The
eternal truth is that men and women are biologically hard wired to appreciate
physical characteristics in each other across a across a rather narrow spectrum
for individual choices.
For
example, it is no surprise that most men can agree in terms of their time and
age, who are the great beauties. We have
the likes of Sophia Loren, Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe famously from the
fifties, and Pamela Anderson from the nineties as outstanding examples. These were all particularly memorable and
certainly attracted the most votes by a country mile. Plenty more were promoted of course and the B
list is full of mostly similar beauties.
What
drives this is something clearly simple.
It is our sub brain. When it
detects characteristics of which it approves, it will send out unbidden a wave
of hormones. Teenage boys will find
themselves with undesired erections and women will have undesired vaginal
flow. That is just the most obvious
effect that everyone experiences. Thus
both men and women will dress or carry on in order to catch the eye of the
opposite sex. It is really that potent.
A
way more subtle test however is this.
For men, the next time you find yourself in a row with your significant
other, in the middle of it all; force yourself to drop your eyes to her
breasts. It will be like a switch gets
thrown. It is really that decisive and
uncanny.
This
item investigates the science of it all and clarifies some issues.
Eternal
Curves
Men “know” something
significant about women’s bodies that women don’t. And it all has to do with
nature’s mandate to produce children with the greatest array of survival
skills.
By Will Lassek, Steve Gaulin, Hara Estroff Marano, published on July 03,
2012 - last reviewed on October 16, 2013
Sculptors immortalize them.
Poets regularly regale them. Even ordinary men pay tribute. American males, it
has been calculated, spend some $3 billion a year to gaze at women with hourglassfigures, those whose small waists blossom into sinuously curvy
hips.
Men rate women as most
attractive when they have a waist size that is 60 to 70 percent of their hip
size, the late psychologist Devendra Singh found in a series of pioneering
studies begun 20 years ago. And in more than a hundred other studies, men all
over the world—including isolated groups unexposed to modern media—prefer a
similar shape. Singh and cognitive neuroscientist Steven Platek found that viewing women with
curvy figures stimulates a powerful internal reward system, lighting up the
same pleasure centers in men’s brains that are targeted by cocaine and heroin.
That this kind of hourglass figure is not only typical of the women men pay to look at,
such as Playboy Playmates
and adult film stars, but is also a preference found in many different social
groups and cultural settings, suggests it has been shaped over millennia by
evolutionary forces, like our tastes for sugar and fat. The preferred women are
remarkably alike, and the similarity of their measurements and men’s reactions
to them further suggests that there is a specific template buried deep in men’s
minds.
It is likely that men who
preferred curvy hourglass figures in women had more children who carried their
fathers’ preferences down to the present. Still, how could an hourglass figure
relate to a woman’s success as a mother? The answer is not at all obvious. But
over the past several years, we have been demonstrating that it has a lot to do
with intelligence. And just as much to do with what people eat and where it comes
from. The evidence also suggests why American women increasingly dislike their
bodies and misjudge what men like in women. It may even explain why American
children fare increasingly poorly academically compared with kids in the rest
of the world.
What it comes down to, in a
word, is fat. But not just any fat.
What Men “Know” Without
Knowing
The average playmate or
adult film star is 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighs 115 pounds, giving her a
body mass index (BMI) of 18.5. Her bust, waist, and hip sizes are 35-23-35, so
that her waist is 66 percent of her hip size. By comparison, the typical
American university undergrad has a waist that is 75 percent of her hip size.
The Playmate’s hips are similar to those of students with the same BMI—53
percent of her height; it’s just that her waist size is three inches smaller.
So men prefer women who are taller than average, with normal-size hips for
their moderately low BMIs, and very small waists.
Her unusually small waist
is only part of what makes a Playmate so curvy. The other part is having
relatively normal- size hips and legs that are well endowed with fat. Even a
thin woman carries an astonishing amount of fat in her legs and hips—about a
third of her body weight. Men everywhere admire the fat located here. Those
surveyed in 54 non-Western tribal groups almost always preferred women with
large or fat hips and legs.
The total amount of fat a
human female carries is seven times that of other animals, and much more
than men! Only bears ready to hibernate, penguins facing a sunless winter
without food, or whales swimming in arctic waters have fat percentages that
approach those in normal, healthy, trim young women. Women, however, don’t
regularly swim in arctic waters or hibernate for the winter. Why, then, have
they been designed to store so much fat in their hips, buttocks, and legs?
