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| Skinny women will always be hot and only evolution explains why. But here's why it doesn't matter. |
When it comes to female body image, politics often cloud the discourse. You have to tip toe around potentially offensive topics, and yet at the same time adhere to conventionally accepted ideals, values, and norms. Else be labeled a charlatan.
So this is me breakdance-fighting my way through a security field of political lasers, one wrong move away from being caught by the misogyny police.
What inspired this post was an unlikely internet destination where I learned that there are people fighting to have athletic bodies ("swole" was the word used) accepted as normal and healthy, a legitimate reflection of one's individuality and personal goals. Of course, I can get behind this; after all, there's already a growing movement among men and women to respect females who are fit and athletic. 'True beauty', 'real women', and so on.
But what shocked me was that this movement also included incredibly well-muscled men, the type that are flash-judged as meat heads, narcissists, dolts, and dummies.
I was sympathetic, because as an evolutionist I understand the human propensity for judgement. How quickly we are to value someone based simply on how different they are or by how their superficial signals, whether they be muscles, fedoras, or lower back tattoos, somehow vie with our own individual worldviews or preferences.
What I ended up taking away is that these people, at the very least, deserve their autonomy, equality, and individuality free from value judgement. They are people, too.
The reasoning behind this is that symbols (muscles, fedoras, and tramp stamps) are weak evidence for what constitutes that person as a whole. Just because someone is muscled doesn't mean they are dumb or even douchey, no matter how much you wanna believe it.
So how does this tie into skinniness? Well, the stick-thin model is sort of like the swole bro: they are both subject to social stigma simply because their body types deviate so far from the norm.
Models are sometimes judged as starving, eating-disordered narcissists. Indeed, some are. And they are looked upon with scorn and envy by those frustrated with Western culture's adoration of skinniness. Perhaps jealous that these hard-to-obtain ideals are the emblems of beauty and fashion and perhaps attractiveness.
Whether or not models are attractive seems to be a divisive issue for some. 'Real women have curves' is a saying thrown around without much dissent. But allow me: this saying confuses me because it rightly attempts to bolster curvy women's confidence by wrongly dismissing non-curvy women. I'm sorry, but skinny women aren't real? Then what are they?
Models are obviously attractive. And if you deconstruct the marketing apparatus built upon the fact that sex sells, then you have to conclude that aggregates of female body image in advertising are hugely relevant to sexual attractiveness.
If markets are efficient, as our business schools suppose them to be, then the images we see are the ones that maximize the ad's effectiveness. It truly is fascinating to me, on an anthropological level, how this commercial system has come to define the model's features: an alluring, exotic racially-ambiguous mix of traits that revolve around the central one -- skinniness.
Models tend to be very skinny. This is something people before me have noticed and is apparent in almost every catalogue or storefront so let's just accept it and move on, shall we, because the really interesting question is WHY.
Why are models skinny? Is this something that evolution can illuminate?
The short answer is yes, and it has everything to do with the first rule of marketing: sex sells. In evolution, if we're talking about attractiveness, we're talking about fertility.
But if the 'sex sells' mantra predicts that ads will show high-fertility women, then why don't they showcase women with curves? Aren't those women the ones with highest fertility rates?
Yes, curvy women are indeed often shown to be healthier, more fertile, more libidinous, among other things. But this does not discount the logic of fertility in other female body types.
Sometimes I hate to be the guy to come right out with the truth but it eventually must be done and I've talked around this issue for long enough now: Skinniness is a signal of youth and youth is a signal of fertility.
If you've ever seen a young woman coming of age just after a growth spurt, you're going to see pretty much exactly what you see on billboards, down to the skin tone, and yes, the skinniness.
Perhaps it is a dark truth of evolution that we can add to the many others, but there are higher wisdoms to take away from all this. Namely, don't judge people. Don't value whole populations based on petty categories and insecurities.
All women are beautiful. They are beautiful in absolute terms irrespective of their place in the attractiveness hierarchy. I don't mean that as a cultural value or an ethical principle; I mean that as a biological fact.
We are all people. We are all equal. Perhaps evolution teaches us this truth better than any other.
