Healthbolt

40 opinions for A Short History of The “Ideal” Female Body

• mam885
  Dec 27, 2006 at 3:53 pm

  I’ve read in a couple very reliable sources (women’s fitness magazines) that Monroe’s “size 14″ is comparable to a size 8 today, due to vanity sizing and such.

• Crumb Bum
  Jan 5, 2007 at 6:14 pm

  For a short history, yours seems to be quite revisionist. The women shown in the first two paintings aren’t typical ideal women from the 1600’s & 1800’s at all, my guess is you simply chose them to illustrate your rather flimsy “point”.

  Since when does boingboing link pages with less merit than a bad grade school essay?

• cynot3
  Jan 5, 2007 at 6:51 pm

  I’m going to have to go ahead and say HIGHLY doubtful.
  First of all, you have no proof on whether the Rubens and Renoir represent “ideal” female form of the time, or if they were merely the only women they were able to get to pose nude.
  Second, you COMPLETELY skipped the 30’s and 40’s and only giving one example for every other decade.
  Last, If you look at examples that actually represent the ideal female form to males (pornography), from the 50’s on to present day the “ideal” female form has pretty much stayed the same.. curves and breasts. If you’re talking the ideal female form to females (fashion magazines) then you’ll find the slender, slim, stupid skinny sharp feature girls pretty much from the 70’s on to present day. Since when was Karen Carpenter’s anorexia EVER considered an ideal female form by anyone? I know more guys that would have chewed off their own leg to sleep with a Russ Meyer girl or Farah Fawcett. I’ve never heard of anyone that thought Karen Carpenter was hot, female or male.

  I am going to have to say this is probably one of the most disappointing articles/websites boingboing has ever linked to

• thopper23
  Jan 5, 2007 at 7:33 pm

  Okay…

  I am going to give a small nod to the fact that you needed to have done more homework on this issue. It also would have been nice if you had included multiple examples for a single time period, but you have gotten some unjustified negativity thrown at you…

  CrumbBun and Cynot3…BoingBoing is a wonderful site (and my homepage), but there’s no need to make this blogger feel unworthy of attention. The subject matter is what’s key here. Most blogs are from 13-year-old kids who can’t get over being emo long enough to post anything but boring poetry and pictures of their friends in the cafeteria. This is a bit more thought out than alot of the wasteland that comprises the internet.

  BoingBoing is NOT the pinnacle of information, but just a pool of interesting web savvy.

• cycle23
  Jan 5, 2007 at 8:04 pm

  Ya know, the general point will be new to some girls and boys out there. I do think there’s something to be said for the notion that women buy into the skinny waif a bit more than men as a response to the perception that obese women are not attractive to men. I can’t say I’ve avoided having a bit of a negative response to obese women, at least when it comes to attraction. However, I love fat people, my data is 330 lbs and a great guy. My kids grandma is pretty darn big and one of my favorite people (well, was… her affinity for Bush just because of his Christian leanings sort of killed it for me), but I have a deepset fear that I could marry someone and later find myself not attracted to them if they become obese. Usually the voice of reason kicks in and says by that time, it should be the sort of relationship where that wouldn’t be a concern for me, or it probably wasn’t the right relationship anyhow.

  I think the first two posts are so virulent they almost smack of coming from the pro-anorexia crowd that does in fact exist these days.

  My grandfather was an American POW in Japan and was super skinny from then until he died. I weighed 205 when I was 19 and 135 when I was 21, and I’m male (and heterosexual no less, and not even metro! frikking ex-redneck for crying out loud!), but now I am 35 and weigh a good 195 with a good mix of fat and muscle and if I didn’t drink beer I swear I’d have abs. I think when my daughter was born I just decided to be normal.

  But that’s not at all why I wrote, it’s this google ad that showed up:

  “HATE YOUR BELLY FAT?
  Lose 1 jean size very 7 days! We guarantee it. Or it’s free.”

  Oh Google, your zen-like way of doing no evil is awe inspiring.

• plandis
  Jan 5, 2007 at 8:07 pm

  Just because the author used only two examples of the weight of women in the 1600 and 1800 doesn’t mean that was the artists preference. Being thin during that time was a sign of poverty. It meant you didn’t have enough to eat or the nutrients to gain and maintain weight. Just as in that time as well women were ideally never tanned. If a woman was tan it meant she was also poor. She worked in the fields. She didn’t have servants to care for her SHE was the caregiver.

