The Queen - Matt Ridley

A heterosexual man emerges from puberty with more than a general sexual preference for all women: ,He emerges with a distinct notion of beauty and ugliness. He is "stunned " by some women, indifferent to others, and finds others sexually repulsive. Is this, too, something that he acquired by a mixture of genes, hormones, and social pressure? It must be, but the interesting question is how much of each. If social pressure is everything, then the images and lessons we give to the youth of both sexes, through films, books, advertisements, and by example, are crucially important: If not, then the fact that men prefer, say, thin women is fixed by the genes and hormones and not a passing fad.

THE USES OF BEAUTY

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Suppose you were a Martian interested in studying people as William Thorpe studied chaffinches. You want to know how men learn their standards of beauty, so you keep boys in cages. Some you expose to endless films of plump men admiring and being admired by plump women, while thin men and thin women are reviled; others you keep in total ignorance of womanhood so that their existence comes as a shock at the age of twenty.

It is revealing to speculate on what you think the outcome of the Martian 's experiment would be because what follows is an attempt to piece together from much inferior experiments and facts the same result: What kind of woman would the men who had never seen women prefer once they got over the shock of seeing women for the first time? Old ones or young ones, fat ones or thin ones? And would the men reared to believe that fat was beautiful really prefer plump women to skinny models?

Bear in mind the reason we are concentrating on male preferences. As we saw in the last chapter, men care more about the physical appearance of women than vice versa, and for good reason: Youth and health are better clues to women's value as a mate and potential mother than to a man's: Women are not indifferent to youth and health, but they are more concerned than men with other features.

SKINNY WOMEN

But fashions change: If beauty is subject to fashion, however despotic, it can change. Consider a case where the definition of beauty does seem to have changed drastically in recent years: thinness. Wallis Simpson, later the Duchess of 'Windsor, is credited with the remark that awoman "can never be too rich or too thin, "

but even she might be surprised at the emaciated appearance of the average modern model: In the words of Roberta Seid, thinness became a "prejudice" in the 1950s, a " myth" in the 1960s, an

" obsession" in the 1970s, and a "religion" in the 1980s." Tom Wolfe coined the term "social X rays " for New York society women

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who starve themselves into fashionable shape. The weight of the Miss Americas falls steadily year after year. So does that of Playboy centerfolds. Both categories of women are 15 percent lighter than the average for their ages.' Slimming diets fill the newspapers and the wallets of charlatans. Anorexia and bulimia, diseases brought on by excessive dieting, maim and kill young women.

One thing is painfully obvious: There is no preference for the average. Even allowing for the fact that abundant, cheap, refined food makes the average woman much plumper than was normal a millennium or two ago, women must go to extraordinary lengths to achieve the fashionable reedlike shape. Nor has it ever been sensible for men to pick the thinnest woman available: Today, as in the Pleistocene period, that is a sure way to choose the least fertile woman: A woman can be rendered infertile by a body fat content only 10—15 percent below normal: Indeed, one theory is that the widespread obsession of young women with their weight is an evolved strategy to avoid getting pregnant too early or before a man has committed himself to raising a family: But this does not help explain the male preference for skinniness, which seems positively maladaptive:"

If the male preference for thinness is paradoxical, how much more puzzling is the fact that it seems to be new. There is ample evidence from sculpture and painting that Victorian beauties were not especially thin, and from sculpture and painting as far back as the Renaissance that beautiful women were plump women: There are exceptions: Nefertiti 's neck was that of a thin, elegant woman: Botticelli 's Venus was not exactly overweight. And for a time, Victorians worshiped at the shrine of wasp waists, so much so that some women allegedly removed a pair of ribs to make their waists slimmer. Lillie Langtry could enclose her eighteen-inch waist with two hands, but even the slimmest of today 's models are twenty-two inches around the waist. And it is implausible that a Renaissance man would have found them ugly. Yet we need not rely only on our own culture for evidence that plump women can be more attractive than thin ones. There is a willingly expressed preference for plump female bodies among tribal people all over the world, and in many subsistence societies, thin women are shunned: THE USES OF BEAUTY

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As Robert Smuts of the University of Michigan has argued, thinness was once all too common and was a sign of relative poverty: Nowadays, poverty-induced thinness is confined to the Third World: But in the industrialized nations, wealthy women are able to afford a diet low in fat and spend their money on dieting and exercise. Thinness has become what fatness was: a sign of status: Smuts argues that male preferences, keying in on whatever signs of status prevailed, simply switched. They did this presumably by a switch of association. A young man growing up today is bombarded with correlations between thinness and wealth, from the fashion industry in particular. His unconscious mind begins to make the connection during his critical period, and when he is forming his idealized mental preference for a woman, he accordingly makes her slim:'°

STATUS CONSCIOUSNESS

Unfortunately, this theory conflicts directly with the conclusions of the last chapter, so something has to give: It is women, not men, who are supposed to be especially sensitive to the social status of their potential spouses. Sociobiologists argue that the reason men notice women 's looks is not as a proxy for their wealth but as a clue to their reproductive potential: Yet here we have men supposedly using women 's waists as clues to their bank balances and positively panting after infertile emaciates:

Several studies have come to the unambiguous conclusion that beautiful women and rich men end up together far more than vice versa: In one study the physical attractiveness of a woman was a far better predictor of the occupational status of the man she married than her own socioeconomic status, intelligence, or education—a rather surprising fact when you consider how often people marry within their profession, class, and education brackets:" If men are using appearance as a proxy for status, why do they not use knowledge of status itself?

Unlike female thinness, male status symbols are generally

" honest." If they were not, they would not remain status symbols.

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Only the very best con man can fake conspicuous consumption or get away for long with boasts about his prowess or rank. Thinness is altogether trickier because poor, low-status women once found it easier to be thin than rich, high-status women. Even today when poor women can afford only junk food while rich women eat let-tuce, it is hard to argue that every thin woman is rich and every fat one poor. 16

So the argument that links status with skinniness is not persuasive: Skinniness is a very poor clue to wealth, and in any case men are not much interested in women 's status or wealth. Indeed, the argument is circular: Social status and thinness are correlated because of a male preference for thinness. I find the explanation that men have cued in on a woman 's thinness as a clue to her status unconvincing.