Interest Haiku #10: Voluptuous Women
Tuesday, December 16th, 2003 09:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flwydVoluptuous Women -
Curved hips, round belly
Generous breasts, rosy lips
Goddess embodied
I have this as an interest in part because I think "voluptuous" is a wonderfully fun word to say. You have to move your lips in and out several times, it begins and ends with a fricative, it has several opportunities for long and sensual vowels. Voluptuous well represents voluptuousness.
The postmodern feminist party line focuses on phrases like "socially defined standards of beauty," which seem to imply that if we as a society decided that sexy is puss-ridden bed-bound centenarians on oxygen, we could. The evolutionary psychologist comes along and says "Ein minuten, bitte." Men are attracted to features which indicate the ability to bear and raise healthy children. So in every culture, men are attracted to people who display youth, health, chastity (so they aren't carrying someone else's children), strong gathering skills, and so forth. Many of these differ in practice from society to society -- the color of healthy skin depends significantly on the base rate of skin color, for instance. The amount of leisure time a person seems to have is also a factor. If a woman is a good gatherer, she'll have extra time and if she's healthy she'll have more energy to devote to things like growing and maintaining her hair. I remember reading that in places where most people work in the sun, fair skin is considered more beautiful, while tans are more desired if most people are rather pasty. So despite their hard-core nativist image, evolutionary psychologists propose a fair amount is learned based on environment.
However, anyone who looks at the wide physical variety of people who successfully find a mating partner, there is anything but a single desired form. I suspect that this is due in part to the many parameters that go into the attractiveness equation. Small stature can indicate youth, but it can also indicate sickly stunted growth. High body fat could indicate health with lots of resources to devote to children, it could indicate laziness (which is often a good thing -- if someone can afford to be lazy, they probably have plenty of resources), or it could indicate that a woman is already a mother.
So how do the factors play out in my brain? I find women of many shapes and sizes to be attractive for different reasons. But I think voluptuousity deserves special attention for several reasons. First, voluptuous usually means a soft armful to hug, which is my favorite physical thing to do with the opposite sex. (My favorite thing overall to do with the opposite sex is holding intellectual punversations. I'm a fan of nerd-sluts :-)
I think voluptuous is great also because it usually means a curvy figure, and curves are much more interesting to look at than linear functions. (See? Nerd-slut again.) The emaciated models in the check-out aisle look almost like teenage boys with boobs, and that's not a turn-on for me.
For the evolutionary psychologist, voluptuous is a good sign of childbearing potential. It also means if she gets stuck in Siberia, she'll have a higher R-value (to keep warm) and will be able to last longer on reserves. Plus, she'll float better in Lake Baikal. (Did I mention I'm also a barren landscape fetishist?)
Voluptuous women have more room to play with clothes, assuming they can find a store that sells clothes that fit them. (At Dragonfest, I loved the sign on the clothing merchant booth that said "Clothes for goddess-sized women.") Voluptuous women can wear big flowy clothes with grace and beauty. They can wear revealing clothing to enhance and advertise their natural assets. And I think female speed skaters (who have huge voluptuous-but-firm thighs) look waaay hot in their skin-tight drag-resistant suits. For girls without many assets, the beauty rests largely in the clothes themselves, but for voluptuous women, it's about how they wear them.
Voluptuousness often indicates power. From an angry earth goddess to a black mother of four from the ghetto, when a big and powerful woman makes demands, you're a lot more likely to follow instructions than when a quiet waif asks for something.
Finally, the EP has room to say that people would find attractive people who other people find attractive. That is, if all Timmy's friends think Jessica is pretty, Timmy might pick up on that and say to himself (in a module, natch) "She must have something going for her." Thus, it's not necessarily contrary to Neo-Darwinian theory that there are social standards of beauty and that people feel pressured to conform to them (which they do). The evolutionary psychology camp just thinks we have much less control over these standards than the postmodernists and feminists assert we do. The advertising industry (and, implicitly, mass media as a whole) has an interest in people spending lots of money on products to make themselves look a certain way. (Perhaps the food industry should advertise with non-anorexics.) Thin is in (though it wasn't even as recently as Marilyn Monroe and Mae West). So voluptuous women at some level fight the herd and the flow and express beauty in their natural body shape. And I think that's my fundamental beauty ideal -- the ability to be beautiful without putting too much effort into it. Because every five minutes that's spent on trying to look a certain way are five minutes that could be better spent geeking out. And I'd like to encourage that behavior. (Yay nerd-sluts!)
Incidentally, as indicated by my icon for this post and the frequent geek references, the most important features for me in a relationship are intellectual- and personality-based. Aside from snuggling ramifications, body shape and size and other appearance factors are about who I like looking at and daydreaming about.
Curved hips, round belly
Generous breasts, rosy lips
Goddess embodied
I have this as an interest in part because I think "voluptuous" is a wonderfully fun word to say. You have to move your lips in and out several times, it begins and ends with a fricative, it has several opportunities for long and sensual vowels. Voluptuous well represents voluptuousness.
The postmodern feminist party line focuses on phrases like "socially defined standards of beauty," which seem to imply that if we as a society decided that sexy is puss-ridden bed-bound centenarians on oxygen, we could. The evolutionary psychologist comes along and says "Ein minuten, bitte." Men are attracted to features which indicate the ability to bear and raise healthy children. So in every culture, men are attracted to people who display youth, health, chastity (so they aren't carrying someone else's children), strong gathering skills, and so forth. Many of these differ in practice from society to society -- the color of healthy skin depends significantly on the base rate of skin color, for instance. The amount of leisure time a person seems to have is also a factor. If a woman is a good gatherer, she'll have extra time and if she's healthy she'll have more energy to devote to things like growing and maintaining her hair. I remember reading that in places where most people work in the sun, fair skin is considered more beautiful, while tans are more desired if most people are rather pasty. So despite their hard-core nativist image, evolutionary psychologists propose a fair amount is learned based on environment.
