Slim waist most preferred feature in women

For enduring popularity of female form down the ages, nothing beats a narrow waist, researchers say.
A team of researchers in the United States surveyed accounts of female beauty in British literature from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and found that the only feature that consistently got authors' pulses racing was a slender midriff, Nature magazine reports.
"The waist does not sound an intuitively sexy body part," admits Devendra Singh of the University of Texas, Austin, who led the study. But nevertheless, it was the one thing on which the hundreds of writers surveyed seemed to be unanimous. They didn't even agree on whether large breasts, that modern staple of sexual attractiveness, are nice or not, he said.
A preference for slim waist is also found in first-century Indian writings and fourth-century Chinese works, Singh's team had previously found.
The popularity of a slender middle might be due to what it reveals -- woman's health and fertility, Singh was quoted as saying by Nature.
Healthiness is associated with low levels of abdominal fat, and high levels of female sex hormones such as oestrogen pinch the waistline and give the body an hourglass shape, the magazine said.
Singh and his colleagues scanned a database containing some 345,000 works of British and American literature, selecting only older British writings, and cross-referenced terms such as 'waist', 'breast', 'hips' and 'buttocks' with words such as 'plump' and 'slim'. They reported their results in proceedings of the Royal Society of London.
The evidence for preference of a narrow waist from around the world and throughout the centuries, researchers say, suggests that it comes from something more inherent than fashion or the influences of global mass media.
"Nowadays there's no culture without western influences, so it's easy to say 'oh yeah they're copycatting the west'," Singh says.
"But this shows that it cannot be explained as a whim of western culture."
It might not be quite unanimous, however, Nature says, pointing out that in a 1998 survey in which men from the indigenous Matsigenka tribe of Peru were asked to choose their favoured female silhouette, most preferred a plumper lady and some commented that slim-waisted women looked like they had been suffering from fever and diarrhoea.
A mini midriff may give men valuable information about a woman's potential to have healthy babies, and that could be why they subconsciously find it attractive, Singh said.
A similar theory has also been used to explain why we subconsciously register highly symmetrical features (an indicator of good genes) as more beautiful.


Source:Hindustanis.org