  In addition I believe the author’s use of Karen Carpenter and her Anorexia is simply to show how women and society has grown towards women should be these thin, whisper of a being. Anorexia is one of the biggest problems facing young girls today. There are advocates and websites devoted to advocacy of it.

• wc444
  Jan 6, 2007 at 6:58 am

  I’m not sure who you consulted regarding the “ideal” appearance of modern day women, but I don’t know any man, including myself, who would consider the voluptuous curves of women such as Scarlett Johanssen or Beyonce Knowles as anything less than ideal.

• Wade
  Jan 6, 2007 at 7:57 am

  Here, here, wc444. I prefer the voluptuous over the waif any day.

  Oh, and to Crumb Bum and cynot3, I really appreciate the comments! Please keep in mind that this I am a blogger not a scientist and this is one post, not a thesis. My goal here is to make people think about the images they are presented with daily. (Seems like it’s working.)

• nex
  Jan 6, 2007 at 10:46 am

  Wade, that’s a neat goal, but I’m not sure whether it makes people think in a meaningful way. I think it’s OK to post some wild hypothesis without stating how little you actually know about the topic. But when you really do that, you should come up with an original hypothesis, so that something new is brought to the discussion, instead of mindlessly repeating a rather unsubstantiated commonplace.

  That aside, I have a question: Are you saying that anorexic women are defenseless, helpless victims of people who have the impertinence to publicly admit that they prefer thinner figures to heavier ones, and should therefore be compared to Nazi slave drivers?

• Wade
  Jan 6, 2007 at 11:37 am

  “That aside, I have a question: Are you saying that anorexic [sic] women are defenseless, helpless victims of people who have the impertinence to publicly admit that they prefer thinner figures to heavier ones, and should therefore be compared to Nazi slave drivers?”

  I mainly think that an onslaught of images such as the ones we face everyday distort our view of reality to the point where we think (on some level) that a model who is easily comparable to a victim of starvation and torture is somehow desirable instead off-putting. Which is weird.

  As far as the victimization of anorectics goes, it’s a mental disorder. The prevalence of images like the ones I posted does ad fuel to that fire or maybe even be the cause.

  I think that it’s fine to publicly announce what sort of figure you prefer. In fact, I think that’s it’s such a fine thing to do that I announced it on this site (with this very post) and I’m also going so far as to provide you with a medium to respond in kind.

• nex
  Jan 6, 2007 at 1:24 pm

  Thanks for the clarification; even though I expected that this was the intention behind the comparison in your post, I kind of had to see you state yourself that you didn’t mean to be tasteless or trivialise the Holocaust.

  I agree that the media present a biased, distorted view of reality. But this is a matter of course, almost a necessity, we won’t get rid of that anyways. For example, I would love to see people who are annoyed by the flood of thin models (be it real or imagined) stop complaining and get creative themselves, e.g. take pictures of beautiful big women and publish them. However, they won’t get contracted for advertisements for a big corporation, as long as the respective marketing department finds that thin models sell more product.

  The most important defense has to be education. With regard to supermodels, it’s nice to know how much photoshopping is going on. With regard to reports from a war, it’s nice to know how embedded journalists are forced to present their own side in a positive light. This ties in nicely with the DIY-approach I mentioned above, citizen journalism FTW!

  Lastly, let’s not forget that rare things are more valuable, and that a person of your preferred sex might look more interesting, more desireable (you always want what you don’t have, the grass on the other side is always greener …), if he/she has a somewhat uncommon quality. Maybe in Rubens’ society, overweight women were as exotic as underweight ones are in ours?

  This question is important, because it hints at a self-regulating effect on what’s considered attractive, pretty much the opposite of doomsaying along the lines of “they’re getting thinner and thinner until they starve to death!”

• bollocks
  Jan 6, 2007 at 6:24 pm

  “Maybe in Rubens’ society, overweight women were as exotic as underweight ones are in ours?”

  Duh. You have it the wrong way round. First off, the women you call ‘overweight’ weren’t, at least for Rubens; and the ones you call underweight aren’t, for fashion photographers. For both, they are the norm.

  The point is they both depict a *desired* norm. But *whose* norm? Frankly it seems to me that the fashion industry today portray gamine women as sex symbols, when they resemble skinny young men more than voluptuous women. Given the apparent dominance of gay men in todays fashion industry, you have to ask: is the image of attractive womanhood being protrayed by the fashion industry what straight men are attracted to at all? Are they just for men whose interest is more in the clothes than the woman?