However, anyone who looks at the wide physical variety of people who successfully find a mating partner, there is anything but a single desired form. I suspect that this is due in part to the many parameters that go into the attractiveness equation. Small stature can indicate youth, but it can also indicate sickly stunted growth. High body fat could indicate health with lots of resources to devote to children, it could indicate laziness (which is often a good thing -- if someone can afford to be lazy, they probably have plenty of resources), or it could indicate that a woman is already a mother.
So how do the factors play out in my brain? I find women of many shapes and sizes to be attractive for different reasons. But I think voluptuousity deserves special attention for several reasons. First, voluptuous usually means a soft armful to hug, which is my favorite physical thing to do with the opposite sex. (My favorite thing overall to do with the opposite sex is holding intellectual punversations. I'm a fan of nerd-sluts :-)
I think voluptuous is great also because it usually means a curvy figure, and curves are much more interesting to look at than linear functions. (See? Nerd-slut again.) The emaciated models in the check-out aisle look almost like teenage boys with boobs, and that's not a turn-on for me.
For the evolutionary psychologist, voluptuous is a good sign of childbearing potential. It also means if she gets stuck in Siberia, she'll have a higher R-value (to keep warm) and will be able to last longer on reserves. Plus, she'll float better in Lake Baikal. (Did I mention I'm also a barren landscape fetishist?)
Voluptuous women have more room to play with clothes, assuming they can find a store that sells clothes that fit them. (At Dragonfest, I loved the sign on the clothing merchant booth that said "Clothes for goddess-sized women.") Voluptuous women can wear big flowy clothes with grace and beauty. They can wear revealing clothing to enhance and advertise their natural assets. And I think female speed skaters (who have huge voluptuous-but-firm thighs) look waaay hot in their skin-tight drag-resistant suits. For girls without many assets, the beauty rests largely in the clothes themselves, but for voluptuous women, it's about how they wear them.
Voluptuousness often indicates power. From an angry earth goddess to a black mother of four from the ghetto, when a big and powerful woman makes demands, you're a lot more likely to follow instructions than when a quiet waif asks for something.
Finally, the EP has room to say that people would find attractive people who other people find attractive. That is, if all Timmy's friends think Jessica is pretty, Timmy might pick up on that and say to himself (in a module, natch) "She must have something going for her." Thus, it's not necessarily contrary to Neo-Darwinian theory that there are social standards of beauty and that people feel pressured to conform to them (which they do). The evolutionary psychology camp just thinks we have much less control over these standards than the postmodernists and feminists assert we do. The advertising industry (and, implicitly, mass media as a whole) has an interest in people spending lots of money on products to make themselves look a certain way. (Perhaps the food industry should advertise with non-anorexics.) Thin is in (though it wasn't even as recently as Marilyn Monroe and Mae West). So voluptuous women at some level fight the herd and the flow and express beauty in their natural body shape. And I think that's my fundamental beauty ideal -- the ability to be beautiful without putting too much effort into it. Because every five minutes that's spent on trying to look a certain way are five minutes that could be better spent geeking out. And I'd like to encourage that behavior. (Yay nerd-sluts!)
Incidentally, as indicated by my icon for this post and the frequent geek references, the most important features for me in a relationship are intellectual- and personality-based. Aside from snuggling ramifications, body shape and size and other appearance factors are about who I like looking at and daydreaming about.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
just some things that came to mind...
Date: 2003-12-16 10:30 pm (UTC)-concerning the EP's, a few years ago there was an interesting article in Discovery magazine about what people find to be beautiful (they were only looking at faces.) The researchers compiled a large amount of head shots from all different ethnicities, face shapes etc. They then used a computer to mesh two faces together, then 3, then 4 etc. Afterwards, they asked people which faces were the most attractive. The researchers found that the more "average" the face (in other words, the more faces that went into the compilation face) scored the highest on the attractiveness meter. They figured this was because people are generally attracted to genetic diversity. ... Um, so I know that doesn't have to do with body shape, but I think it is interesting.
-Another interesting thing that I read somewhere: modern western folks didn't think that tans were so stylish until Coco Channel came back from vacation with one. At that point, a tan went from being something the lower worker class developed because they had to work in the sun, to something that the upper class could use their money to travel and consequently get.
-I think this is tied into our current social ideas of ideal body shape. In our culture where Mickey D's reigns supreme by offering really cheap food to people that can't afford to buy things from Whole
paycheckFoods, the poor are the ones more likely to become overweight. [Incidentally, the Economist has some interesting things to say about obesity and our culture's obsession with junk food in this week's issue.] The rich have extra money to spend on gym/country club memberships and have money to pay babysitters to look after the children while they work out with their personal trainers. They also have the money to spend on fresh nutritious food and the really wealthy have enough to pay chefs to create "delicious and nutritious" meals for them to eat. In this way, the Upper-class (sought after/admired) body type has become thin, while the lower class body type (not sought after or admired) has become pudgy... which is quite the contrary to several hundred years ago when Ruben was painting his voluptuous women because their wealthy circumstances allowed them to eat as much as they pleased. Their pudge was a status symbol which he found quite beautiful.-Also, I just wanted to say thank you for writing this. I think we get blasted with "be thin" everywhere in the media, and it is nice to remember that there are a whole lot of people (besides myself) who think that curves are pretty.