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Profiles in History
“Our brains are hardwired. The cortex in the back of our brains scans the environment looking for fertile mates.”
—Louann Brizendine, M.D., author, The Female Brain
If you believe the attractiveness of a slender body and especially a flat abdomen are a recent Western, industrialized-countries phenomenon, history will prove you wrong. In cultures around the world and across the millennia, a slender middle as the hallmark of health, vigor, and beauty has nearly always headed the list of desirable physical attributes in a mate.
Take, for example, Queen Hatshepsut, fifth pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty of Egypt and the most powerful woman in her world. She died at age 50 from a ruptured tooth abscess, an ignominious end to be sure. That notwithstanding, as she was borne to her grave a hoary, desiccated corpse, swaddled in folds of her own fat, her funeral procession passed myriad statuary and glyphs representing her, not as she was but as she wished to be: young, sleek, and of slender silhouette. Modern analysis of her mummified remains, however, tells us such was not the case. Middle age had caught up to the queen. It appears that along with being quite obese, she had wretched teeth, bones riddled with tumors, and may have suffered from diabetes as well. Yet during her lifetime and for all the many centuries since her death, her svelte form in statues and paintings belied the middle-aged sprawl of the real Hatshepsut.
In 1991, feminist Naomi Wolf opined, “Beauty is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact.” In other words, Ms. Wolf views our opinion of beauty as being based not on any innate or inborn sense of what is attractive, but as a product of our cultural indoctrination. We think a pretty face is pretty or a flat belly is attractive for no other reason than that’s the way we’ve been programmed to think by the society in which we live. The covers of Playboy, Playgirl, Vogue, and Cosmopolitan, she claims, set our standards for attractiveness, not the reverse. According to Wolf and others of her opinion, there is no universal standard for human beauty. Were we not programmed by advertisers and the entertainment industry, we would find a fat man or woman just as attractive and desirable as a thin one.
We disagree.
Years of serious scientific study, across numerous disciplines, prove otherwise. Our attraction to a pretty face and a flat belly is in our genes and is an atavistic throwback to a time when such features represented health and the ability to reproduce—important requirements in the selection of a mate. As Harvard Professor Deirdre Barrett puts it, these deep-seated universal standards of beauty “reflect our evolutionary need to estimate the health of others from their physical characteristics.”
It’s not our cultural programming that sets our standards for beauty; it is our instinct.
As recently as seventy-five years ago there were no reliable antibiotics available to fight bacterial infections and absolutely nothing to deal with myriad other infectious agents to which we humans fall prey. Many diseases common to our great-grandparents’ generation and before are virtually never seen now. And many of these diseases left disfiguring marks on their victims. For instance, it was common in those days to see people with terrible scarring from smallpox, along with ringworms and running sores from other skin infections. The peaches-and-cream complexions of persons of the opposite sex advertised their health. Who wouldn’t be more attracted to someone with smooth, unblemished skin? Rickets and other diseases struck their marks on the bones, leaving their victims with obvious physical deformities. Who in choosing a mate wouldn’t be more attracted to someone with a symmetrical physique and straight posture? And women who were youthful and flat of belly were more fertile and therefore more attractive as mates. This all sounds cruel, but unfortunately biology is cruel. Our ideas of beauty are not driven by Madison Avenue, but by the microchip in our DNA, placed there by Mother Nature using her most indispensable tool: natural selection.
But is Mother Nature’s handiwork accurate? Does it apply today? Or is it an artifact of evolution like the vestigial tails on some apes? We would argue that it is accurate. At least the part that makes us perceive a thin waist as more desirable than a thick one.
Our hard-wiring compels us to be drawn to potential mates with slender midsections because we are drawn to health. Although we may not perceive it at a conscious level, at the DNA level we want to mix our genes with those of someone who is healthy. That innate desire translates to our brains’ singling out those with narrow waists and deeming them attractive. And with good reason. As it turns out, those flat abdomens usually reside on healthy people.
