I love big *, I cannot lie

January 6, 2008 8:11 PM

Why do people like certain body types - depending on what culture they grow up in?

Being very careful not to get into any details that would seem discriminatory - there are certain body types that are preferred within certain cultures. The women that live within these cultures often have these features in emphasized form. For example, large buttocks or large breasts.

The majority of the men that live within these cultures appreciate these body features. People who are originally from other parts of the world, but grow up in that region will also tend to appreciate these body features.

My question is - when does this happen? Nobody will ever explain to young boys the features they are supposed to find sexy, but they just grow up liking them. How does it happen?

posted by markovich to science & nature (12 comments total)

Nobody will ever explain to young boys the features they are supposed to find sexy

Yes they do, and they do it all the time... it's just that they don't do it so obviously and expressly as saying "You should like large breasts". It's more implicit than that.
posted by pompomtom at 8:23 PM on January 6, 2008

I would suggest that your premise may be flawed. Have there been actual studies showing a statistical leaning towards one particular body type/feature that can be tagged to a person's culture, whatever that is?
posted by odinsdream at 8:28 PM on January 6, 2008

odinsdream - i don't think there are any statistical studies on this, but talk to people who have lived in different countries, and you will see strong trends.
posted by markovich at 8:36 PM on January 6, 2008

The easy answer is they don't, or our favorite response "confirmation bias". You think this is true because you are not a member of the culture you are discussing (I'm guessing, or you'd say that you were talking about) and so the easy stereotypes the media feeds you about people from other cultures "make sense" to you because you lack direct experience to contradict them. Without more information about what you're really talking about, or what the data is that you're trying to explain, this is a weird sort of question and it's not "less discriminatory" because you don't explain specifically what you are talking about. Here are a few articles you can read to get more perspective.

Looking Good: The Psychology and Biology of Beauty
A student paper that summarizes some other looks at culture and beauty

John Manning of the University of Liverpool in England cautions against over-generalization, especially by Western scientists. "Darwin thought that there were few universals of physical beauty because there was much variance in appearance and preference across human groups," Manning explained in email interview. For example, Chinese men used to prefer women with small feet. In Shakespearean England, ankles were the rage. In some African tribal cultures, men like women who insert large discs in their lips.

Indeed, "we need more cross-cultural studies to show that what is true in Westernized societies is also true in traditional groups," Manning said his 1999 article.

Aside from symmetry, males in Western cultures generally prefer females with a small jaw, a small nose, large eyes, and defined cheekbones - features often described as "baby faced", that resemble an infant's. Females, however, have a preference for males who look more mature -- generally heart-shaped, small-chinned faces with full lips and fair skin. But during menstruation, females prefer a soft-featured male to a masculine one. Indeed, researchers found that female perceptions of beauty actually change throughout the month.

Slimness and Self-rated Sexual Attractiveness: Comparisons of Men and Women in Two Cultures - Statistical Data Included
From the Journal of Sex Research - 16 pages including a dense bibliography and a lot of cross-cultural data on what people find sexually attractive. Concludes:

Representative surveys in St. Petersburg and in Finland in the 1990s showed that slim women considered themselves sexually more attractive than heavy ones. Based on three surveys and in-depth interviews, our main argument was that slimness as a cultural ideal was internalized more by Finnish people than by St. Petersburg people, and by women more than by men in both cultures. This becomes understandable as the body and its outward appearance can be interpreted in our modern consumer culture as some kind of (corporeal) capital (Shilling, 1993, pp. 127-148; cf. Bourdieu, 1984) which is an important source of one's subjective (as well as "objective") sexual attractiveness. In light of our findings, the value of this capital is defined and calculated on the thinness/fatness axis. Slimness and tightness can be used as an exchange in handling this capital. The bodies (capitals) lacking these values are insecure and "docile" (Bordo, 1993, p. 166), at least compared to slimmer bodies. Direct sanctions or external controls were not needed in a situation in which the cultural ideal had been internalized as a natural part of the whole identity.

