The Opinionated Bastard

My wife gets a Victoria’s Secret catalog about once/week. I look at them for fun sometimes. (I’m perfectly willing to admit I like looking at scantily clad women. Duh.) Overall though, I mostly just ignore them. They’re geared towards women, and selling to women, so they’re only mildly interesting.

Last month a catalog from Playboy showed up for Valentine’s Day. I couldn’t help myself I picked up the catalog and read every page. Then it struck me. The Victoria’s Secret catalog is geared towards women, and it’s filled with, let’s face it, skinny-ass stick figures. The message on every page of the Victoria’s Secret catalog is “spend $30 on this piece of lace, and you can look like this”.

The Playboy catalog is geared towards men. Its message is, “spend $10 on this piece of cotton, and your wife can look like this”. In fact, their catalog even says that!

The catalogs sound similar but the key is that the pictures are different. The women in Victoria’s Secret are skinny. The women in Playboy aren’t, rather the women in Playboy are well, Bodacious, or if you’re a traditionalist, voluptuous. So you can see what I mean, here are two images from their respective websites:

Victoria, the anorexia victim on the left, has no butt. The Playgirl, on the other hand, not only does she have a butt, but hers tells you to kiss it, which (blush) sounds kind of fun.

Now why am I blathering on about all this? Because it occurred to me that for all the things about unhealthy body images I hear from feminists, very little of that has to do with men. Men like looking at women, naked, scantily clad, fully clothed, whatever, but we don’t really like women who look like fashion models in real life. We like women who look healthy and fun. The woman on the left? She doesn’t look healthy to me, and she doesn’t look fun. The woman on the right? She looks healthy and fun.

Both scientists and art historians have noticed this as well. In the 17th century, this was considered the height of sexy:

Peter Paul Rubens, the Three Graces, 1639

Even though these women look like every woman I’ve ever slept with, they probably would no longer meet the modern standards of beauty. What’s changed? We have. In various studies by sociologists, when asked to choose the most beautiful images out of hundreds of photographs, both men and women chose the photos of the opposite sex they felt most reflected health. In other studies, when asked to choose between specific facial features (eyes, noses, chins, etc.), both men and women chose the facial features that were actually the most common: they chose the average nose, the average eye shape, the average chin.

Beauty, it seems, is being healthy and average looking. No great mystery really. Both men and women are looking for mates, right? So they want good genes, which ultimately means looking healthy and “average” looking. Since most of us don’t have all of the “average” facial features, our standard of beauty is the few members of us that managed to get all of those average features at the same time.

Applying this to the painting above, in the world of the 17th century even the wealthy didn’t always get enough to eat. Children often didn’t live to adulthood, and birth control was more difficult. So in that world the Rubenesqe women above would look healthy and fertile, and by that world’s standards, sexy. In fact, the clothing of that period would actually exaggerate a woman’s hips, because being healthy was associated with having wide hips because so many women would die in childbirth.

In the 21st century, children live longer so we aren’t forced by that to have so many of them. Women also no longer die in childbirth on a regular basis. The end result is that we associate health with being athletic. When it comes to measuring the opposite sex, while the pictures of our standards of beauty have changed, the underlying basis, good health and good genes has not. Which makes sense, because people haven’t changed that much between the 17th and 21st century.

In the present, when it comes to the same sex though, it seems we disagree. The women and mostly gay men who control the fashion industry have settled on a standard of female beauty that to my eye makes the women look diseased. For a long time, I figured it was just my particular taste in women. Judging by the catalog I got from Playboy though, it seems I’m not alone, that men in general agree with me: we like women with a little meat on their bones. Because ultimately, we like healthy women not anorexic women.

In fact, it’s really obvious when I think about it. The sexual characteristics that I most notice on women are the sexual characteristics that are different between men and women. Women have boobs (duh) but they also have hips! And curves! Wonderful curves! Women with boyish hips don’t seem as attractive to me, but if a woman were obviously healthy, I probably wouldn’t notice because different people have different body types and what’s healthy on one person is unhealthy on another. Healthy and Fun, that’s what I look for.

So if you’re a woman, and you want to see what men consider beauty, don’t buy Cosmo or Vogue, buy yourself a copy of Playboy. You’ll see lots of women with real hips, and real smiles. Healthy and Fun.

Don’t complain to me about the fashion industries beauty standard though. As a heterosexual male, that has nothing to do with me. I like hips. As far as the standard body image goes, to be honest, I don’t even like it when women wear high heels, because then I have to listen to them complain about their feet hurting when they could have been having fun dancing.

Healthy and Fun Yes! Anorexic with sore feet, No!