  Don’t get me wrong, that’s fair enough, and I don’t mind gay/lesbian presence in the media at all, the bizarre thing here is that he media continually potrays stick-thin ’supermodels’ as fanciable by straight men, when I’ve never met a straight man who found any of them attractive. WTF? (err….I mean, whats this cognitive dissonance all about?)

  Its entirely possible that in Rubens era, societal homophobia meant that there were fewer ‘out’ gays in the arts and that this meant that the desired body shape was child-bearing rather than clothes-wearing. Go on, someone write a masters thesis on this.

  – ’stirrer’

• bricology
  Jan 6, 2007 at 10:56 pm

  Some very interesting points raised above.

  It should be remembered that Rubens was essentially a commission artist; he was court painter to the Flemish governors, did commissions for the French, Spanish, Italian, Hapsburg and other courts, so he primarily painted the aristocracy. He was in his fifties when he painted “The Three Graces”, and one of the models for it was his 16 year-old bride, so we know that at least some of the form of the women depicted in it is based upon actual woman’s bodies. But women of means were much more likely to be heavier, since food wasn’t plentiful for the poor; being fleshy wasn’t just a status symbol of the time, it was also the result of having access to plenty of food and the sedentary lifestyles of the wealthy. That physical type was also anything but healthy, with diets that were primarily made up of starches, fatty meats, dairy and a few overcooked vegetables; life expectancy was around 35 years. There was no shortage of thin women at the time; they simply weren’t in a position to commission their portraits. But the painters of scenes of common people show many women who aren’t all that “Rubenesque” (c.f. Vermeer).

  I think the Twiggy phenomenon is far more related to her having a boyish figure than an “underweight” female figure. Androgyny was all the rage in fashion in that era, so her figure was perfect for the clothing. I don’t know that designers or photographers being gay has anything to do with it, though. For example, two of the main creators of the androgynous look were Andre Courreges (who is straight) and Mary Quant. I don’t think they had any notion of making women into boys (although it might be argued that they wanted to make both genders into children). And it’s worth noting that the main reason that fashion models are preferred to be the two main ways that they’re viewed (photographs and elevated runways) both make them look heavier, so choosing thinner models counteracts that optical effect.

  A few people here have suggested that men don’t find thin women as attractive as fuller-figured ones. Well, I guess that makes me atypical, since I like thin women just fine, and find them slightly more attractive than their opposites. But it’s a mistake to presume that all women who are thinner are so as a result of anorexia, accepting some sort of negative body image from the media or other external reasons. Some women are simply genetically predisposed to be thinner, just as are some men. I think that the public opinion pendulum has been pushed so far in the direction of promoting “healthy body self-images” that it has given thinner women the label of “freaks”. The majority of women tend to the opposite direction, and constituting the majority in opinion and market share, they have declared that it is they who are the norm; they are the healthy type. Of course, that flies in the face of medical experience that shows that women who are even modestly overweight face significantly higher health risks.

• nex
  Jan 6, 2007 at 11:41 pm

  I had written:
  “Maybe in Rubens’ society, overweight women were as exotic as underweight ones are in ours?”

  bollocks replied:
  “Duh. You have it the wrong way round. First off, the women you call ‘overweight’ weren’t, at least for Rubens; and the ones you call underweight aren’t, for fashion photographers. For both, they are the norm.”

  Your comments (i.e. the rest of your posting) may have some merit, and thanks for entering the discussion, but the first thing I notice about the paragraph quoted here is that as a reply to my hypothesis, it is beside the point.

  Firstly, I wasn’t talking about the preferences of Rubens or photographers in particular, but about preferences of their respective societies in general. Secondly, I was not comparing apples to oranges. When I said “overweight” and “underweight”, I really meant just that. With the definitions of these terms of course based on state-of-the-art medical findings, not on the personal opinions of some weirdo artists.

  I’m also confused — if I had it backwards, what would be the ‘forwards’ version? (In case this isn’t clear: I’m asking because I’m genuinely intrigued and interested, I don’t mean to be dismissive!)

