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.
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.
The trouble is, I am not sure what to suggest in place of it.
Suppose it is true that in the days of Rubens men preferred plump women and that today they prefer thin women: Suppose between the plump matrons of Rubens 's paintings and the ' no woman can be too thin ' days of Wallis Simpson, men stopped preferring the fattest or some half-plump ideal and started preferring the thinnest women available. Ronald Fisher 's sexual selection theory suggests one way in which it may have been adaptive for men to like thin women. By preferring a thin female, a human male may have had thin daughters who would have attracted the attention of high-status males because other males also preferred thinness. In other words, even if a thin wife could bear fewer children than a fat one, her daughters would be more likely to marry well, and having married well, to be wealthy enough to rear more of the children they bore. So the man who marries a thin woman may have more grandchildren than the man who marries a fat one. Now imagine that a cultural sexual preference spreads by imitation and that young men learn the equation thin equals beautiful by watching others behave.
That in itself would be adaptive because it would be one way for males to ensure that they did not flout the prevailing fashion (just as females copying each other in mate choice is adaptive in black grouse). Were they to ignore the cultural preference for plump or THE USES OF BEAUTY
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for thin women, they would risk having spinster daughters as surely as a peahen would risk having bachelor sons by choosing a short-tailed mate. In other words, as long as the preference is cultural and the preferred trait is genetic, Fisher 's insight that fashion is despotic still stands.'
I confess, however, that these ideas do not really convince me. If fashions are despotic, they cannot easily be changed. The puzzle is how men stopped liking plump women without depriving themselves of eligible offspring by doing so. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the fashion in men 's preferences for women 's fatness cannot have changed adaptively. Either men ' s preferences shifted spontaneously and for no good reason or men always preferred some ideal shape that was always quite thin: WHY WAISTS MATTER
The solution to this puzzle may lie in the work of an ingenious Indian psychologist named Dev Singh, who now works at the University of Texas in Austin. He observed that women's bodies, unlike men's, go through two remarkable transitions between puberty and middle age: At ten a girl has a figure not unlike what she will have at forty. Then suddenly her vital statistics are transformed: The ratio of her waist to her chest measurement and to her hips shrinks rapidly. By thirty it is rising again as her breasts lose their firmness and her waist its narrowness. That ratio, of waist to breasts and hips, is not only known as the vital statistic but it is also the feature that, with a few brief exceptions, fashion has always emphasized above all else. Bodices, corsets, hoops, bustles, and crinolines existed to make waists look smaller relative to bosom and bottom.
Bras, breast implants, shoulder pads (which make the waist look smaller), and tight belts do the same today.
Singh noticed that however much the weight
bones and high mammary tissue content, while thin waists seem to indicate that these features could not be caused by fat: Singh 's theory is slightly different but intriguingly parallel. He argues that, within reason, a man will find almost any weight of a woman attractive as long as her waist is much thinner than her hips. 18
If that sounds foolish, consider the results of Singh 's experiments. First, he showed' men four versions of the same picture of the midriff of a young woman in shorts. Each picture was subtly touched up to alter slightly the waist-to-hip ratio: 0:6, 0.7, 0:8, and 0:9. Unerringly, men chose the thinnest-waist version as the most attractive: This was no great surprise, but he found a remarkable consistency among his subjects: Next he showed his subjects a range of drawings of female forms, which varied according to their weight and according to their waist- to-hip ratio: He found that a heavy woman with a low ratio of waist to hips was usually preferred to a thin woman
