So frequently one hears people (mostly women but some men too) about how the women in mass media are ‘unnaturally’ skinny or create unrealistic expectations. Now some of this is no doubt just undirected bitching, the same way guys always bitch about assholes getting the girl. However, other people clearly think this is a serious problem that can be changed. For instance the rule barring exceptionally skinny models from some fashion shows. Or this article about Leonard Nimoy’s nude photographs of heavy women. A perfect example of the attitude one usually hears is this snippet from the article.

“The average American woman, according to articles I’ve read, weighs 25 percent more than the models who are showing the clothes they are being sold,” Mr. Nimoy said, his breathing slightly labored by allergies and a mild case of emphysema. “So, most women will not be able to look like those models. But they’re being presented with clothes, cosmetics, surgery, diet pills, diet programs, therapy, with the idea that they can aspire to look like those people. It’s a big, big industry. Billions of dollars. And the cruelest part of it is that these women are being told, ‘You don’t look right.’ ”

Notice that the essential argument leveled against skinny models and actresses is that most women can’t look like them. In other words the complaint really is that models are prettier than most women. This is like objecting to holding up famous scientists as role models for children (or scientists) because most people are not smart enough to live up to that standard. Of course the standard objection is that beauty is culturally relative so, unlike intelligence, it’s not true that models are objectively prettier than most women. Of course this accepted point of view is very much in evidence in Nimoy’s comments.

Mr. Nimoy …. admits that before he began this project, it had never occurred to him that beauty might be culture driven, that a fat body in Africa is treated quite differently from one in the United States. “In some cultures their weight is a sign of affluence: their husbands can afford to feed them well,” he noted.

As I’ve argued before valuing heavy women as status symbols is not necessarily the same thing as finding them pretty. However, studies do seem to back up the claim that weight preferences vary from culture to culture (though it is more unclear for the waist-to-hip ratio). But one should remember that these cultures face different pressures so it is unclear if you could have a culture valuing heavier women where, as in the states, it is poverty associated with obesity. In fact, far from revealing the comforting fact that beauty is malleable these results are suggestive of the far more troubling hypothesis that beauty always tracks social status.

But so what if beauty is culturally relative? This doesn’t change the fact that every society will find some women to be prettier than others. Whether our culture finds fat women, skinny women or women with one breast to be the most attractive our models and actresses will still be chosen to be the more attractive than the vast majority of people can hope to achieve. Sure we could replace diet pills and fad diets with other forms of cosmetic alteration but the idea that we could change the fundamental human drive to improve our looks or stop rating some people as more attractive than others is absurd. Besides, as I’ve observed before (e.g. with my post on enzyte) their is nothing special going on here with body image. Their is always a trade off between showing people/items/situations people find desirable and making them feel bad because they lack them.

Now perhaps one might think that weight is a particularly harmful thing to base attractiveness upon. Indeed there are some reasonable arguments for this point of view. Since weight often appears to be under individual control but often isn’t really people tend to be blamed/blame themselves for looking unattractive. On the other hand weight is partially under our control which means that to some degree the ‘goods’ of attractiveness will be biased towards those who care the most about them. One also might argue that a focus on weight encourages particularly harmful patterns of behavior (anorexia). However, the evidence for this point of view is scanty at best.

Despite what is often claimed most sex symbols are within the healthy weight range and the vast majority of men prefer women who are not unhealthily skinny. Certainly anorexia is a problem but it seems to be a particular sort of psychological issue that drives women to exaggerate a sexual characteristic far beyond what is actually considered attractive. I fully expect that if our model of attractiveness was heavier than the average woman we would have girls fattening themselves up to dangerously unhealthy levels. Given almost any notion of an ideal body shape their is some way to exaggerate that (in the direction it is from average) that is unhealthy. Frankly I find the whole thing with banning super skinny fashion models particularly ironic as these models are chosen for a certain aesthetic look and are not what people find ideally attractive and some women naturally have these body types at some ages. Thus the same groups that oppose telling women their body type isn’t okay are doing just that.

I know I’ve posted about this before but the whole situation just boggles my mind. It seems that these people who protest skinny models identify skinniness with attractiveness so strongly themselves they don’t realize that most of the things they object to are a consequence of any shared notion of beauty.

Now this doesn’t mean that projects like Nimoy’s aren’t beneficial. Our culture would certainly be better off realizing that their preferences about looks may not be shared by everyone. While I think a shared culture will always entail a common notion of attractiveness (the unfortunate tracking of social status) the harms could be mitigated by greater awareness of minority opinions about looks. We could also do with less moral derision of overweight people as this greatly increases suffering. Despite the example of cigarettes it is possible to believe that (too much of) something is really unhealthy and a bad idea without imbuing it with moral significance.