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 ...
And empty calories were expensive and hard to come by. Now they are cheap and plentiful.
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....
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.
Don't need to; just lucky.
Biels=Biel. Must have Flashdance on the brain.
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
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
The Nature, Evolution and Efficacy of Mathematics
An Ecological Organic Paradigm: A Framework of Analysis for Moral and Political Philosophy
Darwinian Politics & Morality
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Human Faces: Gender Differences in Processing and Memory
Holistic Darwinism “As a Post-Neo Darwinian Paradigm”
Archetypes and Evolutionary Psychology: An Empirical Inquiry
Sexuality
Fitness of Gay Males
Polyandry in Contemporary Pornography
The Psychological Architecture of Sperm Competition in Humans
Environment, Evolution & Behavior
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
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
Ooops my bad. Alberto Vargas, not Antonio.
> 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.
You should not permit this thread to die.
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.
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.
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