They seem to make the argument that the more western a society is, the more the body is seen as a resource and sexually desired as it moves closer to an ideal. There is a lot of interesting stuff in that article, I suggest reading the whole thing.

Cultural and Psychosocial Determinants of Weight Concerns
from the Annals of Internal Medicine - Doesn't talk about race so much as cultural expectations about beauty with a ton of footnotes.

There's also this MeFi thread from July which seems to touch on the same thing somewhat.
posted by jessamyn at 8:37 PM on January 6, 2008 [5 favorites]

It has nothing to do with culture, but with personal preference. The type of figure I find most attractive are not shared by anyone in my family or closest friends, and are often downcast in popular media here. I have genuinely attempted to be attracted to a different sort, but it just doesn't work. It's something upstairs that was set into default settings sometime prior to cultural influence, methinks.
posted by vanoakenfold at 9:01 PM on January 6, 2008

No, culture definitely has something to do with it.

Published in 2004: Obesity is so revered among Mauritania's white Moor Arab population that the young girls are sometimes force-fed to obtain a weight the government has described as "life-threatening".

Notice the interviewee comments in the article. Very telling about a traditional cultural concept of "beauty."

But globalisation means intersection of multiple cultures as well, and perhaps Western ideals (being more dominant in many areas of the world) lend certain social norms to other cultures. Tracing such large-scale societal effects can be difficult, though.
posted by Ky at 10:01 PM on January 6, 2008

To poke further, I suspect the real answers are earlier and deeper in human history. Some have theorised that many of the earliest cultures revered more body fat as an indication of being well-fed, being healthy, perhaps more fertile, having resources, and thus being more suited for marriage, to procreate, and so forth. From an evolutionary standpoint, this would make sense. The interviewee comments in the article I linked imply such assumptions.

In fact, a more interesting question could be--when and why did certain cultures start leaning to "thin" as an ideal body type?

But if you're only looking at this particular social norm in terms of generation-to-generation preference, Pompomtom also makes the good point that socialization is rarely explicit (especially verbally). It's only when you're aware of that social pattern that one can understand and even refuse it. This is a very key point in sociology and social psychology.
posted by Ky at 10:13 PM on January 6, 2008

You think this is true because you are not a member of the culture you are discussing (I'm guessing, or you'd say that you were talking about) and so the easy stereotypes the media feeds you about people from other cultures "make sense" to you because you lack direct experience to contradict them.

Great sentence. Consider that everybody in our society has different tastes (as vanoakenfold writes), and yet there is a clear bias in our media about what is the best "look". So an outsider only has to pick up Cleo and think that all Western men want extraordinarily skinny girls with big tits. But we both know that would be an inaccurate belief.

Now if you're talking about the accepted perception of beauty for a particular culture, that's a different matter. And though I can't comment for other cultures, I can point out that in Western society, the perception of what's beautiful has changed quite a lot over time. And usually, it's whatever the rich are/were. When the poor starved, it was beautiful to be fat. When everybody worked outside in the field except aristocrats, it was best to have pale skin. After the industrial revolution, and all the commoners were in factories, a tan was the preferred look. And get this: In Shakespeare's day, only the truly rich ate enough sugar to turn their teeth black. So some people used to black their teeth artificially to be more glamorous/beautiful!

Presumably, concepts of beauty change in other cultures over time as well. And they don't seem to hang about for long enough to cause a serious change in their genetic makeup, though this still allows for changes in appearance that individuals can make within his/her lifetime in the pursuit of beauty (ie, dietary, plastic surgery etc.).

Which leads me to the sentence:

"The women that live within these cultures often have these features in emphasized form. For example, large buttocks or large breasts."

This statement implies that there are a set of physical features that can define a cultural group. This is not the case. Studies have shown just the opposite in fact (recalling from Anthropology lectures, don't have the references handy, sorry). IIRC, there is some scientific evidence to suggest that (indigenous) people in colder climates tend* to be stockier (lower surface area/mass ratio) than than (again, indigenous) people in hotter climates, presumably due to evolutionary pressures. But beyond that, I'm not aware of any scientific paper that has described any consistent set of physical attributes or body types for any group of people who share a particular culture**.

