Chapter 1 How Do We Define Ideal? Beauty, n. Qualities that give pleasure to the senses or exalt the mind. Ideal, n. A standard of perfection, beauty or excellence. --MERRIAM-WEBSTER'S Before we embark on our global tour, let's start by defining what we mean by "ideal." As with most things pertaining to appearance, the answer is somewhat subjective, and certainly controversial. Look it up in Webster's, and you'll find that ideal is a noun referring to an agreed-upon standard of perfection, often relating to beauty. And beauty, according to Webster's, is a noun that describes the qualities that give pleasure to the senses. Neither of these definitions addresses what these specific qualities are, or who creates the standards by which they are judged. So before we've even begun, already we have a quandary, one that has been mused over and written about for centuries past and centuries to come: When it comes to a woman's body, exactly what constitutes beauty? Not surprisingly, in the 2,000 years since the birth of Christianity (and for several thousand before that), the answers to these questions have varied dramatically and often contradictorily. Flat, curvy, tall, tiny--all of these characteristics have, at some point, somewhere, been aspired to by a female population. Until the 20th century, cultural opinions and standards related to the female form were largely left to the realm of poets, artists, and philosophers. From Rubens's fleshy, overly ample figures to Gauguin's strong, box-shouldered Tahitian nudes, renderings of the female form were often a matter of the artist's personal preference--or his commentary on society--and left to his aesthetic taste. But in the past 100 years, as science has become the prevailing tool by which our world is explained, the urge to quantify just about everything has spilled over into the realm of beauty. So what has the 20th century revealed about our definitions of ideal? Even now, there is no one perfect answer to the question of perfection. But there are some worthwhile theories. And while I don't believe any one of them holds the answer we are looking for, they are worth exploring, if only to provide some context for our international debate. It's All about Sex The first and arguably most popular theory stems from the work of David Buss, PhD, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Texas who has suggested that our ideas about female attractiveness derive from a Darwinian desire to mate and propagate the species.1 According to Buss, "Just as men's successful tactics for attracting women depend on women's desires in a mate, women's attraction tactics depend on men's preferences. Women who succeed in this endeavor appear reproductively valuable by embodying physical and behavioral cues that signify their youth and physical attractiveness. Women who fail to fulfill these qualities lose a competitive edge." In Buss's view, the "ideal" female body conveys to men that she is fertile. In such a Darwinian model, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder; sexual attractiveness is important only insofar as it guarantees that a woman is suitable for reproductive purposes. As such, a typical "hourglass" figure, with large breasts (an indication of ample food supply for the offspring) and narrow waist with wider hips (a signal of fertility), is ideal. Some psychologists have gone so far as to quantify the ideal waist-to-hip ratio as 0.7 (a waist circumference that is 70 percent of the hip circumference) based on research in which men responded to images of women and ranked them from most to least appealing.2 Buss's theory is interesting, albeit highly controversial and somewhat limited. The assumption that men react to specific visual stimuli based on a primal desire to mate eliminates the possibility that women's ideas about their bodies exist irrespective of men's standards. It also suggests that neither women nor men have any conscious influence in the formation of female beauty standards, or that we actively decide what we find aesthetically appealing. Rather, we are at the mercy of a million-year-old evolutionary script. While this argument may be relevant to regions of the globe in which the need to reproduce is made more immediate by low population density, we are no longer an underpopulated world where one in every five offspring is unlikely to survive. We are an overcrowded population, one that is inflicting irreversible damage on the same natural resources that are necessary to sustain it. Fewer of us, some might say, would improve our planet's odds of survival. If the theory of the evolutionary biologists is correct, wouldn't narrow hips and smaller breasts become hallmarks of the ideal body? Secondly, under the evolutionary psychology model, body ideals for women are defined as being universal, to the extent that certain physical traits are statistically proven to relate to higher birthrates and better- nourished offspring regardless of ethnicity or culture. So we would expect to see the same body shapes aspired to in Fiji as in Finland. But this is not, in fact, the case. In Japan, as we will see, women used to pad their midsections to create a silhouette akin to a column in order to comply with the preferred look of the moment. In China, women bound their breasts to the chest to create the desired flat look. And in the United States, the obsession with thinness has led to runway models bearing little resemblance to the fleshy ideals put forth by Buss. In a roundabout way, it raises the question: If our body ideals are created to encourage mating, but the obesity epidemic in the United States is driving the female population further and further away from this ideal, why would a society continue to pursue the original ideal? Would it not be advantageous from a reproduction standpoint to alter the ideals so as to encourage men to find heavier women attractive? Taken to the extreme (and, let's face it, evolutionary psychology's theory is extreme), in a world where men only mate with large- breasted, small-waisted, thin-legged women, there won't be much baby-making going on in another 2 decades, because the potential pool of mates is getting smaller and smaller every year. Further complicating matters, scientists who have studied gender and body image in cross-cultural work have found that the body ideals women aspire to aren't always in sync with the preferred images men choose. The lanky look of Western models is just one example of a body shape that women emulate, though many men prefer the curvier figures on display in Playboy. These diverging aesthetic preferences tell us that whatever role evolution may have played in the past, today's ideals are coming from sources other than Darwin. We Like What's Familiar Some social psychologists have suggested that we find what is familiar to us to be the most attractive. This theory is based on the assumption that the human brain behaves as a sort of digital camera, photographing and retaining images of every person it encounters. From the day you are born, your brain records and files these images--but not as isolated entities. Rather, each new snapshot is added to the ones before it, then divided by the overall quantity of images, thereby creating a composite of the average woman and man's appearance. The resulting image is the standard by which we judge or perceive the attractiveness of others.3 This is more than just an abstract theory: Numerous studies have been