but even she might be surprised at the emaciated appearance of the average modern modeclass="underline" In the words of Roberta Seid, thinness became a "prejudice" in the 1950s, a " myth" in the 1960s, an
" obsession" in the 1970s, and a "religion" in the 1980s." Tom Wolfe coined the term "social X rays " for New York society women
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who starve themselves into fashionable shape. The weight of the Miss Americas falls steadily year after year. So does that of Playboy centerfolds. Both categories of women are 15 percent lighter than the average for their ages.' Slimming diets fill the newspapers and the wallets of charlatans. Anorexia and bulimia, diseases brought on by excessive dieting, maim and kill young women.
One thing is painfully obvious: There is no preference for the average. Even allowing for the fact that abundant, cheap, refined food makes the average woman much plumper than was normal a millennium or two ago, women must go to extraordinary lengths to achieve the fashionable reedlike shape. Nor has it ever been sensible for men to pick the thinnest woman available: Today, as in the Pleistocene period, that is a sure way to choose the least fertile woman: A woman can be rendered infertile by a body fat content only 10—15 percent below normaclass="underline" Indeed, one theory is that the widespread obsession of young women with their weight is an evolved strategy to avoid getting pregnant too early or before a man has committed himself to raising a family: But this does not help explain the male preference for skinniness, which seems positively maladaptive:"
If the male preference for thinness is paradoxical, how much more puzzling is the fact that it seems to be new. There is ample evidence from sculpture and painting that Victorian beauties were not especially thin, and from sculpture and painting as far back as the Renaissance that beautiful women were plump women: There are exceptions: Nefertiti 's neck was that of a thin, elegant woman: Botticelli 's Venus was not exactly overweight. And for a time, Victorians worshiped at the shrine of wasp waists, so much so that some women allegedly removed a pair of ribs to make their waists slimmer. Lillie Langtry could enclose her eighteen-inch waist with two hands, but even the slimmest of today 's models are twenty-two inches around the waist. And it is implausible that a Renaissance man would have found them ugly. Yet we need not rely only on our own culture for evidence that plump women can be more attractive than thin ones. There is a willingly expressed preference for plump female bodies among tribal people all over the world, and in many subsistence societies, thin women are shunned: THE USES OF BEAUTY
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As Robert Smuts of the University of Michigan has argued, thinness was once all too common and was a sign of relative poverty: Nowadays, poverty-induced thinness is confined to the Third World: But in the industrialized nations, wealthy women are able to afford a diet low in fat and spend their money on dieting and exercise. Thinness has become what fatness was: a sign of status: Smuts argues that male preferences, keying in on whatever signs of status prevailed, simply switched. They did this presumably by a switch of association. A young man growing up today is bombarded with correlations between thinness and wealth, from the fashion industry in particular. His unconscious mind begins to make the connection during his critical period, and when he is forming his idealized mental preference for a woman, he accordingly makes her slim:'°
STATUS CONSCIOUSNESS
Unfortunately, this theory conflicts directly with the conclusions of the last chapter, so something has to give: It is women, not men, who are supposed to be especially sensitive to the social status of their potential spouses. Sociobiologists argue that the reason men notice women 's looks is not as a proxy for their wealth but as a clue to their reproductive potentiaclass="underline" Yet here we have men supposedly using women 's waists as clues to their bank balances and positively panting after infertile emaciates:
Several studies have come to the unambiguous conclusion that beautiful women and rich men end up together far more than vice versa: In one study the physical attractiveness of a woman was a far better predictor of the occupational status of the man she married than her own socioeconomic status, intelligence, or education—a rather surprising fact when you consider how often people marry within their profession, class, and education brackets:" If men are using appearance as a proxy for status, why do they not use knowledge of status itself?
Unlike female thinness, male status symbols are generally
" honest." If they were not, they would not remain status symbols.
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Only the very best con man can fake conspicuous consumption or get away for long with boasts about his prowess or rank. Thinness is altogether trickier because poor, low-status women once found it easier to be thin than rich, high-status women. Even today when poor women can afford only junk food while rich women eat let-tuce, it is hard to argue that every thin woman is rich and every fat one poor. 16
So the argument that links status with skinniness is not persuasive: Skinniness is a very poor clue to wealth, and in any case men are not much interested in women 's status or wealth. Indeed, the argument is circular: Social status and thinness are correlated because of a male preference for thinness. I find the explanation that men have cued in on a woman 's thinness as a clue to her status unconvincing.
The trouble is, I am not sure what to suggest in place of it.
Suppose it is true that in the days of Rubens men preferred plump women and that today they prefer thin women: Suppose between the plump matrons of Rubens 's paintings and the " no woman can be too thin " days of Wallis Simpson, men stopped preferring the fattest or some half-plump ideal and started preferring the thinnest women available. Ronald Fisher 's sexual selection theory suggests one way in which it may have been adaptive for men to like thin women. By preferring a thin female, a human male may have had thin daughters who would have attracted the attention of high-status males because other males also preferred thinness. In other words, even if a thin wife could bear fewer children than a fat one, her daughters would be more likely to marry well, and having married well, to be wealthy enough to rear more of the children they bore. So the man who marries a thin woman may have more grandchildren than the man who marries a fat one. Now imagine that a cultural sexual preference spreads by imitation and that young men learn the equation thin equals beautiful by watching others behave.
That in itself would be adaptive because it would be one way for males to ensure that they did not flout the prevailing fashion (just as females copying each other in mate choice is adaptive in black grouse). Were they to ignore the cultural preference for plump or THE USES OF BEAUTY
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for thin women, they would risk having spinster daughters as surely as a peahen would risk having bachelor sons by choosing a short-tailed mate. In other words, as long as the preference is cultural and the preferred trait is genetic, Fisher 's insight that fashion is despotic still stands."
I confess, however, that these ideas do not really convince me. If fashions are despotic, they cannot easily be changed. The puzzle is how men stopped liking plump women without depriving themselves of eligible offspring by doing so. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the fashion in men 's preferences for women 's fatness cannot have changed adaptively. Either men ' s preferences shifted spontaneously and for no good reason or men always preferred some ideal shape that was always quite thin: WHY WAISTS MATTER