500 Years of The ‘Perfect’ Female Body
Great blog article by Serge Bilanko
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As a daddy to a little 4-year-old girl, nothing frightens me more than knowing that the world is a super shallow pit of vipers when it comes to judging people on their looks.
There is just no getting around the fact that physical beauty, especially if you are a woman, is a real thing. Yet at the same time, when we realize and admit that so much of a young girls’ time and energy will soon be dedicated toward trying to be as attractive to the naked eye as she can possibly be, we are simply tipping our hat to one of the oldest ways that nature conducts business.
And one of the most unsettling.
Yeah yeah, of course, I understand that lots and lots of stuff matters when it comes to ‘falling’ for someone else and for ‘wanting’ to be with them, first on a date or two, and then ultimately, through the hell or high water of a long-term relationship. However, the cosmos has always and probably will always dictate to us this universal truth: that first spark between two humans is almost always a physical one.
We’d all probably like to pretend that in a perfect world each of us would be desirable to others based on the merits of our mind, our ability to think intelligently and swiftly, our wonderful sense of humor, and the bright promise of our ability to nurture and love twinkling in our eyes, but that ain’t how it really works: we both know that.
In this ever-changing world of rapid-fire technology and useless data overload, at times it almost seems as if anything short of absolute perfection, especially when it comes to how you look to others, is equal to all-out failure. That scares the hell out of me when I realize that, for young girls like my daughter will be soon, and then for adult women, this raging river of physical stuff can be even more rough and tumble to navigate than many of us guys could ever really imagine.
So Ive decided to hit the ‘Pause‘ button and take a step backwards. As a 21st century man, I feel the need to maybe try and take a broader look at just how drastically our definition of what a beautiful and desirable and sexy woman is has changed across the last couple of centuries. Because if nothing else, history often dictates the future, you know?
What I’ve come away with has been pretty damn refreshing too, I have to say.
Why?
Well, I think it’s because that the more I look at women from the past, the more I’m noticing what should be obvious to most of us without much pondering at all: that true beauty can never really be stashed away from us behind walls of malnourished elves or unobtainable anime figures.
And listen, I’m not really doing this to make you or me feel superficially better about our own physical plights (Lord knows that my physical body shape hasn’t really been deemed all that super hot since well-fed chunky railroad tycoons landed all the best gals back in like 1846). I think this whole thing is more to reassure our deeper selves, if you will, that, as with most things that are tricky to explain, what we as a species tend to think of as the ‘perfect body’ often swings drastically from one end of the spectrum to the other over time, and even standing in the middle of any given moment.
Which, when you think about it, proves more or less that, deep down in our human guts most of us understand that the most truly beautiful women we will ever know (our daughters, our wives, our mothers, etc) come in way more sizes, shapes, and colors than we are often led to believe.”
