HSG

Question: How old is the adoration of full-figured feminine beauty?

Answer: As old as humanity itself.

At this site, we generally focus on the depiction of beauty in Western art, beginning with its earliest representations in Classical Antiquity. Classical civilization not only defined the timeless ideal of beauty, but also endowed that ideal with profound cultural significance. In his "Encomium of Helen," the Roman orator Isocrates explains how the veneration of Helen of Troy gave Greek civilization form and purpose, and helped to create a common identity among the Aegean city-states.

However, plus-size beauty epitomized feminine attractiveness long before Homer sung the praises of Achilles and his Achæan warriors. In fact, according to a new book-length study of Paleolithic art by R. Dale Guthrie, male artists have been creating artistic representations of the fuller female figure since prehistoric times.

That's right--male artists. Because although a popular myth holds that the many extant full-figured figurines from the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras are either self-representations by their creators, or testify to the existence of matriarchal societies, the facts of history suggest otherwise.

(Many of you will be familiar with the types of figurines in question. A few representative examples of these understandably crude sculptures appear here.)

A recent article that appeared on the TLC Web site highlights Guthrie's conclusions about Paleolithic art:

"Female images dominate and are nude, almost every one full-figured above and below," said Guthrie. "Unlike the other animals, the sculpted, engraved and painted human females and female parts are sometimes done schematically, distilling and inflating the primary and secondary sex characters."

In his book, The Nature of Paleolithic Art, the author itemizes the preponderance of archeological evidence which suggests that male artists were responsible for the creation of these primitive sculptures, and that the figures do not represent women in a state of pregnancy, but rather, in ways that were considered physically desirable.

As Guthrie observes, "Men making images of women would be likely to choose female forms that were [considered] attractive--most curvaceous" (342). The author also explains the practical origins of this plus-size standard of appearance:

Most women are portrayed as full-figured. . . . Such curvaceousness biologically underwrites and socially signals fecundity. Parallel evolutionary processes have tuned the attention of men to take note of and read these signals. (364–65)

Intriguingly, Guthrie also reveals the source of the now-discredited myth that these depictions of female figures represent the possibility of matriarchal societies:

Karl Marx . . . postulated a matriarchal order as the original social structure. Versions still thread through postmodern Marxist-influenced ideology.

Anthropological and archaeological evidence does not support the universality of a matriarchal phase in human societies . . . less-informed readers take these purported mother goddess/matriarchy ideas as a matter of fact and faith. Such ideas have become the central metaphor in some narrowly feminist rewrites of history . . . The idea of a historic stage of a universal goddess and/or matriarchy has been abandoned by most scholars. (368)

While it is hardly surprising that a propagandist such as Marx, doggedly committed to undermining Western civilization, would have latched on to such a theory (for his own political purposes), the fact that this hallucination has now been debunked is very good news for size celebration. It means that these depictions of feminine appearance--crude and primitive as they are, and lacking in the idealistic underpinnings that originated with Classical civilization--were not ideological in nature, but aesthetic, and do represent what the earliest human societies considered most attractive. And these shapes remain far closer to the natural ideal of beauty than do the androgynous skeletons that permeate modern culture.

In this way, at least, our earliest ancestors were far wiser than we are today.

Emmanuel Benner, The Lookout (1879):