an elegant tango

Throwback in high school.
Tiny little arms.

My whole life I’ve been skinny. Like, get called into the counselor’s office because they think you have an eating disorder skinny. Like, strangers think it’s acceptable to say “eat a sandwich!” instead of “nice to meet you” skinny. Like, eat two Big Macs and large fries and still lose 5 pounds skinny.

I’ve been steadily putting on weight since high school, about 3 pounds per year. I rarely weigh myself and instead focused on taking in as many calories as I could to climb my way out of the “underweight” section on that chart at the doctor’s office. “One day I’ll fill out and be able to sit on hardwood floors,” I told myself.

So you can imagine my surprise when I stepped on the scale a few weeks ago and saw that I’ve gained 15 pounds in about 6 months. I mean, I’ve kind of been noticing some more padding in my belly area as the rest of me has stayed thin. I’ve been kind of proud of my hard-earned fat. But when my sister saw a photo of me and asked if I was “prego,” it dawned on me that I need to regulate how and where I continue to gain my weight.

Men and women are shaped differently, in large part due to fat distribution. Classically, in art and otherwise, women considered to be most beautiful are those with little waists and bigger hips. Science set out to quantify this, and found there is in fact a golden ratio to tell you how hot you are (as if the rest of the world and media didn’t already assume that role).

The results are in and turns out that men find women with waists that are 70% the circumference of their hips to be most attractive. It is thought that this ratio signifies the most fertile women that are best built for carrying and delivering a baby. Makes plenty of sense, right?

Consider evolutionary signals, as discussed in my earlier post stop it, your bib is turning me on. An itty bitty waist and a round thing in your face may often actually signal a fertile woman, but not always. Think of how many women today struggle with infertility, many of them proportioned according to the 70% rule. So is the 70% rule an honest signal of fitness? Has modern medicine and birthing protocols tampered with the honesty of this signal?

You like this, don't you?

There’s a whole field called evolutionary aesthetics, which basically looks into inherited traits that have an effect on the psychological perception other members of a species have of an individual. Why are our lips red? Why do we hate the sight of poop? Why do babies show preference to circles over squares? Why do our brains tend towards things colored with vivid blues and greens?

Since evolutionary aesthetics deals with psychological perceptions throughout the development of a species, over hundreds of thousands of years, it must take into account the changing social environments that affect those psychological perceptions. You see, the perceptions of these traits are not static. For instance, it has been found that men show more preference for larger women when they are hungry. Come back after lunch break, and those same men show subtle preference for smaller women. Should the world fall apart and sink into famine, Vogue will be out of business. Larger women with more resource acquisition abilities will be the hot new things.

I love the elegant tango that happens between natural selection and psychological perception. It’s created the human shape we have now. And the human body may be one of the most inspiring forms, with all of its of curves and colors and lines and fluidity, that our species has recognized yet.

Even if there’s a little bit of it hanging over my jeans right now. The gentle sag of fat over one’s Abercrombie skinny jeans can be inspiring, right?

Oh my god I’m going running right now.