insomniac thoughts

[juldea]

Money is weird. Like, the theory of it all. I go to work, and when I leave, they don't give me Wealth. They give me a piece of paper that says that their bank is going to transfer a balance to my bank. But the balance doesn't mean anything either... it's numbers on a sheet of paper, in a computer, nothing I can hold. Someone could theoretically just up and say that the computer says zero now, and there it all goes... But that's not weird, that's the thing, it's what we've all come to deal with as normal. We don't hold our wealth anymore, we don't have it tangible... We let our possessions be taken from us and spread around and used by others, and then we wonder why we don't ever feel in control of our lives...

Segue.

Hypothesis: the American (Western?) emphasis on breast size rather than hip size for attractiveness of a (female) mate is indicative that our society is no longer worried about perpetuating itself through breeding, but instead worried about feeding those that we've bred. In other words, it's an evolutionary response to overpopulation. Discuss.

I feel like I'm on the edge of an ephiphany tonight, rolling around bed in my insomnia, plagued with newfound knowledge of humanity's dark sides (thank you Uris)... It's probably just the ramen and ice cream I had for dinner.

Comments

My personal hodgepodge of theories on breasts and hips

[withlyn.livejournal.com]

Once upon a proto-human time, breasts and hips were both utilitarian things: if women had bigger hips than men, it was because they had big pelvic girdles, and if they had bigger breasts, it was because they had bigger mammary glands. Both of these things are super-handy for the female side of reproduction: a large pelvic girdle doesn't just mean "easier birth" in terms of losing fewer of your babies: it means "easier birth" in terms of being less likely to die in your first childbirth. Bigger mammary glands (than men have) can actually produce milk faster than smaller ones, though of course the seize of a woman's mammary glands when she's not pregnant yet are not really indicative of how big they will be when she is actually nursing.

So a number of things happen: First off, sexually mature women can be distinguished from men or large children by their comparitively larger hips and breasts, and so men's brains become keyed to looking for those attributes in prospective mates. That is probably enough to explain why men prefer big hips and big breasts in a mate: the bigger the hips and the bigger the breasts, the more the "good prospective mate" areas of the brain get triggered. In addition, having even bigger hips and even bigger breasts are useful modifications in their own rights.

So, in a world where men have started to key in on those two things (as well as some others) to identify good mates, the women who exemplify those characteristics best are the ones who end up with the best chances at getting a mate, and futhermore with the best "bargaining power" towards getting a good mate. (If they set their standards low enough and just want to get pregnant, women are virtually assured of finding a man to have sex with them. The same is not true for men.) Bones and mammary glands are relatively hard tissues to grow/maintain, so once past the point where those changes are actually making childbirth and nursing easier, it's easier to just augment the size with fat deposits. That seems like some sort of genetic deception, but, in the harsher world where essentially everything about human physiology developed, fat deposits mean that one has been getting enough to eat, and that is very indicative of one's reproductive desirability. Women with lots of fat deposits both have been successful at gathering food in the past, and already have some stored up towards the pregnancy and feeding the baby.

To conclude, I personally find that the biggest purely geometric factor towards the sexual attractiveness of a woman is not breast size or even hip size per se, but waist-hip ratio, which I'm pretty sure that I specifically identify via the slope of the sides of the abdomen between the waist and hips. Furthermore, I think that women with a bigger chest size than hip size look a bit awkward and unbalanced. That's a rough statement; I have never made a practice of actually knowing anyone's measurements.