I’ll come back tomorrow for a laugh, since I have little doubt that by then, at least several men will have been oddly anxious to “prove” you wrong.
This is awesome. A little Mediterranean/Euro-centric, but of course that’s where we have most depictions of female beauty somewhat akin to representation from history. I wonder if the loosening hold of centralized pop culture is also loosening the idea of One True Beauty, or at least letting competitors in a bit more.
Oh come on now, give the haters a little credit - they’ll probably argue that Caroline is guilty of objectifying women by presenting a video that does nothing but show bodies and claim beauty standards. I mean what about the ladies who have none of these body types! Should they feel ashamed?!
Why debate subjectivity when they can instead try for false equivalence! 
… 
Man The 80’s was shizzle my nizzle.
What’s wrong with the ideal body type being the one you inhabit? Works for me.
Ideally, I’d have no body. But that’s not for everyone.
No body means no medical expenses, or futzing with insurance, or having to feed it at regular intervals, or worrying about the stupid meat puppet crapping out on me.
I hate that part, too. What a waste of time, and if you don’t do it your brain starts to fade. It would be much better to just plug in to an outlet!
Well. I don’t mind eating. I just wish it was an optional thing, where what you put in doesn’t really impact performance or make any difference.
The biggest question that occurred to me was “With all that pale cloudy background, you thought white text would be ideal for this purpose?”
Entirely.
And I left thinking: “Yup, I’d happily have sex with all of those women!”*
*I think because they all had pretty faces… I assume that’s a cultural thing too and that this video just didn’t address that and instead focused on bodies… Or maybe I’m just a hornball…
Low female Waist:Hip ratio is a constant and cross-cultural signifier of fecundity and thus attractiveness, regardless of other tastes changing with the times (Furnham 1997). It doesn’t even need to be seen to be alluring (Karremans 2010).
Furnham, A., Tan, T., & McManus, C. (1997). Waist-to-hip ratio and preferences for body shape: A replication and extension. Personality and Individual Differences, 22(4), pp 539-549
Karremans, J. C., Frankenhuis, W. E., & Arons, S. (2010). Blind men prefer a low waist-to-hip ratio. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(3), 182-186.
THANK you!
Three hours, @milliefink.
And here I found myself thinking “ideal” is an interesting word, suggesting both value-judgement and objectivity. I wonder who’s that awesome guy whose opinions on this matter are facts? Fashion designer, no doubt.
The “ideal” from early 20th century on is no doubt driven by fashion designers. But the low waist:hip thing is built into the male brain. Along with desire for an unblemished, symmetrical (“pretty”) female face —which is likewise an indicator of health and good genes.
I didn’t post to try and prove Caroline “wrong”. The neat thing about waist:hip ratio is that it’s a useful surrogate for health and fertility across a range of body types and weights, which is presumably why it’s hard-wired as an attractor rather than, say, body mass index.
The “Ancient Greece” ignores the fact that there really wasn’t such a place - there were a variety of more or less related cultures in that part of the Mediterranean, with very different standards. Athenian women were expected to be pale because aristocratic women stayed home and didn’t work in the fields. But Spartan aristocratic women were expected to be much more like men, strong and athletic from outdoor exercise.
This actually reinforces the article.
When I travelled across India I was shocked at how many ugly Indian women there are in the world. In tech you often meet very attractive Indian women. Until I went to India I had developed the idea that Indian women were more attractive than white women. But then I realized it was selection bias. I was just being exposed to the women who had married the top of the food chain men, the ones who had the talent to get a USA visa for programming skills. And it was their wise parents selecting who is top rather than 18 year old wild girls who don’t get infatuated with geeks here in the USA.
Point being that the ideal isn’t necessarily prevalent. I have heard that the plump body styles of the past were popular because that was a sign that you didn’t have to work in the fields but could sit around eating cake all day because you married well. Both the women and the males idealized that body not because it represented ability or sexiness but because it represented refinement rarification and position over ability.
Ok, well that happened…
I loved this except: the swimsuits were not particularly flattering and I can’t think of a Hollywood Golden Age actress who was as curvaceous as the model here. Marilyn Monroe was not a size 16. http://www.snopes.com/movies/actors/mmdress.asp
I’m sure somebody is going to happen along and point out that the male brain is not the only measure of feminine beauty. But what do I know, at the moment I can only consult my male brain, and that’s kind of tautological.
