Let’s Talk About Sex: Women
I can’t understand how women wear high heels. Yes, they may make a woman more attractive, but they are torture! Not just on their feet, but also their backs, as they increase lumbar curvature (that is why, as a true gentleman, I only encourage wearing them in bed).
A more universal fashion phenomenon – subtle at first, obvious once seen – is clothing designed to present a lower hip to waist ratio.
The next time you gawk at pics of women, make your reptilian brain take a back seat, and engage your frontal lobes for a change. Analyze some commonly used poses:
- Arched back (similar to what high heels do)
- Standing with one foot crossed over the other
- Hip sticking out to one side
- Hands on hips
This tunes perception towards a lower hip to waist ratio (HWR). Women’s fashion shares this pursuit; highlighting a low HWR if they already have it, or stylistically rebalancing towards it if they don’t.
The magic range is 0.67 to 0.73. Women with this ratio, and a healthy BMI, are the most fertile. It is an outer manifestation of internal reproductive health [1].
Men have evolved to instantaneously recognise this. It is sexy. It is powerful. The mere sight shoots through our eyes into our primitive brain. It activates our reward centres and affects our decision making. During ovulation, subtle fat tissue shifts and natural posture changes make a woman’s hips look fuller and more pronounced.
Attractiveness enhances status, and fashion aspires to. Status and power are two rails of the same track. Naturally, women’s fashion evolved to accentuate the hip-waist curvature…
…And societies oppressive to women use coercion to forbid it altogether.
Let’s look at women’s fashion cross-cultural and throughout the decades:
Throughout the 60s & 70s:
The bulb embroidery is placed so as to only add bulk below the waist.
Single colour tops, with the illusion of bulk via patterns on skirts waist down.
Women don’t need belts to hold their dresses up.
Polkadot girl is accentuating an already optimal HWR: tight around the waist, loose around the hips.
It dwindled in the avant-garde androgyny of the 80s:
Legislatively, the 70s was instrumental women to pursue careers, and by the 80s women were in full swing in competing with men.
This influenced more masculine elements than ever, such as shoulder pads and puffy tops. Look how front on and upright the poses are! Like yin and yang, there was a big drop in accentuating the essentially feminine hip-waist curves. Still, it persisted:
Onto the 90s:
00s:
The lines decrease in thickness around the waist.
Crossing cultures:
Indian
Punjabi
Norwegian
Swedish
Thai
Zulu
Even in something as bare as bikinis:
…I spent an unnecessarily long time picking these out.
I challenge any woman to convince me that the strings are practical. They do, however, add bulk to the hips.
The ‘V’ line alone accentuates the hips:
Texture also adds bulk:
Compare this to a bikini that does none of the above:
…Doesn’t that make her hips look narrower? The bikini bottom is actually squeezing the hips in – it’s anti-curve. Bad fashion!
I have a new found appreciation of women adorning themselves for us.
Signing off,
Sav Dean
Elaborations & Sources:
- Idea body types with ratios in one study: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0050601
- Testosterone and body fat %
- This study on men’s perceived increase/decrease in attractiveness by how heels alter the arch of their spine. The study https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01875/full unfortunately it did not specify how many women looked better/worse with high heels.
- Fertility HWR link
#winksman #fashion
