The Man's Guide to Women: Scientifically Proven Secrets from the Love Lab About What Women Really Want

by John M. Gottman

Clinical psychologist and author Joni Johnston, PsyD, writes that after the bubonic plague in Europe wiped out one-third of the population, the ideal in feminine beauty was looking pregnant. Even a woman who was single was encouraged to look “fertile.” One has only to look at the great paintings from the Renaissance through the Victorian era to see that the feminine ideal used to be women who were curvaceous, voluptuous, and generally rounder than today’s ideal. This was the original airbrushing, but instead of creating ultrathin and emaciated women, those Renaissance painters portrayed a full-bodied woman as the epitome of sensuality and sexuality. The thin woman ideal emerged in the 1920s, as women’s civil rights grew and women began to reject traditional feminine images. Since then, this ideal has taken on a life of its own and is the cause of all sorts of eating disorders in young women. Also, when a society is well fed, thinness denotes self-control or an ethereal abstinence that appears saintly. So thinness became chic in the 1920s, when the industrial revolution was booming and the middle class was well fed and growing.