Science has documented that women with curvy hips have more babies and are healthier. But a new study by a University of Utah anthropologist suggests that flatter hips come with a different set of benefits: strength, assertiveness, competitiveness and an ability to cope with stress.
Touche, Barbie.
Professor Elizabeth Cashdan, who chairs the U.'s anthropology department, reviewed existing data to answer a conundrum concerning the human female figure: If hips that are larger than the waist are so optimal for reproduction, why are most women's waists almost as big as their hips?
Cashdan concluded that the hourglass form that convention holds as the perfect feminine shape isn't so perfect after all. The answer probably lies in hormones, according to her study published this month in the journal Current Anthropology. While hourglass-shaped women enjoy greater fertility and health, they may be less able to ensure the survival of their children in subsistence cultures.
"This is about trade-offs," Cashdan said. "The human body is a compromise. Take the ideal skin color. If you have light skin you have less risk of being deficient in vitamin D, but on the other hand you are at greater risk of melanoma."
The very hormones that boost female strength and mettle also transfer fat from hips to waist, resulting in a higher waist-to-hip ratio, or WHR, Cashdan's way of measuring curviness. (The lower the number, the greater the curves. A
WHR of 0.7 is viewed as "optimal," but the ratio for most women is above 0.8.)
"The hormonal profile associated with high WHR [high androgen and cortisol levels, low estrogens] may favor success in resource competition, particularly under stressful and difficult circumstances," Cashdan writes. Androgen increases assertiveness, competitive aggression and muscle mass, while cortisol enhances the ability to tolerate stress.
"All of these effects could be adaptive in circumstances where women must work hard to support their children, compete directly for resources for them, and cope with resource scarcity," Cashdan writes. "A truly optimal level of hormones, then, should weigh these considerable advantages against their well-known costs: lower fertility, health problems if overweight, and possibly lowered attractiveness to men."
Cashdan's findings were welcomed by body image consultant Karen Brunger, who contends the hourglass ideal harkens to a bygone era and is corrosive to women's sense of self worth.
"In the past, a woman's world went from her father's home to her husband's home and she wasn't expected to make a living. The more hourglass she was, she could expect to marry well, but that is no longer the case," said Brunger, founder of the International Image Institute in Ontario, Canada.
"The hourglass body doesn't work for us. A lot of my work with women has been to help build self esteem and honor the bodies they have," she continued. "In the past, women were their bodies. Now it is about what we're doing in our lives and who we are as people."
According to Cashdan's study, notions of the ideal body type vary across cultures. For example, in societies where women are less economically independent, such as Japan and Greece, male preferences lean more toward thinner waists than in northern European countries, which feature greater gender equity. And subsistence cultures have a much different view of the feminine ideal.
"Many of us who have worked with people in non-Western economies, where women are breadwinners and provide for the children, we have found that women have more apple-shaped bodies," Cashdan said. "And when you ask men about their preferences, beauty is important but they want a hard-working woman."
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