• avedonsghost
  Jan 7, 2007 at 8:08 am

  Speaking as a fashion photographer, I will now reveal a closely guarded secret:
  We’re trying to sell clothes here. A skinny model draws attention to the gear she’s wearing.
  Fashion models have unusual physiques - often they’re over 5′ 10″, often they’re in their teens (lots start at 14), but an anorexic model would not be acceptable on the runway anymore than someone with leprosy!
  So, while most of them are slender, with little fat or muscle mass, they’re not unhealthy - Twiggy’s still working and looking good in her 50s - what kills models often times is what goes up their nose, rather than not in their mouths…..
  There’s also a confusion here between fashion models and sex symbols - girls that sell to men, with figures like Pam Anderson - the ones that you see in beer and pick-up truck ads - that’s what Marilyn Monroe was, but her contempory fashion models were thin, as were those back as far as the 20s, when photos overtook drawings as the main means of marketing clothes.

• opiper
  Jan 7, 2007 at 1:44 pm

  I think the crux of the issue is that well-to-do women have always been considered most attractive and that well-to-do-ness has been demonstrated differently over time.

  As many have commented, Ruben painted the aristocracy whose weight reflected their wealth. Back then, resources were more scarce (than a drive-up window) and not as energy rich (as a supersized Big Mac meal). People without servants had to work hard to bring food to their tables, burning valuable energy, whereas the rich could be lazy and out of shape.

  Today however, the affluent use their wealth to pay for fancy diets, gym memberships, exercise equipment, personal trainers and chefs. Because today thinner is harder to acheive, it is the ideal. In this age of convenient calories, its too easy to over-eat and under-exercise - especially if you’re poor (in the US) - so like good American’s we reward overcoming odds and love skinny people. Figures, huh?

• Abie
  Jan 11, 2007 at 9:49 pm

  Just bear in mind that Twiggy was 14 at the time her modeling career started , so “woman ” might be to strong a word…

  I am curious to know how much of this race for thinness is due to the stardom of fashion model (K.Moss comes to mind ) as opposed to other stars (Beyoncé…).
  Fashion designer want nice-faced walking coathangers because the flatter the easier to make the clothes fall nicely.
  It is a complete artefact, and I think fashion magazine bear a share a responsability in this.

  It is interesting to take a lok at mashion drawings (they were used in fashion magazine as late as the ‘60) : they are also completely unrealisic for the average woman ( ludicrously thin waists and small feet) . It would be interesting to know if those images were considered goals by women of the time.

  Sorry for thinking aloud, but this is a complex problem

• Jason Giddings
  Jul 22, 2007 at 1:42 pm

  I agree with “avedonsghost” , my girlfriend has a naturally modelesque twig figure, sharp features, 33 years old and eats like a hog. she is not unhealthy, those models on the cocaine diet are the ones endangering themselves. sorry to all the jealous haters of women with this phenome type, you just have to live with it instead of trying to revamp the publics perception to allow obesity to become the appreciated norm. if you’re having a problem putting down the philly cheese steak, don’t blame the skinny girl, its your fault.

  and i read some post earlier referring to it as an American problem. keep your self loathing to yourself, Europe is full of cheese gorging, bread sutffing obese people too. (and worse, they wear thongs to the beach)

• MoMo Dee
  Aug 19, 2007 at 9:07 am

  I am heartened to hear the opinions of males here who state that they like a larger, softer, and curvier female body. We need guys like this to speak very loudly and especially to advertisers about what they want to see. Advertisers listen when you “vote” with your wallet. Tell them that these bony woman aren’t attractive, that you want to see curvier, more fertile and female women! Very underweight also equals infertile as starving girls don’t get their periods and their bodies are not adequate to sustain the life of a baby. You don’t have to find morbidly obese women attractive to admit that you like bigger women. I think lots of people are afraid that if they say give us larger women they will end up with women who are unhealthfully large. The extremes are not supposed to be ideals. How about a happy medium where women can be 130, 150 pounds and be considered ideal? That’s NOT morbidly obese, nor is it underweight.

• blueheat
  Aug 21, 2007 at 6:23 pm

  @MoMo Dee: The thing is that most extremely thin looking women tend to be in fashion mags selling handbags to women. Straight guys don’t care about fashion, the industry is pretty much run by women and gay men.

  If you want to see what guys consider good looking pick up a copy of a mens magazine like maxim and look at the women inside. (exclude the ones who are famous). The ideal is still relatively slim but with nice curvy bodies unlike the fashion models who look like they have the tall, lanky bodies of teenage boys.