One clue is that the fat
stored there is protected; it doesn’t figure into weight fluctuations. Fat in
the upper body is like a checking account with frequent deposits and
withdrawals. But hip and leg fat is more like a certificate of deposit—it usually remains untouched by weight shifts. Only during the
last few months of pregnancy and while nursing do women start breaking down this lower-body fat, making it exclusively available to the rapidly growing infant.
Something stored there seems very important for their children. It couldn’t be
just a matter of calories, because it’s easy for the mothers to get them simply
by eating more of anything.
Just as human mothers have
seven times more body fat than other animals, human babies have a body part
that is seven times larger than the one in other animals—an enormous brain that grows fastest in the first two years of life. Other
than water, the human brain is mostly fat and has a lot of a particular kind of
fat: an omega-3 fat called DHA (docosahexaenoic acid). We can’t make omega-3
fats; they have to come from what we eat, and women tend to stash their DHA in
the same hip and leg fat that men value.
A human baby’s need for DHA
to feed its rapidly growing brain—DHA is especially incorporated into nerve
cell membranes, facilitating the rapid transmission of information—is so great
that a mother can’t supply enough from her everyday diet. Most of the DHA in a mother’s milk comes from what she has
stored over the years in her lower-body fat. Even then, her supply is limited,
as it is depleted by each child. Since a mother’s DHA levels are greatest for
the first child, it may be one reason why first-born children tend to be
smarter than their siblings.
That’s what men’s brains
are telling us—that a woman’s figure signals the abundance of her DHA supply.
Studies show that women with curvier hourglass figures have more DHA stored in
their body fat. And because DHA makes brains work better, these curvier women
also tend to have smarter children and, contrary to what you might expect, to
be smarter themselves.
In other studies we have
conducted, we find that children who live in countries where mothers have high
levels of DHA in their breast milk score high on international tests of
academic ability regardless of differences in income. American children rank
31st out of 64 nations. Children earn the highest scores in places with very
high levels of omega-3 fat intake, like Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, where
most women have slender hourglass figures. Japanese women have four times more
DHA in their blood than do American women, with high-scoring children and low
levels of obesity.
While a woman’s hips tell
men about her omega-3 stores, her waist conveys a still richer message. In
addition to having more omega-3, women with smaller waists are also less likely
to have been pregnant before (or currently), so their childbearing potential is
still untapped. They are also less likely to die in childbirth. The same giant
infant brain that mothers have to supply with DHA also makes it much more
difficult for it to fit through the birth canal. Women with higher BMIs and
more waist fat are more likely to have first babies that grow too large to
deliver, a problem usually fatal for mother and baby unless she has a surgical
birth—and one that still takes the life of one mother in 10 without access to
obstetrics. Shorter women are especially likely to have this difficulty, and
they also tend to have bigger waists because they have less space for their
internal organs. It’s easier for women as tall as Playmates to have small
waists, and it’s also easier for them to deliver their babies.
Because small waists convey
so many desirable qualities, men like them to be extremely small. There is, in
fact, no lower limit to waist size that men conjure. The imaginary women they
depict in comic books and animated films have hips like Playmates but
impossibly small waists. Jessica Rabbit’s waist is less than 40 percent of her
hip size.
Men haven’t a clue about
why they prefer certain body shapes or why their brains light up when they see
narrow waists and well-rounded hips and thighs. But the preferences encoded in
their genes by millennia of evolution help reveal what it is about
women’s bodies that foretells success in having children.
Fat City but Skimpy on
Omega-3s
Not surprisingly, the body
shape that men find most attractive is actually quite similar to the one that
young women typically have—correction: had. Just as evolution has designed men
to prefer a shape ideal for mothering, it has moved women toward that shape.
Even though Playmates are taller than average and have unusually small waists,
their figures are not so different from those of young European women today—or
young American women of 40 years ago. Back then, half of American women in
their late teens had BMIs less than 20, and two in five had a waist-hip ratio
of 70 percent or less. Unfortunately, today’s average American woman is 20
pounds heavier than in 1970. Only one young woman in six has a BMI less than
20, and only one in 20 has a waist-hip ratio less than 70 percent. What’s gone
wrong?