conducted in which participants were asked to choose the most attractive faces and bodies from among hundreds of images--some of which were created by computer technology that merged and blended thousands of individual face and body images. Participants consistently selected the composite images as more attractive than any one individual, unaltered photo.4 As psychologist Nancy Etcoff points out in Survival of the Prettiest,5 "Most people do not conjure up the word 'average' when they see a good-looking face. But average in this context means average in shape, not beauty. In a world of short noses and long noses, almond-shaped eyes and round eyes, oval faces and round faces ... the eye calculates its own statistics and arrives at a mean value. The beauty of such average may reflect our sensitivity to nature's optimal designs." It is thought that "average" bodies and faces are optimal because they reassure the viewer that the subject is on solid, healthy ground; overweight people run the risk of heart disease, tall people die sooner, and shortness could indicate malnourishment or a childhood growth stunt. Yet many other physical preferences, from eye shape to breast size to calf muscles, cannot be explained so easily. Our body aesthetics shift depending on the number of ethnicities with which we come into contact. The American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery reports a trend toward preferences for wider noses and fuller lips in the last 50 years.6 One could argue that these traits have become more prominent in our mental composite as our country's immigrant population swells and the Internet and television introduce thousands of additional non-Caucasian images into our digital memory bank. In their facial composite studies, social psychologists find that Americans increasingly show a preference for features that are less traditionally European. It is tough to discern, though, whether this apparent shift in aesthetic preferences stems from the preference for a true melting pot image, or an appreciation of features that are "different." But when I spoke with Satoshi Kanazawa, PhD, a psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science, he suggested that the criterion people use to choose an "ideal anything" (mate, house, car) is the same: prototypicality. Any item judged to be closer to the prototype is deemed more attractive. In humans, this is the "averageness" effect. I suggested to Kanazawa that the qualities of exceptional height, remarkable thinness, and unusual facial beauty are considered desirable by women precisely because they reflect something above average. I asked him if we equate this above-average physical state with other above-average traits, such as higher socioeconomic status. Yes, he said, for two reasons: "First, taller and more beautiful people are on average more intelligent. They are more likely to achieve higher education and income on their own accord. Second, more beautiful (though not necessarily taller) women are more likely to marry more desirable men who have higher status and more money. So more beautiful women are more likely to attain greater status and more resources via marriage to wealthy men." Or, without men. Indeed, several studies have borne out the fact that taller women are likely to earn a higher income than women of average height. One study, reported in the Journal of Applied Psychology,7 predicted that workers with a 7-inch height advantage over colleagues would make roughly $166,000 more over the span of a 30-year career. Why? Height leads to greater self-esteem in the individual, while at the same time providing the taller person with a dominating presence in the work environment. How can it be that we simultaneously find average-looking women the most attractive, while associating certain non-average traits with desirables like money and status? Seeking clarity, I called Jamin Halberstadt, PhD, a social psychologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand, who has received multiple awards for his work on the issue of prototypicality. Halberstadt admitted that the science of averageness is not infallible. He said, "People's judgments do not occur in a vacuum. There is a variability factor depending on what else you have been exposed to in your life. When it comes to bodies, you must account for what the person's own body type is, as well." Perhaps thinner people will prefer thinner people; heavier people will be drawn to rounder shapes. Then again, if someone is dissatisfied with his or her own body type, perhaps he or she sees beauty in someone with the opposite physical makeup. Emotions also come into play, says Halberstadt. Ask a woman how she feels about her appearance when she's in a good mood, and the response is significantly more likely to be positive (or, at least, less critical) than if you ask her on a day when she's feeling down. The mood-body image correlation is so strong, in fact, that standard medical screenings for depression include questions about how the patient feels about his or her appearance. If you asked me to describe my ideal body, I would be prone to fantasize. It is not something I possess at the moment, but something I dream about having in the future. An ideal body is about what could be, not necessarily what is. To me, this helps explain why, although millions of Americans grow larger every year, our idea of the perfect body continues to shrink. According to the theory of averageness, our concept of the ideal body should reflect the mid-range body size in our population; but clearly, if you look at magazines, models, and actresses as evidence of what we find aspirational--it does not. The Appeal of Being Divisible by Two Perhaps averageness is not quite the definition of ideal we're looking for. But there's no denying the validity of the many studies that find people are more attracted to composites of faces and bodies than any single image. Researchers from fields as diverse as oral surgery to social psychology sought an answer to why we find these images so appealing, and many of them have arrived at the same conclusion: We are reacting to the science of symmetry. More exactly, the continual blending of individual physical characteristics, over time, will begin to yield a composite that is geometrically symmetrical. Left-eye size evens out with right; people with more pronounced left biceps will pair off with those right-dominant body shapes. Even right and left breast size, which can vary slightly in an individual, become more symmetrical in a composite. Is the ideal body simply perfectly proportioned and balanced? Twenty-five hundred years ago, sculptors, mathematicians, and philosophers all grappled with the question of how to best capture this principle. What determines proper proportions in human forms, architecture, city planning, and beyond? Plato, Pythagoras, and a myriad of others offered theories, but it was Euclid who appears to have provided the first written description of what became known as the golden ratio: a mathematical formula based on the principles of symmetry that finds the ideal distance between two points and lines intersecting as 1:1.618. Known as phi in Greek, the ratio is named after Phidias, an ancient Greek sculptor who designed the Parthenon statues to conform to the golden ratio. Excerpted from World Has Curves: The Global Quest for the Perfect Body by Julia Savacool All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
