Excepts

Introduction:
The iconic representation of a beautiful and sensuous woman as an hourglass figure defies prevalent belief among laypersons and scholars that beauty is ephemeral, arbitrary, and in the eye of the beholder. The label of "hourglass", hand gestures to depict the shape of women, and even the numbers (36-24-36) often used in vernacular speech to describe a woman effortlessly invoke the image of a youthful, attractive, and enticing woman in the present era. Describing a woman's height and weight does not conjure up images that such a woman is also young and beautiful. While slenderness is often prized, it is practically impossible to imagine that most people would judge a woman with 32-32-32 measurements as attractive regardless of how skinny she is. The hourglass figure remains critical for judgments of youthfulness and beauty even in skinny models. So what explains the universal and enduring appeal of the hourglass figure? One explanation based on evolutionary psychological theory is that female beauty as represented by the hourglass figure taps into important biological information about various factors regulating women's reproductive potential and fertility.
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Summary: Defining beauty:
The evidence summarized in this paper demolishes the myth that beauty is ever changing, skin deep, and superficial. The attractiveness judgment based on the hourglass figure defined by WHR is a robust phenomenon evident in various cultures throughout history. I have presented data to establish that the allure of the hourglass figure is "programmed" in the human mind because it provides important biological information about a woman's youthfulness, health status, and fertility. Many people who object to such explanations are not well versed with the basic tenets of evolutionary theory. Many people believe that for the evolutionary explanation to be correct there should be a conscious awareness of a link between a female's attractiveness and her health and fertility. The evolutionary theory does not stipulate that there should be a conscious awareness for such a link. The pleasure one derives from an act is the motivation for engaging in the act. Engaging in behavior that successfully solved adaptive problems faced by humans in ancestral environments induces pleasure. For example, humans eat calorically rich foods not because of the knowledge that under certain conditions accumulated calories stored by the body would help in survival; rather, they eat such foods because they taste good and doing so is pleasurable. Likewise, a man is attracted to a woman with an hourglass figure not because she is fecund but because being with a beautiful woman induces pleasurable feelings.
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Furthermore, once an adaptive mechanism has evolved it can be activated even if the original link is de-coupled in a novel environment. Consider why noncaloric sweeteners taste good and pleasurable. In the evolutionary past, sweet taste was linked to nontoxicity and caloric density; in turn, humans evolved a preference for sweet taste because this aided in their survival. The evolved mechanism supported the rule that "if it tastes sweet, consume it" instead of a rule to make sure that food is calorically rich. In the present environment, the close coupling between sweet taste and caloric content that persisted throughout human evolutionary history has broken down. More relevant to the present theme of this paper, advances in cosmetic techniques and aesthetic plastic surgery enable women in modern industrialized societies to maintain a youthful look and sensuous body shape for far longer than ancestral women. In nonindustrialized societies, women lose youthful looks after giving birth and breast-feeding one or two children; women in modern industrialized societies can retain a relatively youthful appearance after giving birth to one or two children or even in their mid-thirties. Aesthetic plastic surgery does not make women more fecund but does enhance their attractiveness to men by activating the mechanism of sexual attraction that evolved to equate a beautiful body to youthfulness and fecundity.
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The puzzle is that if beauty is instantly perceived and processed why do people have problems describing what makes a woman beautiful? Consider the statue of Venus de Milo. Most people will agree this statue represents a beautiful woman; but when asked to describe what makes her beautiful, some people may attribute her beauty to her symmetrical round breasts, whereas others attribute it to her full and round buttocks. This is probably because modern nomenclature provides few means for describing the gestalt of "attractive" female body shapes (the term "hourglass figure" is a notable exception). This linguistic limitation may have fostered the prevailing tendency to focus on discrete body parts when describing female beauty. This can be very clearly visualized if one changes either the size of the breasts or buttocks of Venus de Milo and disregards the proportionality of these parts of her body. Likewise, in present society the perception that a beautiful female is necessarily thin does not convey any information about the proportionality of the woman's body parts that is essential to defining beauty. This of course does not imply that people in all societies prefer slim female bodies or that they all prefer similar shape and sizes of body parts. There are marked differences in preferences for large full buttocks and lateral thighs in African Americans, whereas Caucasians tend to prefer less lateral fat on the thighs and smaller, but shapely buttocks. Hispanic Americans tend to prefer very narrow waists and slightly full lateral thighs, with well-rounded buttocks. In spite of these variations in body part preferences, people from these different ethnic groups judge a female figure with close to 0.7 WHR as maximally attractive. The evolutionary forces have designed psychological adaptations to adjust certain determinants of sexual attraction to local ecological conditions (eg, in environments of food scarcity, men may prefer plump women with strong legs) and distinct morphological features (skin pigmentation, type of hair, shape and size of nose and lips) of certain races. What evolution would have required is that the core feature indicative of health and fertility be consistently judged as beautiful in all these conditions. Thus, cross-racial consensus exists in perceptions of female attractiveness. For example, Caucasians are likely to judge Miss Japan and Miss Nigeria as beautiful despite racial differences. For further example, after being told the bodily measurements of Miss Universe are 35-24-35, one seems likely to envision a beautiful woman but not one of any particular ethnic group.
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In conclusion, the human male's preference for females with hourglass figures is not a result of some mysterious force, but is the product of a specific selective history. The body shape is a template of female sexual attractiveness and serves as a reference point. Various ethnic groups may consciously feel that the shape and size of a given body part is what makes a woman beautiful, but the relationship among the body parts remains invariant and marked deviations from this idealized body shape diminishes sexual attractiveness.   • • •