The plain truth is that men have traditionally preferred women possessing all the requisite feminine curves. Women with the configuration of a "supermodel" - all sharp angles and bones, virtually indistinguishable from the body of a teenage boy - are a distinct turnoff for many, if not most men.

Historically, men have preferred plump women. The current pop culture standard of feminine beauty is something of an aberration, a fad dating only from the late '60s. The first of the bony supermodels of the modern era, Twiggy, was greeted with snorts of laughter and derision. However, traditional values of feminine beauty could not withstand the onslaught of the fashion and mass marketing industries, and yet again television advertising and pop culture triumphed over common sense.

Fertility figures such as the Venus of Willendorf, the shards and relics of ancient civilizations, represent stylized female figures with exaggerated breasts, hips, and buttocks. Through the ages and in most cultures, the male preference for plump, curvy female forms continued. The paintings of such Renaissance masters as Rubens displayed voluptuous feminine beauty in magnificent abundance. As late as the 19th Century, female fashion emphasized womanly curvature, with the "hourglass figure" (small waist, large breasts and hips) the ideal shape. Those unfortunate underendowed women wishing to enhance their appeal wore stays and bustles. Then, with the decline of traditional values and development of the techniques for manipulating popular taste in the service of greed in the latter days of the 20th Century, skinniness became big business.


Women spend billions of dollars yearly for low-fat, "lite", and diet foods. Weight-loss clubs and programs have become a major growth industry. Surgical fat removal, suctioning, stomach stapling, digestive bypasses, balloon insertion, and other drastic remedies have become a profit center at some hospitals and medical practices. It seems that traditional medicine is just not enough of a moneymaker, and doctors have become weight reduction hucksters. ...And American women are eating it up, and suffering, even dying from anorexia, bulemia, and other eating disorders caused an obsession with skinniness.


You will not get a boyfriend by losing 50 pounds. Your life will not necessarily improve and you won't be any happier in your new, temporarily lighter body. So, what to do?

Cultivate a sense of self-worth. Develop your mind. Work on your social and conversational skills. Become a more interesting person. Learn to be proud of yourself.

By all means live a healthy lifestyle. Eat wholesome foods, avoid bingeing, and get regular exercise. If nature endowed you with a big-boned frame or large body, optimize it by exercise, rather than wasting your money and destroying your health with fad diets. Recognize, though, that you are a fine human being just the way you are, and your task in life is to make the best of what you have.

Kleph's curious, out-of-mode curves without warning became the norm, and Sue was a queer, angular, half-masculine creature beside her.
...
Beauty is almost wholly a matter of fashion; what is beautiful today would have been grotesque a couple of generations ago and will be grotesque a hundred years ahead. It will be worse than grotesque; it will be outmoded and therefore faintly ridiculous.
Lawrence O'Donnell, Vintage Season