The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [142]
Bear in mind the reason that we are concentrating on male preferences. As we saw in the last chapter, men care more about the physical appearance of women than vice versa and for good reason: youth and health are better clues to women’s value as a mate and potential mother than to a man’s. Women are not indifferent to youth and health, but they are more concerned than men with other features.
Skinny Women
But fashions change. If beauty is subject to fashion, however despotic, it can change. Consider a case where the definition of beauty does seem to have changed drastically in recent years: thinness. The Duchess of Windsor is credited with the remark that a woman ‘can never be too rich or too thin’, but even she might be surprised at the emaciated appearance of the average modern model. 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.11 Tom Wolfe coined the term ‘social X-rays’ for New York society women who starve themselves into fashionable shape. The weight of the Miss Americas steadily falls year by year. So does that of Playboy centrefolds. Both categories of women are fifteen per cent lighter than the average for their ages.12 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 reed-like shape. Nor has it ever been sensible for men to pick the thinnest woman available. Today, as in the Pleistocene, that is a sure way to choose the least fertile woman: a woman can be rendered infertile by a body fat content only ten to fifteen per cent below normal. Indeed, one (far-fetched) 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 the family. But this does not help explain the male preference for skinniness, which seems positively maladaptive.13
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 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 worshipped at the shrine of wasp waists, so much so that many women relied on severe corseting and some 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. 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 marked and willingly expressed preference for plump female bodies among tribal people all over the world, and in many subsistence societies, thin women are shunned.
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 to spend their money on slimming and exercise. Thinness has become what fatness was: a signal of status.
Smuts argues that male