  —-

  Anyways contrary to what this article would have you believe the feminine ideal (or the masculine ideal for that matter).

  The depictions of Aphrodite / Venus, the goddess of love in greco-roman mythology. Have been fairly consistent over time from ancient marble statues, to botticelli’s ‘birth of venus’.

  It is also fairly valid across cultures you can look at 12th century Chola Bronzes of the Hindu godess Lakshmi. (very exxagerated, unrealistic feminine form yet asthetically appealing)

  The only exception I can think of are the stone age ‘Hottentot Venus’ carvings that look like they have steatopygia. Not normally found in modern women.

• Darth Vader
  Oct 28, 2007 at 3:50 am

  Let’s just go back to rubenesque era,and forget about this disgraceful times in which non-fertility is glorified.

• Muffin
  Nov 28, 2007 at 12:00 pm

  Wow Jason,
  What a pleasant person you must be. I am sure that your girlfriend is beautiful and adores you since you are such a kind person.

  On the other hand, I wonder if you have confused overweight with women who don’t have rail-thin bodies and never will. I think the point is that you must live with your body type no matter what is is.

  But in about two paragraphs, I learned more about you than I ever wanted to know. I wish your girlfriend good luck.

• Shergelmtwege
  Dec 17, 2007 at 11:58 am

  I’d prefer reading in my native language, because my knowledge of your languange is no so well. But it was interesting! Look for some my links:

• Penny
  Dec 17, 2007 at 4:51 pm

  Wow this was very interesting, couldn’t understand most of it though. I have to say well done, everyone knows the mass media tells everyone what to think, it does here anyway, so all those pictures you got are right on. I LOVE the picture comparing the model with the concentration victim! No wonder so many women these days have eating disorders.

• Alphabetix
  Jan 3, 2008 at 1:09 pm

  Gross, of course.

• Lucy
  Jan 11, 2008 at 3:03 pm

  Please check out the book Waistland. It covers many of the myths we perpetuate about ideal body types. Yes, the ideal has always been healthy and Marilyn Monroe was the ideal, but her dress sizes ranged from 6-8 in the 1950s (according the Christie’s catalogue) which, by today’s vanity sizing standards, is much smaller (and getting smaller every year. MM was a fitness enthusiast.

• Steve
  Jan 19, 2008 at 9:43 am

  I have a few issues with this list:

  - There is a difference (that this list ignores) in the ideal female body from the perspectives of men and women. You need only look at the covers of men’s magazines and women’s magazines to see this. The female ideal for men tends to be slim but curvy, overtly sexual with plenty of tits and ass, whereas women’s tends to be slim and waifish and non-sexual. Women’s ideals also tend to follow fashion. Straight men don’t care about fashion. This list seems very much weighted toward the female/fashion side of things.

  - You use Ruben’s paintings as your old example, but how can you be sure that that was the general ideal at the time. After all Rubens was just one artist. If you were to look at the art community today by going on deviantart.com and typing in the relevant keywords you would find that are are thousands of artists who paint voluptuous, “rubenesque” women today. Probably far more than did in Ruben’s day.

  - You say Marylin Monroe was a size 14. Though I don’t know that much about women’s dress sizes, I do know that they change a lot over time and a size 14 of the 1950s is not the same as a size 14 of today.

  - For your modern example you’ve used an underweight fashion model, but (going back to my first point) this is only really the case amongst women (and gay men I might add) in the fashion industry. The ideal for straight men is usually slim and curvy or slim and stacked as they say, eg. famous actresses and singers like Scarlett Johansson, Beyonce Knowles and Jennifer Lopez and glamour models like Kelly Brook and Lucy Pinder (though all these women are still quite skinny, I myself prefer a more voluptous woman, they are all more healthy and curvaceous than fashion models). Yet instead of these obvious examples you’ve used an obscure picture of an obscure model from (in men’s eyes) an obscure industry. It seems like a classic case of ignoring the facts because they don’t quite fit into the point your trying to make.

• Suzann
  Mar 1, 2008 at 4:12 pm

  I agree with Darth Vadar - let’s go back to Rubens!

• Cait
  Jul 16, 2008 at 8:24 am

  I think models are too thin nowadays.

  I am a 16 year old girl who is a size eight and i would love to put on some weight to be honest! I would love some curves & i don’t understand why models need to be so thin & look underweight and ill as their are very few ‘real’ women who look like that.

