And my topic about society's taste in body type has always been a subliminal expression of humanity's fear of mortality. As in, if it is a period (damn near anything before the 20th century) where lots of people are in danger of starving to death, then curves are considered sexy. In either gender. Like renaissance odalisques their round bellies, or a plump man as a good marriage prospect. And it's still obvious in the 20th century... America is prosperous in Gatsby's 1920's, not so many people are starving in post-ww1 America, so Flappers aspire to a lithe, straight silhouette. And look at all of those art-deco depictions of beautifully elongated/surreal women.
So this is my bullshit theory, and I have repeated it a bunch of times whenever a skinny girl talks trash on fat girls, or a chubby lady complains vice versa. I repeat my bullshit theory, and then I don't have to make any actual declaration of my choice of chubby over slender over anything else.
And then I hear the following story on the news yesterday, replete with stock footage of anonymous fat women jiggling around, shot from the waist down so the news cameraman can sidestep asking permission to take anyone's picture.
From the Washington Post:
"When men are under stress, they are more likely to find larger women’s bodies attractive.
So says a small study published Wednesday in the journal PLoS One. Researchers at London’s University of Westminster and Newcastle University, both in Britain, assembled 81 white male undergraduates to test a hunch (based on previous studies) that men under psychological stress might prefer bigger-bodied women than men who aren’t stressed might choose.
After subjecting half of the group to high-stress situations, all 81 of the men were presented with a standard set of images of women that’s often used in research regarding attitudes toward body size. The series consists of 10 black-and-white frontal-view photographs of leotard-clad women (whose faces have been blocked out) whose body sizes range from very thin (or “emaciated,” in the study’s parlance) to obese. They were asked to identify which body they found most attractive, or ideal. They also were asked to identify the smallest and the largest body they found appealing.
Sure enough, the men under stress identified larger bodies as their ideal choice and as the largest they found attractive; the stress-free men chose smaller bodies as ideal and as the largest they found attractive. Those differences disappeared at the lower end of the body-size scale, with both groups making similar choices when identifying the smallest body they found attractive.
“It is now widely-acknowledged that body size ideals are, in part at least, shaped by an individual's resource security, such that heavier body sizes are preferred where or when resources are unpredictable or unavailable. This proposition highlights the fact that a primary function of adipose tissue is the storage of calories, which in turn suggests that body fat is a reliable predictor of food availability. In situations marked by resource uncertainty, therefore, individuals should come to idealise heavier individuals, as fatness would be associated with access to resources. Conversely, thinness in such contexts may be associated with increased incidence of ill-health and, for women, ovulatory irregularities and lower capacity to support pregnancy.”
The study further notes that larger size may signal maturity, independence and other qualities tied to survival. It makes sense that a person under stress might seek out a companion with those traits."
So it wasn't exactly as simple as my theory, but there were definitely parallels.
In the interest of full disclosure, pertaining to sexual preference, I should probably share the following information about myself:
I am constantly terrified.
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