The same innate drive that
makes women store fat may also be causing them to gain extra weight now. It’s
not women’s needs that have changed—it’s their ability to satisfy those needs.
Since omega-3 fats must
come from our diets, the amount we can store in body fat depends on how much we
can get from the food we eat. Unfortunately, American women (and men, and
children) are now seriously deprived of omega-3 fat. Food companies eliminate
them from products in order to extend shelf life. But as the amount of omega-3
in the American food supply has been shrinking, we’ve been getting much more of
another fat, omega-6, which is cheaper, more stable—and undermines our ability
to get enough omega-3.
Most omega-6 fat comes from
chemically processed oils extracted from soybeans and corn. Further, feeding
farm animals corn instead of allowing them to graze on their natural diet of
grass (rich in omega-3) also increases omega-6 while reducing the omega-3 in
meat, milk products, and eggs. Omega-6 fat is not inherently bad. Our bodies
need roughly equal amounts of these fats, and for over 95 percent of human
history, they were in balance. But our diets now supply 20 to 25 times more
omega-6 than omega-3!
As a result, American women
now have very low levels of DHA in their stored fat, as indicated by the amount
of DHA in a mother’s milk; after all, providing necessary nutrients for their
infants is why women store DHA in the first place. Sadly, compared with women
in other countries, American mothers rank near the bottom in the DHA content of
breast milk.
They also rank poorly in
the DHA content of body fat. One pound of American body fat has much less DHA
than a pound of fat in women consuming high omega-3/low omega-6 diets, like
those in Japan. The only way an American woman can increase the amount of DHA
in her fat stores is to add more pounds of fat. Since it takes a certain amount of DHA to build a human
infant’s brain, a woman today needs more pounds of that low-DHA body fat. This
may help explain why American women weigh 20 pounds more than they did 40 years
ago, and 40 pounds more than Japanese women of the same height.
More Weight, Less Light
Because body weights are so
much higher than they were 50 years ago, many American women are concerned
about their weight. Back then, most women were content with their bodies: There
were few books about dieting and no weight-loss
programs. Today even slender women are dissatisfied with their bodies; more
than a quarter of those who weigh 110 to 114 pounds are trying to lose weight.
A woman’s image of the ideal figure is not subject to the same evolutionary
pressures as a man’s is; it’s much more influenced by the culture she lives in.
In the 19th century,
women’s fashions seemed to reflect men’s preferences, albeit painfully.
Fashionable women squeezed their waists with corsets and exaggerated their hips
with bustles. In the 1920s, fashion designers like Coco Chanel sought to
liberate women from such constraints and ushered in an era of simple
unstructured, linear dresses. After World War II, curvier women were back in
fashion, although sculpted with tailoring rather than artificial contrivances.
Then the 1960s inaugurated a continuing glorification of thinness.
Today’s super-skinny
fashion model is actually quite different from the women men find most
attractive. At 70 inches she is taller than 99 percent of American women, and
her weight of 115 pounds gives her a BMI of just 16.5, lower than that of most
women in food-poor countries like Bangladesh. Two-thirds of fashion models have
BMIs of less than 17, compared with just 6 percent of Playmates. While the
fashion model’s waist is larger than a Playmate’s, her hip size is much smaller
relative to her height, just 46 percent vs. 53 percent in Playmates.
Very tall women can afford
to have relatively smaller hips (their height makes them look even smaller)
because once hips are wide enough to accommodate babies fairly easily, there is
little to gain from being larger. But the very narrow hips of a fashion model
make her appear to be exceedingly slim—even slimmer than a typical slender
teenage boy who has hips about 49 percent of his height. To look very thin,
models have to be very tall in addition to having very low BMIs.
Fashion models also look
skinnier because they are much less buxomthan Playmates. Contrary to what you might expect, Playmates
actually have smaller bust sizes than typical coeds, though they are large for
their BMIs. But even though a fashion model is typically four inches taller
than a Playmate, her average bust size is three inches smaller, and is just 46
percent of her height compared to the Playmate’s 54 percent. Having smaller
busts and hips in relation to her height makes a fashion model much less curvy —
Playmates are 36 percent more curvy than fashion models. No surprise that men
aren’t lining up to look at the latest issue of Vogue or Harper’s
Bazaar.
