>I have. While I know fellows who'd agree that they wouldn't kick MM out of
>bed for eating crackers, they'd also agree that they wouldn't kick most
>grrRls out of bed in general. But, in the end, the courtney Cox waif look
>is ever growing in popularity asfaict and the size 13/14 Monroe would have
>been considered fat today. Now, take Monica Lewinsky, I'm pretty sure she
>was a size 14 when she was first dating the First Penis. (She couldn't
>have been bigger than that b/c the Gap doesn't sell bigger sizes. She got
>the blue dress at the Gap). But how many jokes did we hear about how
>terribly fat she was? I honestly thought this was so peculiar. I didn't
>think she was fat in the least and yet that's all I heard.
Only ever heard Monica was fat from a couple of youngish women. I remember an Australian study which compared body shapes between girlie magazines (eg Penthouse) and women's magazines (eg Cosmo). The former were full of sumptuous voluptuity and the latter full of relative stringbeans - to a statistically significant degree, too (so it must be true). Whatever the forces are that destroy women's self-confidence and eating habits, it ain't the male sexuality to which mainstream soft-porn is thrown. That doesn't mean it ain't still patriarchal oppression - it is after all, still an exertion of power by way of internalised regulation (Foucault again) - but it might indicate it's not quite the triumph of male sexuality. And it might also show the Titian ideal is not wholly out the door.
As for criticisms of women's looks, the harshest seems to come from women, in my experience (thankfully, they actually seem a lot more forgiving concerning men's looks). Both female appearance and their sexual habits are criticised in my hearing a lot more by other women. You can't blame 'em for that, I suppose. You can only tell the difference between girlie magazines and women's magazines by the banner. The cover picture on both is generally a sexually provocative, half-dressed female-type person.
Who was it who said, once we get women looking at each other through men's eyes, the battle of the sexes will have been won?
As for my multiple-choice question; I'd written the post badly. I was referring to my theory that most men find most women attractive, while most women find but some men attractive. Wrong, natural, cultural, or other? I have a rather vulgarly Darwinian theory it is actually natural. Those with wombs have had, I suspect, the ultimately regulatory power in evolutionary terms, because the investment each woman potentially made in sex was potentially so much greater than men's (in light of the apparent division of labour throughout most of our three million years). They needed to find a multiplicity of attributes in their sex partners (much of it quite consciously, I think: like ability to protect pregnant or nursing women from danger in some situations, or perhaps the capacity to help think through problems in others, the eloquence to exert authority and gain status in others, an eloquently big belly in others, and a promisingly mobile physique in others). Men needed very few in theirs. We lived such short lives (30, I read somewhere) throughout most of our history that women were basically pregnant or nursing throughout their sexual maturity, and would have spent much of their time as part of a domiciled collective, where individual attributes would be of less significance (an unintelligent or unathletic woman is still not a bad mate/mother for these reasons). Men's unconscious drive to guarantee and perpetuate their seed (the selfish gene and all that) necessarily made 'em more individualistic, aggressive and competitive - which, in this vulgar story, would then quite sensibly ultimately be seen as virtues by women.
So now I've explained why girls always seemed to like the bad boys back at uni. I'm on a roll.
I also hear tell that there is now much archeological evidence that women did a lot of the trapping (not just bloody gathering, as has been their official historical designation). I reckon if you spend most of your mature life with child, in the company of others with child, you'd likely come up with complex languages and all kinds of technologies that answered questions like how to get a reliable source of protein down you when you're not overly mobile (nothing to reliable about sending the lads in search of mastodons, I expect).
So, women were the first communists, the begetters of language, and the technologists of yore.
Yeah, I have had a wet lunch. Just feeling chatty really.
Cheers, Rob.