The Red Queen_ Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature - Matt Ridley [144]
However, I confess 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
The solution to this puzzle may lie in the work of an ingenious Indian psychologist named Devendra Singh, who now works at the University of Texas in Austin. He observes that women’s bodies, unlike men’s, go through two remarkable transitions between puberty and middle age. At ten a girl has a figure not unlike that she will have at forty. Then, suddenly, her vital statistics are transformed: the ratio of her waist to her chest measurement and to her hips, shrinks rapidly. By thirty it is rising again as her breasts lose their firmness and her waist its narrowness. That ratio, of waist to breasts and hips, is not only known as the vital statistic, but it is also the feature that, with few, brief exceptions, fashion has always emphasized above all else: bodices, corsets, hoops, bustles and crinolines existed to make waists look smaller relative to bosom and bottom. Bras, breast implants, shoulder pads (which make the waist look smaller) and tight belts do the same today.
Singh noticed that however much the weight of Playboy centrefolds changed, one feature did not: the ratio of their waist width to their hip width. Recall that Bobbi Low at the University of Michigan argued that fat on the buttocks and breasts mimics broad hip bones and high mammary-tissue content, while thin waists seem to indicate that these features could not be caused by fat. Singh’s theory is slightly different but intriguingly parallel. He argues that, within reason, a man will find almost any weight of woman attractive so long as her waist is much thinner than her hips.18
If that sounds foolish, consider the results of Singh’s experiments. First, he showed men four versions of the same picture of the midriff of a young woman in shorts. Each picture was subtly touched up to alter slightly the waist-to-hip ratio: 0.6, 0.7, 0.8 and 0.9. Unerringly, men chose the thinnest-waisted version as most attractive. No great surprise, but he found a remarkable consistency among his subjects. Next he showed his subjects a range of drawings of female forms, which varied according to their weight and according to their waist-to-hip ratio. He found that a heavy woman with a low ratio of waist to hips was usually preferred to a thin woman with a high ratio. The ideal figure was the one with the lowest ratio, not the one with the thinnest torso.
Singh’s interest is in anorexics, bulimics and women obsessed with losing weight even when thin. He believes that because dieting in fairly thin women has no effect on the waist-to-hip ratio – if anything it makes it larger by shrinking the hips – they are doomed never to feel more attractive.
Why does the waist-to-hip ratio matter? Singh observes that a ‘gynoid’ fat distribution – more fat on the hips, less on the torso – is necessary for the hormonal changes associated with female fertility. An ‘android’ fat distribution – fat on the belly, thin hips – is associated with the symptoms of male disabilities like heart disease, even in women. But which is cause and which effect? It seems to me more likely that both the shape and the hormonal effects of it are sexually selected by generations of males than that males prefer the shape because it is the only way the hormones can be made to work. The relatively brief period during which women have hourglass bodies – from fifteen to thirty-five, say – is a sexually selected phenomenon. It owes more to competition to attract men than to any other biological