Nevertheless, super-thin
women sit unchallenged atop fashion’s pedestal, although it’s not clear why
current fashions idealize a super-skinny shape. Being very thin is certainly
rarer today and attracts attention. In addition, clothing that hugs a curvy
body is difficult and time-consuming to make—all those darts and tucks
significantly add to the cost of making women’s clothes.
The separation of design
from manufacturing operations in the fashion industry demands the patterning of
clothing not by draping fabric on a figure but by sketching on paper, which not
only consigns bodies to a flat two dimensions but is instantly faxable to
distant factories. Untethered from real bodies, sketches are subject to
distortion limited only by a designer’s imagination. There’s a higher profit
margin in linear styles, although they look good only on an equally linear
body.
If the fashion ascendance
of super-thin women has not had a lasting impact on women’s body shape, it has
certainly had a huge impact on women’s patterns of thinking: Women are much
less satisfied with their own bodies after viewing images of the super-skinny
models featured in women’s fashion magazines.
More significantly, this
ascendence has skewed women’s perceptions of what men like. When asked to
predict how men will rate women of different body shapes, women choose thinner
figures than men do, figures more like fashion models than like Playmates.
Here’s the kicker: The shapes that men actually choose are closer to those of
the women making such predictions! In other words, women are usually more like
men’s ideals than they realize, so that losing weight may not make them any
more attractive to men.
Men’s minds are better than
women’s at understanding women’s bodies, because there’s so much at stake for men.
Not all men can win the woman of their dreams, but their dreams drive them to compete for women with more
optimal body shapes. Winning them is their best guarantee of having children
with good brains, likely to be more successful in all the activities required
to sustain life—and to pass on their genes.
Better Living via Better
Food
While all of us are
genetically programmed to enjoy calorie-rich fat, we could never have the
weight-promoting, omega-imbalanced fats we consume today without the industrial
chemical processing of vegetable oils and the force-feeding of corn and grains
to immobilized animals meant to graze on grass. Such fats are not as satisfying
as the omega-3-rich fat we evolved to eat—fat from green plants, wild fish and
seafood, and the meat, milk, and eggs of animals eating their natural diet of grass. Less satisfied, we eat more. Studies show that we
are hungrier after a meal high in omega-6s than after one with more omega-3s.
Fortunately, we are free to
change to a diet more like the one we had when most women were content with how
they looked. It’s the diet most Europeans still have—with much more of the
omega-3 fats that build good brains and healthy bodies, and much less of the
weight-promoting omega-6 fats. We have tried fooling Mother Nature for at least 40 years; maybe it’s time to stop.
A Very Hip Head Start
The DHA-rich fat deposits
that give women curvy hips and thighs are an almost irresistible nonverbal
mating message to men. It not only makes a woman visually attractive to males,
it also signals that she has plenty of brain-building fats to confer on progeny—nature's
own Head Start. And it indicates that such a woman is also likely intelligent,
herself a beneficiary of those brain-buffing fatty acids.
But that's only the start
of the cognitive benefits of hip fat, insists Gordon Gallup, Jr., who believes
that gluteofemoral fat boosts social intelligence in women. It makes them good
at understanding the mental states of others. While a low waist-hip ratio
accounts for 7 percent of the variance in general intelligence, in studies he conducted at the
University of Albany (New York), where he is professor of psychology, he has
found that it accounts for a sizable 20 percent of variance in social intelligence.
Skill in reading the minds
of others, Gallup says, is a huge mating advantage for such women—and they definitely
need one. Given their attributes, "they are particularly likely to be
targeted by males for dating and sex." In fact, studies by others show that women with a low
waist-hip ratio lose their virginity sooner than other women and have more sex
partners. But their social intelligence shields them from dishonest courtship;
it enables them to dope out disingenuous claims of commitment.
The same social
intelligence probably boosts their mothering ability too, Gallup hastens to
add. "It makes women better able to respond to their children," he
says, although he has yet to put this hypothesis to a test. —Hara Estroff Marano
Shape Shifts
The narrow waist and the
curvy hips and thighs of the average Playboy Playmate
(center) exemplify the body shape that men the world over prefer—while women
hope to look more like a fashion model (left) but increasingly embody the
proportions at right.
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