Don’t pack up your worry beads just yet: Seems like we will never actually find out if the hourglass figure is the officially ideal body type for women or not according to any men who are willing to answer. Studies are mostly sure, but not definitive. Even 40 men in Poland in a recent study could not confirm for pinky-swear sure that this was the best type of female body a woman could have. [Bursts into tears.]
I know what you’re thinking: Who can we be mad at? But science is not at fault. Science has been trying really really hard on this one. They haven’t dropped the ball on this for even so much as a second. Time goes on, cultural notions change, but science is right there to keep asking literally anyone, including Dutch men who were blind since birth, what ratio of hip to waist was most surefire a guarantee you would put your dick in a lady.
It’s not all bad. If you don’t have an hourglass figure, you could have one of three other possible types, according to the Wikipedia entry for “female body shape“: banana, apple, pear and hourglass.
+Fruit
+Fruit
+Fruit
+Time-measuring instrument filled with sand
We haven’t even begun to put the time into exploring just how attractive those others types could be with the right eyeshadow. Heads up: The “male body shape” Wiki doesn’t exist. There’s just “body shape” and it’s about “human body shape.” In the section under that entry about terminologies, there is only one entry to describe male bodies — “V shape.” It says:
V shape: Males tend to have proportionally smaller buttocks, bigger chests and wider shoulders, wider latisimuss dorsi and a small waist which makes for a V-shape of the torso.
An associated picture as an example of such an attractive form is Michelangelo’s David.
Oh, OK.
It’s hard to describe different male body types, or different hot types of men, because we don’t seem to have as many acceptable words and the ones we do don’t really nail it down so good. At best, it is a spectrum of beefiness, give or take.
Hot? Cut? Fit? Tall? Buff? Beefy? Big? Small?
V shape. Did you know that?
Oh I how I love a V shaped man, as letter shapes go.
Oh how a V shaped man populates my dreams.
Who’s your favorite V shaped man? Who did People name the hottest V shape alive this year?
Seriously don’t men have different waist sizes and hip sizes and what do we call those? Are there words for that? Not-V shaped? Not .9 waist-hip ratio?
What I’m getting at is what do we talk about when we talk about hot dudes?
Question: Do hetero women ever say the following things:
“I’m a muscle woman.”
“I’m an ass woman.”
“I’m a bicep gal.”
“You know me, I only take big dicks.”
Say I think brown-haired dudes are the hottest dudes around. What do I call them? Brown-haired dudes? That is so clunky! Wish I had one word to sum them up by indicating just one attribute I really dig about them, like V shaped. Is there one word even?
I worked at a newspaper, and in a piece I edited, a male writer used the term leggy brunette to describe a woman. I asked my editors if it would be OK for me to use that term (leggy brunet) to describe a male colleague who was tall with long legs and dark brown hair. They laughed nervously like I was crazy and could I shut up already OMG it was so awkward for all of us but especially me for saying that?
LOOK AT THIS ROUND UP OF LEGGY (TO VARYING DEGREE) BRUNETS!
Imagine if you identified men by hair color and one other “obvious” feature you found sexy. Check out that chesty redhead over there looking fine with his red hair and prominent chest. It seems absurd and oddly diminishing, no? Besides, the best looking men are muscular brunets. Obviously.
The only acceptable way to refer to a man’s head of hair is if he has no hair or if that hair is aged hair. Bald guy is OK, so is silver-haired fox, but everything in between does not exist.
There is a song called “Brown-Eyed Girl” and many many songs have been penned about lady eyes in the popular consciouness. Are there any songs about eye color related to men, sung by women who refer to their man by his eye color, that you can think of? No. The answer is no. They exist but they are not in the water so to speak. I looked really hard and polled friends and finally found this. And this. And this. And this. All songs you have never heard, I’m positive. OK maybe you have heard Destiny’s Child’s “Brown Eyes.”
Maybe women DGAF about hair color or eye color or chests? Are we beyond eye color? Is Paul Newman the only one who cut through on account of having the one good pair of eyes?
Perhaps there was only one man with eyes who mattered.
I would like to see study after study — and critique after critique of said study — funded purely trying to determine exactly what type of guy women find hottest and exactly why, related only to hotness and I would like them to try again and again until they get it right for posterity or posterior, whichever comes first. Also: Correct dick size, best salary, best walk, and best smile. Just kidding, don’t care about smiles. I’m an ass hound.
Instead, this: Let the record show that in the continued, desperate search for which type of female body is the best, scientists recently gathered 40 men in Poland and asked them to rate women’s body types. Most of the 40 men, after looking at a series of images where body mass was the same but waist-hip-ratio changed, preferred the WHR of .7 as expected.
But — get ready for it — preferences varied.
DID YOU HEAR THAT? PREFERENCES VARIED. This is probably a breakthrough of some kind, I really couldn’t say. Apparently this is a subject over which there is considerable disagreement about which WHR values are the MOST ATTRACTIVE and how important that is.
The problem is, guys just like too many things. We just can’t pin them down on one hot thing. But if we could promise one thing together right here today, I hope it’s this: Let’s never stop asking them (in scientifically backed settings). Amirite? Who is with me? Never stop asking.
I think if we just keep pushing, and we get the study controlled in the right way, one day we will be able to say for sure what is the hottest way a woman can look and then we can self-select who stays on earth and who drives themselves off the nearest cliff overlooking an ocean of resignation. Deal? Science?
Image via Shutterstock.