Cerebus is right, what is considered beauty has changed over time and across cultures. For instance, in ancient Greece, the naked male form was considered to be the height of beauty, not the female. Can you imagine thinking the penis is particularly attractive now? And you can see it being played out in the media right now. For a time, all the fashion magazines were deriding people for being over weight, and encouraging an ideal model of a woman as stickinsect thin. Now the tide is flowing the other way, with women being targeted for being underweight, and catwalk models being encouraged to put on the pounds. That's not to say that there is no natural beauty. But we have accept that beauty is part natural, part social construction....
well it may have been that fat WAS considered most fertile and healthy... but now science has shown us otherwise.
Well, I think having some fat stores probably does contribute to survival in environments where access to food is an issue. In an environment where food is plentiful the risk factors associated with excess fat take priority, so in that situation it becomes beneficial to survival to have less fat. Cultural tastes may reflect this survival imperative in some way...
and now we have no environmental survival necessity in our western culture... and so fat no longer become an issue of darwinian attractiveness.
Well ... not quite as simple as that. Not "Darwinian" in that attractiveness is as much cultural as it is biological and it couldn't be considered an evolutionary step. But it's one possibility that survival imperatives and cultural notions of attractiveness are related in some way.
ok.. let us cast our mind back... far beyond the first agricultural settlements of the fertile cresent... the migratory tribes that hunted and gathered would only eat until they were no longer hungry... larger women would be a very peculiar sight indeed... there would be no need to store fat for the winter, because migratory tribes migrate, following a herd and so would very rarely need to store fat. not until people started farming and building settlements did people suddenly need to show of their riches. and the best way of being visibley rich is to have a biggar girth than anyone else... the health impact of which is not nearly as concerning as outward appearence to peers... and so as people were more concerned with wealth than health it became the norm to marry biggar women as this would again demonstrate your wealth to others... in my eyes it would appear that men forced women to be "pleasently plump" so that their social standing was not affected by marrige. wealth=glutony=large girth= sign of wealth.
It is an interesting phenomenon that, in the past, being fat was a sign of wealth, but now it is poor families that are often fatter. But to argue that men forced women to be plump to gain social standing would be an exceptionally difficult claim to substantiate....
but it was men who financed the paintings... which were the media of the time. so to suggest through paintings that this was what men found attractive is no less probable than magazines today suggesting women should be slim.
It is less probable because paintings were not mass media. High art was the preserve of the elite, it did not enter into the popular consciousness in the way that modern mass media does....
and it was the elites who were worried about the affects marrige would have on social standing.. so by encouraging women to "look the part" they could keep face in front of peers... another thought i just had is:- it has only been recently that women have had a massive control over the media, and it is only recently that the media has been encouraging women to become slim and athletic... could this be women wanting to break free of the fatty confines of male dominated weight dictation.
well it has also been stated before that gay men were the ones that attributed the thinner is beautiful mentality because they were the fashion designers and they wanted the models to look like young boys i don't know if i believe that, but well, it might also bear some weight (no pun intended) to the discussion as a whole. cerebus, and my fellow phoenix ... thanks for also stating a voice of reasonable enlightenment on the situation smartie - sorry for the low blow about your screen name, but honestly i was pissed off ... i'll admit it. due to many issues that i'm not going to get into here, i can have a bit of a thin skin at times in discussions that become so heated, and obviously as a larger lady, this one seems to affect me alot ... to the point that after my last comments i haven't logged on to hip at all, as i didn't want to get myself riled up, especially cause of everything else going on in my life at the moment. if you didn't mean any harm, then none taken; but well, it did seem at times you were on the edge of attacking yourself.
