Because if this is true, then to hell with dieting. I’m not going to try to fit into my high-school size anymore. (I’ll still exercise because it makes me feel better, though.)
Women with curvy figures are likely to be brighter than waif-like counterparts and may well produce more intelligent offspring, a US study suggests.
Researchers studied 16,000 women and girls and found the more voluptuous performed better on cognitive tests – as did their children.
The bigger the difference between a woman’s waist and hips the better.
Researchers writing in Evolution and Human Behaviour speculated this was to do with fatty acids found on the hips.
In this area, the fat is likely to be the much touted Omega-3, which could improve the woman’s own mental abilities as well as those of her child during pregnancy.
Men respond to the double enticement of both an intelligent partner and an intelligent child, the researchers at the Universities of Pittsburgh and California said.
Well, I’m not planning on having any kids (sorry, guys!), but otherwise, this is great news for me. I have a small waist and big hips. Just like my mother before me, and her mother before her, and…
Oh yeah, and I also have an IQ in the top 1% of the world’s population. I was in Mensa all through university. Go figure!
Anyone who’s ever read Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, or Kim Chernin’s The Hungry Self, will already have gathered that anorexia is bad for the brain. It stands to reason: starving yourself will eat your brain. And yes, fat is most assuredly a feminist issue. Especially if it makes a woman both brainy and sexy–thus busting at least two myths. Women are commonly believed to be either one or the other, but not both, and especially not if they’re not built like supermodels. Take that, O ye waifs.
Now, if you’ll pardon me, I think I’ll have a little snack. My big, beautiful brain deserves it.
I like big butts and I can not lie. I would imagine that if our species continues to evolve (fingers crossed), that a wider pelvis would allow for babies with larger craniums to emerge. There’s only so much a non-fused skull can squeeze through. Think of those fabulous hips as a prototype. Then again, c-sections could eventually render such an adaptation moot by allowing craniums to enlarge at a faster rate than the hips they’re meant to pass through. Then exceptionally wide hips would serve no practical purpose, but exist solely for the purpose of attracting a mate.
Bina, I take these pop-evolutionary theories with a grain of salt–as I do people that give pathological attention to quantifiable ‘intelligence’ through IQ.
Not to say that I don’t believe in genious–but, like the idealization of the perfect figure, there is far more to ‘intelligence’ than can be reduced to a range of numbers.
For all it’s high IQ’s, Western ‘civilization’ is incredibly pathological. The ‘best and the brightest’ sure appear ignorant about offering up any rudimentary changes in social/economic behavior that would actually do much in the way of stopping the on-going ecoside.
A little less preening and a little more humility would go far toward developing the conditions through which social and ecological health could eventually become the norm.
But what do I know–I am not a member of Mensa, just a lowly field slave.
(Last thought–the anorexia that has prevailed in high fashion/aesthetics in the past twenty years simply points up the diseased thinking among the little monkeys that pretend to have authority in such matters.)
Slave, I suspect that the real reason for the current waifish “ideal” in fashion serves a purpose for the patriarchy and the corporatocracy both. It eats women’s minds; it turns them into crazed consumers of expensive goods; it pumps up the diet/plastic surgery industry (which is one of the biggest scams going); and it ultimately serves to marginalize women. When you’re worried about how much you weigh and struggle to be a size 0 (no kidding, that’s the “desirable” state of female being now–a literal nothing!), you might as well just pull out of the struggle. You cannot serve social justice or protect the environment as a slave of the Ego Empire.
And the Ego Empire knows it full well, which is why it prizes women who look weak, and ARE weak in mind. It likes them to navel-gaze–and think, “Gee, my abs aren’t defined enough!” As long as it keeps us doing THAT, it keeps us from turning our sights on things that truly matter–equal rights for all, a level class playing field, reproductive choice and health, the environment (the #1 cause of breast cancer is NOT obesity, as we’re so often told–it is pollution!), etc. We’re not encouraged to be introspective in a healthy, consciousness-raising way (that’s SO 1970s!), but to turn our rage inward–on ourselves, not the Machine.
And you’re certainly right about the “best and brightest” of capitalist society being woefully inadequate to the task of making our world liveable or keeping it that way. But then again, these are fat old white guys, and they’re not there in power by accident; they know how to rig things so that the system keeps favoring them. And just one of the many ways they do that is to make women insecure about their thighs.
And the worst part is, they don’t give a damn about the lives they ruin, any more than they give a rat’s ass about global warming. They can buy a trophy wife with liposucked everything and silicone boobs–what do they care? As long as the system works for them and that money keeps rolling in, we can’t look to them for change. What we can do is look down at our big hips, shrug, and shake our J-Lo booties all the way to the Revolution.