Motivational Posters...

[glatt]

[HungLikeJesus]

I like the Xmas one - that would make a good card.

[Flint]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Guess I'm just an average kind of guy.

I've never understood the supposed appeal of a skinny, bony ass. The parts of a woman that make her sexually attractive are strategically located deposits of fat, i.e. boobs, ass, hips, thighs. Nature, our evolutionary programming, tells us that a woman healthy enough to carry fatty deposits in these key areas is a good candidate for carrying our offspring and successfully forwarding our genetic code. This is science, you can't deny that a big fat ass or pair of boobs is what is supposed to turn on a normally functioning male adult.

The world is so ƒucked up in so many ways, but the ubiquitous "ideal" of super-skinny females is something that I can't even begin to understand.

[infinite monkey]

I thought about this as I watched Atonement. Keria Knightley is a pretty woman, but she's so thin. And I thought about how so many guys like a woman with some meat on their bones...yet there I sat wishing I was as skinny as Keira. Or even on the same planet.

So what is up with that? Well, it speaks to men's ideals vs women's ideals, but it doesn't get to the heart of the dichotomy, which is the root of eating disorders. Can't blame the men on this one. It's female, and it's bad and insidious marketing.

[ZenGum]

I think there *might* be an explanation in the following:

*disclaimer* human behaviour may be affected by genetic factors but it is very flexible and malleable, both by environmental/social factors and self-imposed decisions. It is very unlikely to be "hard wired", except maybe for the heartbeat, and maybe not even that. I'll use the term "programed to" but what I really mean is "born with a tendency to behave generally like this".*

It would make sense for male humans to be programed to want a nice, healthily padded female as a breeding partner. What Flint said.

But! ideally, she should also be just ending puberty. That way she will be a breeder/mother for many years and also probably isn't already breeding with someone else.

A female of the ideal breeding body shape will be somewhat lean at the end of puberty, but voluptuous in the right places. She will fill out as she lives.

So what males are programed to find attractive is that curvaceous youngish female who is still a little slender in places.

Yet, as time goes by, life and motherhood have their consequences, and she is still curvaceous, but no longer has the youthful sparkle, and the slenderness has long gone. Males lose interest (the shallow pigs).

I hazard the guess that this is the source of modern women's urge to look young and of just the right body shape. Society and especially business (beauty industry) run with this and it grows beyond all sense or reason. It has pushed beyond the natural ideal to an even younger, thinner appearance. Hence the current obsession with thinness.

*Important disclaimer* This is all written focusing only on humans as creatures with biological urges. We have become far more than that. We do things for reasons, not urges, we have culture and knowledge, our societies have developed rules of behaviour. Anyone who lives by the rule of "Indulge biological urges whenever they arise (aka penis does what penis wants)" is falling well below the standards of being a "person". It is this reasoned behaviour according to social conventions that makes someone a "person" and gives them greater rights and moral worth than,say, a cow. IMHO.

So, chaps, just because your genes make you want to go and chase buxom young college chicks, doesn't make it necessarily okay to do so. But there's no need to hate yourself for having the urge.

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

So, chaps, just because your genes make you want to go and chase buxom young college chicks, doesn't make it necessarily okay to do so. But there's no need to hate yourself for having the urge.

IF you teach at university. Otherwise, let the old man lechery begin!

[Flint]

Right, right: the disclaimer that this is, of course, purely objective scientific observation. Don't anybody have a P.C. freak-out on me.

ZG, I get that a thinner female would be perceived as younger, therefore healthier (in terms of an ancient hunter-gatherer culture where age 30 must have been considered elderly), therefore this younger-looking female would be perceived as more likely to be capable of producing our offspring. And as you say, the physique filled out in the right places would indicate that she is ready for breeding, while the thinner build might indicate she is younger, thus less likely to be otherwise spoken for.

Unfortunately the implications of this would be that the biologically ideal woman for breeding is of an age that is not considered leagally or ethically appropriate in our modern culture. Luckily, as you mention, humans have enough gray matter in our frontal lobes to mitigate our primal instincts with the very useful and complex abstractions that make "society" possible.



All of this being said, it still doesn't speak to my original point: that there is a pervasive idea in our culture that a woman who has the physique of a 10 year-old boy is supposed to be the ideal of sexual attractiveness.

This doesn't make sense to me via evolutionary biology or any other means I can think of.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Flint

All of this being said, it still doesn't speak to my original point: that there is a pervasive idea in our culture that a woman who has the physique of a 10 year-old boy is supposed to be the ideal of sexual attractiveness.

I believe, and certainly others can correct me, but " Rubenesque" was the standard for attractive and mating long before the starving look became popular. In other words the idea that skinny is sexy is really an evolutionary new thing, and it may be a cultural white European thing as well. There are other cultures in the US that find "Fat is Phat". Just an observation.

[ZenGum]

Originally Posted by Flint

All of this being said, it still doesn't speak to my original point: that there is a pervasive idea in our culture that a woman who has the physique of a 10 year-old boy is supposed to be the ideal of sexual attractiveness.

This doesn't make sense to me via evolutionary biology or any other means I can think of.

I heartily agree. The protruding ribs look is (a) unhealthy and (b) unattractive. What we have today has gone way beyond any evolutionary sense.

I think to explain this, we'd be looking at some kind of game theory, involving the ratcheting up of expectations and pushing an increasingly impossible ideal...'cause, like, if women felt comfortable as they are, they wouldn't need to buy all that overpriced crap from cosmetics companies, who wouldn't be able to afford those hugely expensive adds in the magazines which tell women they are fat and ugly, so the magazines have to keep telling them this ...

I will sum up with two musical quotes:

Do not read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly.

I like! big! butts! and I cannot lie ...

[Undertoad]

Sexual maturity is what the instinct is, a positive hip to waist ratio and some sign of breastage is the "signal". 10-year-old boys are Right Out.

[regular.joe]

Bone is for the dog....MEAT is for the man!

[jimhelm]

I like skinny chicks. Especially if they like big fat guys.

What?

[fargon]

the bigger the cushion the better the push'in.

[fargon]

Save the whales, harpoon a fat chick.

[classicman]

Ride her like a surfer riding on a tidal wave.