For over a century scientists have known that the forces of natural selection have molded our bones, muscles, organs, biochemistry, and physiology to provide optimal health under our evolutionary circumstances. Those who didn’t adapt died off. Those who made the cut are the ancestors of we who are alive today. About forty years ago researchers started applying the laws of natural selection, not just to physical adaptations, but to mental adaptations as well. Evolutionary psychologists realized that animals born with instinctive fears—for example, fear of falling or fear of snakes or fear of the dark—had a greater likelihood of surviving and passing on those inbred fears to their progeny. In the same way, desires were genetically hardwired. Those who developed the instinct to search for mates using looks and/or body size and shape as indicators of good reproductive health were more likely to populate the world with their offspring who carried these same genes.
Dr. Donald Symons, one of the founders of evolutionary psychology, opines that “the tendencies to find healthy people and young women attractive are relatively ‘innate’ because they are universally associated with reproductive value.” And he notes “males should be attracted most strongly by females of 23–28 years, since they are most likely to produce a viable infant.” It so happens that healthy women between the ages of 23 and 28 years old have flat abdomens and waist-to-hip ratios (WHR, or the waist circumference divided by the hip circumference) of about 0.7. A survey looking back at all the Miss Americas for the past nine decades shows their waist-to-hip ratios have been pretty much the same from the 1920s to the 2000s, averaging about 0.7. Although these young women have varied in weight and height over the years, the WHR has remained constant.
But it’s not just young American pageant contestants who are idealized as the paragons of youthful good looks and health. Across the world and across multiple cultures, the small waist and the low WHR are associated with beauty. (In fact, the WHRs of Playboy centerfolds and Miss Hong Kong have each tracked precisely in that range since 1987.) A number of researchers throughout the world have investigated numerous societies, contemporary and ancient, and found that a small WHR is desirable to members of the opposite sex across both time and culture. According to one of the leading investigators in the field “waist size is the only scientifically documented visible body part that conveys reliable information about reproductive age, sex hormone profile and risk for major diseases.”
Some physical characteristics or manifestations of disease are pretty obvious. Take the sixteenth-century reformer and author Ulrich von Hutten’s description of the signs and symptoms of syphilis, a disease called the “Great Pox” and common to his age: “Boils that stood out like Acorns, from whence issued such filthy stinking Matter, that whosoever came within the Scent, believed himself infected. The Colour of these was of a dark Green and the very Aspect as shocking as the pain itself, which yet was as if the Sick had Laid upon a fire.” This gruesome picture was nature’s not so subtle way of alerting the dating population that one so afflicted probably wasn’t the best mate material. Other signs are not so obvious. At least not on a conscious level.
The WHR is a subtle sign consciously, maybe, but a strong sign at the subconscious or innate level. Why? Probably because there is a link forged by eons of natural selection between our subconscious sense of another’s health and that person’s WHR. The correlation between WHR and reproductive health and overall healthiness is so precise that even tiny variations in this measurement herald significant changes in multiple components of fitness.
For example, multiple autopsy studies on young women who died from nonnatural causes show a significant increase in latent disease when WHR increases above 0.8. The victims were unaware they were so afflicted because the disease processes weren’t far enough along to cause symptoms, but they were present in the early stages. To show just how subtle this change is, a slender young woman with a 22.5-inch waist and a 32-inch hip circumference and a 0.7 WHR would have to increase her waist circumference to only 25 inches, a mere 2.5 inch increase (which represents in increase of only 3?4 inch from front to back) to increase her WHR to 0.8 and increase her chances of disease.
Sex hormones drive the distribution of fat to and from various anatomical areas. Prior to puberty women have WHRs that are about the same as young males, and as they reach menopause, they once again approach the male WHR range (around 0.9). During their fertile years estrogen inhibits the deposition of fat in the abdominal area and shifts it to the hips and t...
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