Im bordering to being underweight (BMI of 20.1 and yes I know BMI is not an accurate scale but still) and I have stomach rolls. It is the most normal thing ever.
social media will repeatedly show you all sorts of things including like chemmed up and knifed up muscle men and beauty queens that make people doubt the normalcy of their own bodies
Social media is a fucking poison for the mind. I happen to have stereotypically looking body cause some malabsorption probably but even I feel like total shit from 5 minutes of browsing insta. If I feel so bad then what about obese people or waist to hip ratio above 0.75 women so like fucking 70%?
I know them all the golden ratios, hip dips and what not, bubbly butt regimens, corset types, BBL death rate all this shit is stuck up there in the head.
It’s like some kind of song on repeat „do stomach vacuums to lower your waist to hip ratio without growing your core muscles” „drink carbonated water with lemon 30 minutes before breakfast”
This is the kind of knowledge that is not only fucking useless but also actively takes valuable space when you are trying to remember about ancient goddess
Option 1: Stomach rolls are inherently bad, and the stomach in the statue does not have rolls.
Option 2: Anytime a stomach folds over, especially with more than one crease, that is a stomach roll. Stomach rolls are not inherently bad.
Options 3 to infinity: Other opinions I have not yet considered.
I believe what option 2 states and honestly had never considered any other ways of thinking about it. Others may have different opinions. I'm interested in hearing them.
Standards are always changing and they always align with what’s hardest to obtain. In the time of Ancient Greece, having extra body fat was a luxury and a sign of wealth and status. Today it’s the opposite.
Well also I think this body type is and has always been attractive to the vast majority of people. Beauty standard are not very attainable (like you said, it's a status thing), but they aren't even what most people actually like.
There’s plenty of cultures where fat is beautiful. Like some where food was scarce and being fat meant you had money and social status. But now there’s McDonalds everywhere, and that’s not considered upper class. Except maybe to a certain self appointed god king and his followers.
This example shows how arbitrary beauty standards are.
Like yeah, your observation is correct, studies have been done on this, but it doesn't mean that the beauty standard is good or natural or correct. If anything it means it's wrong.
Also, today's relative abundance doesn't mean that size is entirely a matter of personal responsibility. Fast food and cheap processed food are often people's only options when they can't afford the time or money to cook meals properly. That food is worse in nutrition so they have to eat more of it, and it's full of junk that capitalists have figured out will be useful in addicting people at the expense of their health, usually a mix of excessive salt and sugar.
There are literal scientific studies about how to make the ideal food that is moreish but doesn't sate hunger, so people will eat lots of it. It takes willpower and resources to fight against that. No wonder there is an obesity epidemic.
So ultimately the beauty standard is still about classism, about wanting someone who is wealthy instead of poor.
If it only exists due to structural inequality where you can have a clear distinction between rich and poor, then it stands to reason that in a world where people generally could expect to thrive and not struggle to make ends meet, so that anxiety about it wasn't commonplace, then a wider array of body types would be generally accepted.
Edit: I hope this comment doesn't read too argumentative. Nothing you said was wrong, I'm just adding to it, and I'm aware that people reading your comment could use it to justify or attack beauty standards, and I'm using it to attack.
Yes we can all have fat rolls. Of course we can. But also beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And lots of people like a little bit of meat. For me, as slightly chunky as I am, that's not what fires me up. But like what you like.
While we're on the topic of carvings of bodies I read in a Wikipedia article that the first case of some type of breast cancer was found in an ancient sculpture which was WILD to me. Imagine scientists dissecting your family photos from super old Facebook archives to uncover that you have a fatal illness 100+ years after you die.
Our Bodies Ourselves pointed out that models in advertisements were allowed to have a tummy and look relatively normal, if attractive and made up. Ken (from Ken and Barbie) was built like Gilligan from Gilligan's Island.
By the eighties, women were expected to be 36"-26"-36" (big butts were out, 36" DDs were in) and Arnold Schwarzenegger was doing action movies as a prime specimen of masculinity. The Luke Skywalker action figure was normally proportioned but had a lightsaber blade that retracted into its arm.
By the nineties, the 40" bust was the norm, and women like Tiffany Towers who had enormous serial implants were more mainstream. The Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker action figures (now with separate unretractable lightsaber) were ripped like He-Man or Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Curiously, Nineties cartoons featured normally built women (no longer in bikini armor but situation-appropriate clothes) and all the men were built like body builders, until the Adult Swim / Cartoon Channel era when characters were more abstracted (post Simpsons).
I fucking hate thos saying. The moralizing of vanity is just another way to feel superior. The people who put a lot of work into how they look do so for a multitude of reasons. Sometimes it's because they are just having fun but other times it's because they grow up being told that they are never enough. That they are simply being deficient for not trying hard enough in which case their lack of vanity becomes instead the moral failure of gluttony or sloth. There is no win state. So then you are simply reinforcing that who they are aside from their appearance is worthless because they are empty voids for caring about the one thing that might be a rare source of validation. We all experience the effects of the privilege of attractiveness or it's lack. A lot of us spend lifetimes unpacking the toxic effects of that programming. This isn't the way to go about stopping that cycle.
"Vanity makes a person ugly inside" is just another way to put someone down so the person wielding this cliche can feel big. It's moralizing someone's relationship to their physicality and preying on places where people are trained to be weak.
I don't think taking care of your appearance, regardless of the reason, is vanity. When "being hot" is your entire personality, you tend to be an asshole, and that IS vanity.
And Aphrodite said hold my ambrosia and turned lonely Pygmalion's waifu statue into a flesh and blood sea nymph Galathea.
Then in 1941, on the Island of Themyscira, as a favor to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, Aphrodite turned a clay infant into Diana, who would come to the western world as Wonder Woman. (This would be retconned in 2011 as Diana being fathered by Zeus to Hippolyta or Zeus giving the clay infant life, even though that's Aphrodite's superpower.)
Took me a very long time to realize my desire to lose weight was less because I wanted to be skinny and more because I subconsciously wanted to look fem