*correlation, and not a very strong one at that.
**note that this is not the same as race, which is the classification of people based on their physical attributes (and shared ancestry).
posted by kisch mokusch at 10:24 PM on January 6, 2008 [1 favorite]

Don't forget that tastes change. Before Twiggy came along, everyone wanted to do/be Marilyn Monroe.

Twiggy, unrelated.
posted by sebastienbailard at 11:11 PM on January 6, 2008

kisch mokusch: I assume the OP was asking about features like Steatopygia of the Khoisan. As for how it happens, the ideal of beauty (and thus, sexual desirability) is passed down like any other cultural tradition.
posted by fermezporte at 6:00 AM on January 7, 2008

there are certain body types that are preferred within certain cultures.

This is true, although within a "culture" (such as "Europe"), there are subcultures (eg "Germany") and so on down to quite finely-grained levels -- the heterosexual men in your family may have a strong preference for one kind of woman, but the guys down the block may prefer something else. There are claims of more universal elements of desire (eg .7 hip/waist ratio), but as with the Mauritania example, these things may not really be so universal, and cultural construction can trump evolution pretty easily. So yes, cultures have ideas of beauty for both men and women that look odd when seen from the outside.

The women that live within these cultures often have these features in emphasized form. For example, large buttocks or large breasts.

This is not so true, but it is certainly a major theme within 19th century and modern pseudo-anthropology / folk wisdom. You know, those old "hottentot" photos, and all those photos of unclad "nubian" women that European photographers still love to produce -- those are photos that say a lot about the consuming culture, but don't reflect much of anything about the culture of the places the photos were taken. Similarly, Baywatch stars and Playboy models may reflect a major aspect of sexual desire in America, but that does not mean that any great percentage of American women have those exaggerated sexual features.

Nobody will ever explain to young boys the features they are supposed to find sexy, but they just grow up liking them. How does it happen?

Because people do say these things, all the time. A certain amount is in the media, but a lot is from your friends and family. Think of all the innocuous comments one hears over the years -- "how could she go out wearing that?" "doesn't he realize that those jeans are gay?" "dude, I saw this girl, and every time she bent over I could see to France!" Those aren't just neutral observations -- they are communicating social norms, sexual expectations, and all kinds of other information. We hear this every day, all of our lives, and come away with some pretty strong ideas about what is "normal" and what is not.

I can remember being a young kid, and we would repeat things that our (more sexually mature) older brothers would say. Really, we didn't understand what we were saying -- "man, she has great legs" was one that had me scratching my head, because at that age legs were simply things you used for running around and kicking each other -- but in the process we certainly absorbed how some parts of a woman's body are, in my culture, highly sexualized (eg breasts and legs) and other parts are not (eg nape of the neck). This is the kind of thing that is so enveloping that there is no reason to ever notice it until you see something different, or there becomes a dissonance between your own sexuality and these cultural norms.
posted by Forktine at 6:20 AM on January 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

Thank you for the link, fermezporte, I'd never heard of Steatopygia. From the link "Among the Khoisan, it is regarded as a sign of beauty". Besides the caveats associated with this statement articulated by jessamyn (do all the Khoisan really find it attractive?), it is still a genetic trait shared by other groups (pygmies, Onge, Basters, Andamese), and I can't find out what they think of steatopygia.

I don't want to say that a culturely-driven selection process of physical attributes can't occur. I personally believe that sex-selection was responsible for many of the changes we went through on our way from australopithecenes to homo sapiens. But cultural bias is a relatively weak force, that should really only work on small populations over extended periods of time.

Steatopygia could be a good example of what the OP's driving at, but I think it's likely to be the exception rather than the norm.


But that's mostly just nitpicking on a single sentence made by markovich. The most interesting part of this question, ie. the whens and hows regarding the development of preferences for body types (and other physical attributes) in adolescents, and the means by which the influences of culture affect these preferences, hasn't really been answered yet (excepting Forktine's last two paragraphs, which start getting to it). Any sociologists out there?
posted by kisch mokusch at 3:29 PM on January 7, 2008