On Tue, 13 Oct 1998, Ray Audette wrote:
>
> Men have always sought an ideal of beauty that is like overweight women
> very rare in Nature.  Women of weight also have very large secondary
> sexual characteristics. Many "primitive" men (including Bill Clinton)
> find these irresitable.
>
> The more exaggerated from nature these secondary sexual characteristics
> are, the better we men like them.  If this were not true, we would spend
> less time gazing at the "silicon wonders" in Playboy and a lot more time
> with old issues of National Geographic.

One of the very interesting findings of evolutionary psychology is that
the old saying "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is basically wrong.
Cross-cultural studies of beauty reveal two key findings:  (1) the most
desirable women have a waist-to-hip ratio between .6 and .8; (2) the
most desirable mate has symmetrical features (both body and face).  Thus,
Christie Brinkley is considered beautiful throughout the world, as is
Denzel Washington, and Lyle Lovett is considered much less so.  When
measures of symmetry are applied to the faces and the bodies of Brinkley
and Washington, the two halves are nearly identical; decidedly not so for
Lovett. The evolutionists' interpretation is not hard to follow--
the waist/hip ratio indicates fecundity, while symmetry indicates the
ability to resist disease and to recover from injury. (And in empirical
truth, fertility problems increase with deviation from the .6-.8
waist/hip range.)

Gregg C.
[log in to unmask]