Waist-to-hip ratio down the years

It is a truth universally acknowledged that men are attracted to women with narrow waists.

Not only today’s men but also the Greeks and Romans favoured such women as evidenced by their many Venus, Aphrodite and other goddess sculptures – all were pictured with narrow waists and hips.

Scientists call this neat shape the ‘waist-to-hip ratio’ and it is a measure of the distribution of bodily fat. The ratio has recently attracted the attention of two French biologists from Montpellier University. The evolutionary biologists wanted to know if men’s tastes in the waistto-hip ratio have always stayed the same or if men’s preferences changed from time to time.

Drs Jeanne Bovet and Michel Raymond arranged to have 1473 men calculate the waist-to-hip ratio of women in Greek and Roman art between 500BC and AD400.

These ladies featured in 60 paintings and 54 sculptures of goddesses representing love, beauty, pleasure, charm, creativity and fertility (but not those obese Paleolithic Venus figurines as nobody knows what they are supposed to represent). The 1473 men were also asked to rate the painted or sculpted ladies on a scale of attractiveness.

The French biologists found the waist-to-hip ratio stayed remarkably constant (around 0.7) over the 900-year study period, though they warned that their calculations might have been muddied by so many Roman sculptors imitating Greek sculptors.

The researchers were frustrated in their attempts to measure waist-to-hip ratios between AD400 and AD1400, as no sculptures were available – the Christian church forbidding the representation of naked women during the Dark Ages.

But the survey had plenty to work with between 1600 and 1900 – from the 17th century Susanna and the Elders to the 20th century The Awakening of Psyche. Over these five centuries waist-to-hip ratios shrank a little.

To study recent changes in waist-to-hip ratios, our biologists turned to Miss America beauty pageants from the 1920s onwards and Playboy centrefolds from 1962 to 2010.

They found modern men looked for narrower waists over these years. We learn that Mickey Winter’s waist-to-hip ratio was 0.53 in the earliest Playboy centrefold of September 1962 but both Miss Americas and Playboy waists shrank dramatically to their narrowest hourglass shapes in the 1970s.

Since the 1970s waists have widened again with Playboy’s Ashley Hobb’s waist-to-hip ratio of 0.67 in December 2010. The French researchers claim to have proved that men’s tastes in ladies’ waistlines is not universal but shifts over time.

According to evolutionary psychologists, a woman’s waist-to-hip ratio signals her youth, her health and reproductive prospects to potential mates, with hourglassshaped ladies the most sought after.

Critics say the French study is flawed as it concentrates mainly on American women. They say other cultures have different tastes and expectations.

Indeed it has been shown that poorer men and men living in harsher environments prefer a heavier woman, where the ‘‘waistto-hip ratio is a cue to resource acquisition rather than high fecundity’’.