Quote from: Jack1066 on July 19, 2017, 12:33:13 PMYeah. I've studied evolutionary psychology and beauty norms a bit in recent months. Things are complicated. This is my theory, anyway, based on what I see the evidence as:
There are almost no universal standards of beauty, save for a few: a waist to shoulder ratio of 0.75 or below is seen as universally attractive in men (I have 0.70 and I don't work out at all, and my shoulders are average breadth, so I am sure all men can get this) and a waist to hip ratio of about 0.70 in women.
After that, beauty norms become a lot more complex. A lot of beauty norms have nothing at all to do with sxxual dimorphism, but are still tied to people's culturally conditioned ideas of masculinity or femininity, for example, a lot of western women don't like Asian men because western people are socially conditioned with a racist idea of Asian men as effeminate; conversely many western men see black women as less feminine. It has very little to do with black or Asian people being less "beautiful", imo, because there is very little empirically verifiable objectivity in beauty.
Height is not an important signifier of masculinity (in men) in most non-Eurasian cultures (Native American, Aboriginal, African). However, other traits, such as stockiness, tend to be. Of course, short men tend to be stockier than tall men on average... In fact, many societies do not have a male-taller norm, and the Nilotic peoples in Sudan are an example of a group who specifically have an equal-height norm between men and women (explained by their very tall average height, imo- which is probably not physically healthy).
We can say the same thing for whether fat women are seen as attractive in x or y society or not.
The trait of tallness (in men) is preferred in industrial societies where tallness is a very good indicator of childhood wealth. It was also part of the classical European standards of beauty going back to ancient and medieval times- as was slenderness in women- but it only became most pronounced in the industrial era, when coincidentally problems like famine were eradicated, but also urban poverty and malnutrition among the working class meant average height decreased substantially.
So slenderness, within reason, and height, both became tied to health- that explains the evolutionary pressure. But more importantly, both are tied to social status. Healthy slenderness and tall height both reflect female "smallness" and male "largeness" in ways that we associate with high social status/class.
How this will go in the future, I don't know, but beauty norms always exist inside their own cultural, historical, and social context. Beauty norms are just one way in which gendered relations are expressed imo
How you explain it about Afro American ?
And also modern westernized asian countries (South Korea, Japan)
It seems that tallness tend to be generalized in every westernized countries but even in a westernized country it's not general - Aboriginal for example-