What a headline. An interesting study which might indicate where the body image of the hourglass figure comes from....is it biological? Is it society? An interesting take

The study involved men who had been sightless from birth. The idea was that the bombardment of visual media — of models on billboards and actresses on television and porn stars online — which may be so powerful and even dominant in molding desire, couldn’t have had any direct effect on these men, who emerged from the womb into a congenital dark. Would their tastes in women’s bodies match those of men who could see? How would their preferences reflect on the roles of nature and nurture, on the influence of evolution and the impact of experience, in forming our psyches?

Over the past two decades, researchers have been looking at whether cinched yet sumptuous female body shapes, corresponding to low waist-to-hip ratios, are preferred by men across societies and have been favored across time, the idea being that if the answer is yes, evolutionary factors would seem to outweigh culture in determining at least this one aspect of lust. And frequently when scientists have shown simple line drawings of women to men around the world, from Germany to Japan to Guinea-Bissau, the answer has in fact been yes; ratios of 0.7, or sometimes lower, have been rated the most attractive, no matter whether more or less overall flesh is the cultural ideal. A study of Miss Americas from the 1920s to the ’80s and of Playboy centerfolds from the ’50s to 1990 came up with the same result; the chosen women became thinner over the decades, but their proportions stayed constant, right around 0.7. The evolutionary explanations for these findings share the logic that lower ratios somehow signaled ancestral men that a woman would produce more or fitter offspring, and the argument of one recent study, built on data from several thousand women and children, is that mothers with lower ratios tend to produce smarter kids, because, the researchers suggest after controlling for other factors, certain fatty acids in a woman’s hip padding, delivered in the womb and through breast-feeding, are beneficial to the development of a baby’s brain, while belly fat is detrimental.

with some statistically insignificant variation, the scores of the blind matched those of the sighted. Both groups preferred the more pronounced sweep from waist to hip.

It is not as clear cut as the copied parts of this article seem to suggest. Oh and, it was about hip to waist ratio not boob size....and I still won't change the headline.


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