not even a source link? bah, not nice.
http://www.psychguides.com/interact/the-evolution-of-miss-america/
The graph of the average American woman´s BMI is definitely more concerning than that of the Miss Americas.
Why does the data of contestants end at 1991? Its says the data is not available, but that’s a little far ago to draw any present day conclusions about it.
The fact that the average american woman has grown so much might be a more important question to address than the fact that models have gotten skinnier,
Yes, body issues are important, but what about actual bodies? The swimsuit gif demonstrates the body types go from “skinny” to “toned” at least as far as one-pieces indicate.
National thyroid crisis.
Those average American woman trend lines should not be extrapolated before 1950. My assumption is that they were close to level before then.
Yes, I thought that was a particularly terrible decision. The extrapolation of Miss Americas beyond 1990 is also quite suspect, but the idea that the Miss Americas of the 1920s (when some women used tapeworms as weight control aids) was chunkier than the average American woman seems pretty unlikely to me.
Sort of off topic, but it’s highly likely no one took tapeworm pills.
So maybe the reason so many people want to go back to the 1950s is because that’s when the “ideal” woman’s body matched the average woman’s body. Everyone was good enough to be Miss America!
That’s the reason women wore so much clothing in the 1800’s. It was ballast, anything less and they’d simply float away.
No, I don’t think it’s off topic. Interesting!
the body types of the winners are increasingly less representative of the typical American woman and often typify an unhealthy ideal.
Pff… That’s going a bit far. In an increasingly obese populace, slim people get called anorexic. There’s nothing unhealthy about being slim, as opposed to say, being obsessed with becoming slim.
So in 1945 the average woman had a figure like a beauty contestant. Neat. No wonder so many men like the look of women from that era. My take away from the graph is that beauty contestants tend to be the inverse of the common woman in any era with the exception of the 40’s. So I suppose I could conclude that men tend to like women who are different from the rest. When the average gal is thin, men tend to look for a fuller figured lady and when the average woman is thick, men desire a thinner mate. That sounds about right.
While the trend lines are disturbing, what strikes me is that there was this much height/weight data publicly available on these people in the first place. The reasons we collect this information perhaps says more about our values than the information itself. By trying to quantify something, we undoubtedly affect our perception of it. By simply measuring height and weight in the context of beauty, we are not just observing a correlation, we are enforcing it. What does it say that we choose to do this? I doubt it would be possible to compile a similar graph for Nobel Laureates. Maybe for US Presidents. Certainly for NFL quarterbacks.
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