  Saying that i don’t like the increase in obesity, overweight people etc but i think people should always use thier bmi because i dont think you can say oh size twelves the ideal size, or size eights the ideal size because if your tall and a size six or eight then you are underweight as your bmi wouldnt be healthy.

  i am 5ft one and a size six/eight and would love to have a but more as although my bmi is supposedly in the ideal weight i would love some more curves :)

  ok now im repeating points… um basically i think this website/blog thing points out a valid problem in our society nowaday and this is why so many young girls my age have bulimia or anorexia. I had a friend with anorexia or close to it and it was so sad to watch her tell me shes fat when she was so beautiful! And then to watch her lose weight like that?

  all because of magazines and catwalk models. This also links to the problem of magazines always editing their pictures and even models dont look as perfect as they appear in photoshoots as all pictures are actually touched up which is ridiculous which means girls and women all over the world feel that they should look like someone who doesnt exist! Fell that thye should have a body which actually no-one has!

  Overall i think we should have ‘real’ women in magazines and modelling different size clothes so that all women have a role model.

• This needs repeating
  Aug 14, 2008 at 5:30 am

  Marilyn Monroe’s size 14 isn’t comparable to today’s size 14!!!! Women weren’t as fat back then, her size 14 is closer to size 8 nowadays. Women are fatter on average now, so retailers bumped up the sizing to not hurt their feelings and play to their emotions (which makes females more likely to purchase). Let’s stop trying to make everyone feel good through lies. If you’re fat and you like it–good, but don’t put Marilyn Monroe in the same fat category.

• Sarah
  Aug 24, 2008 at 10:37 pm

  I would say the ideal body type, is a healthy body.

  …No need to hate on anyone, frig. As someone who is thin, (not a “real” woman, ahem…) I hear a lot of slack about how it’s “actually not ideal” from people who are not that body type, just because it is the trendy one.

  Psh, fuck you guys, I am ideal! I’m healthy and happy. And I can’t wait to make beautiful babies! Haha.

  Cheers to the little, the big, and all the in between, keep it healthy ladies and you are the ideal! You’re all beautiful.

  Appreciate them all folks, they are all beautiful.

  Peace

• cecil
  Aug 26, 2008 at 10:49 pm

  so how come u mkay heads are very thin mkay
  mkay flick titty mkay

• cecil
  Aug 26, 2008 at 10:52 pm

  u kno wat sarah im sick of u complaining mate
  just get over it and eat some cake
  coz u kno y fat kids r fat
  itz coz they like cake
  i just plain think u r a jerk sarah lol lol rofl lol lmao
  jerk mkay mkay flick titty mkayyyyyyyyyy

• anti sarah
  Sep 30, 2008 at 9:08 pm

  sarah is stupiiiiiiiddddddd

• anti sarah
  Sep 30, 2008 at 9:08 pm

  IDIOT

• anti sarah
  Sep 30, 2008 at 9:10 pm

  just kidn ya sara.. piz 4 u 2

• anti sarah
  Sep 30, 2008 at 9:11 pm

  jajajajajajajaja LOL LOL LOL LOL IMAO IMAO MKAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! COZ SARAH IS GOOD

• anti sarah
  Sep 30, 2008 at 9:12 pm

  look at my webpage… click at my name

• anti sarah
  Sep 30, 2008 at 9:13 pm

  and at this one

• Hmmm
  Oct 1, 2008 at 12:53 am

  I would have no problem with men’s complaining about how unattractive they find underweight supermodels if this bore any resemblance to reality!! A quick look at the marketshare of, say, Victoria’s Secret (whose most famous model Gisele Bundchen is both the top-grossing model working today and one of the most downloaded and jacked-off-to of all time) or the pages of Maxim magazine tells quite a different story.

  There is really no difference between how “underweight” Gisele and other supermodels are compared to soft-porn Maxim covergirls–it’s simply a matter of how big a model’s tit job is. Somehow, an anorexic woman with breast implants on the pages of Maxim is considered “voluptuous and curvy” while a supermodel without is considered “scary holocaust victim” skinny.

  This seems more than a little hypocritical to me (and more than a little problematic.)

  Before I get accused of being just a jealous fat girl, I’m 5′8″ and 110 pounds myself, and I eat whatever I like. While I hate male hypocrisy on the issue of “voluptuousness”, I also hate being told by overweight women that I am somehow not a “real woman” because I’m not fat and unhealthy.

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