Horses: An Evolutionary Interpretation of the Homeric Burial of Philippos II

Critical Developmental Periods in Neurocultural Evolution: Neoteny as Enabler of Culture

Perception & Evolutionary Thinking in the Social Sciences


Status and Height in Organizational Groups

Human Faces: Gender Differences in Processing and Memory

Holistic Darwinism “As a Post-Neo Darwinian Paradigm”

Archetypes and Evolutionary Psychology: An Empirical Inquiry

Sexuality


Pornography for Women? What “Slash” Can Tell Us About Female Sexual Psychology

Fitness of Gay Males

Polyandry in Contemporary Pornography

The Psychological Architecture of Sperm Competition in Humans

Environment, Evolution & Behavior


Are Human Environmental Preferences Universal? Evidence from a Cross-Cultural Study of Preferences for Visual and Non-Visual Features of Outdoor Environments

Preschool Girls Differ from Preschool Boys in Recognizing the Utility of an Arboreal Refuge Site

Evolutionary Morals and Supernormal Stimuli

Linking Neuroscience and Behavior: The Strange Case of Water Treatment, Neurotoxicity and Crime

Attraction


Females’ Cognitive Processing of Mate Preferences: Using the Stroop Technique to Study Cognitive Interference

Aesthetic and Attributive Judgments of Female Profiles with Paedomorphic and Archaic Features

Sexual Strategies Theory: Experimentally Testing Attraction Specificity

Male Preference for Female Waist-To-Hip Ratio and Body Height


127 posted on 12/03/2008 11:03:18 AM PST by weegee (Sec. of State Clinton. What kind of change is it to keep the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton Oligarchy?)
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To: DieHard the Hunter

Ooops my bad. Alberto Vargas, not Antonio.


128 posted on 12/03/2008 11:42:16 AM PST by Melas
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To: Melas

> Ooops my bad. Alberto Vargas, not Antonio.

True. Vargas was the artist, and “Varga Girls” was what he painted. I think they dropped the “s” because it sounds better without.


129 posted on 12/03/2008 11:47:06 AM PST by DieHard the Hunter (Is mise an ceann-cinnidh. Cha ghéill mi do dhuine. Fàg am bealach.)
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To: Perdogg
It's so much fun following all those curves when they are in motion..... Photobucket
130 posted on 12/03/2008 9:21:20 PM PST by DMZFrank
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To: Lucky9teen

You should not permit this thread to die.


131 posted on 12/04/2008 8:24:20 AM PST by MeanWestTexan (Beware of Obama's Reichstag Fire; Don't permit him to seize emergency powers.)
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To: Lucky9teen

Well, these are Hollywood people whose bodies are literally their livelihood. If they’re not the perfect fantasy, no matter how bad for them physically, they run the risk of losing their careers. It becomes a problem when girls don’t realize that more likely than not they don’t have to be perfect in order to get a respectable job.


132 posted on 12/04/2008 10:56:21 AM PST by Niuhuru (Fine, I'm A Racist and Proud Of It!)
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To: Lucky9teen
She had her days.
133 posted on 12/05/2008 12:28:15 PM PST by MeanWestTexan (Beware of Obama's Reichstag Fire; Don't permit him to seize emergency powers.)
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To: DieHard the Hunter

Rita Hayworth or Elizabeth Taylor (in her prime).

Indeed, the women depicted by Vargas and Elvgren were amazing. I also tend to favour the women painted by John William Godward.


134 posted on 12/10/2008 8:29:34 AM PST by Army Air Corps (Four fried chickens and a coke)
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