RESEARCH General Health

WOMEN'S BODIES
'Curvaceously thin' body the ideal, scholar finds

Andrea Lynn, Humanities & Social Sciences Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

3/1/03

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — 36-24-36. It sounds like the combination for a safe or lock, and in a way, it is. Those numbers have long been regarded as the right combination for the ideal female body.

Trouble is, as one researcher who recently conducted a study of ideal female bodies points out, those numbers don’t add up. By garment industry standards, the 36-24-36 measurements equate to a size 10 bust, a size 2 waist and size 4 hips. Only Mattel makes dresses with such stunning proportions.

"The size 10-2-4 standard of female beauty suggests that the female body ideal is ‘curvaceously thin,’ " writes the researcher, Kristen Harrison. "Although this body ideal seems to be widely embraced, it hasn’t been empirically linked with media exposure. That was the purpose of this study."

According to Harrison, the curvaceously thin female "represents a sexual ideal, a fantasy, a non-realistic woman who is nonetheless used by real women as a point of comparison in their efforts to ‘improve’ their bodies. Given the discrepancy between the upper and lower halves of this ideal, women’s efforts to mold their bodies to these proportions must include not only dieting to whittle down the lower body, but creative methods of simultaneously maintaining an average-sized upper body": breast reduction surgery, breast augmentation surgery and liposuction to reconfigure figures.

Harrison, a professor of speech communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, discusses her recent study of body ideals in a forthcoming article in the journal Sex Roles. In the study, 149 college women and 82 college men reported their television viewing habits and took part in a series of drawing exercises in which they chose their ideal female bust, waist and hip sizes. The drawing exercises showed that women desire a waist and hips significantly smaller than their own, but a significantly larger bust. Men chose a larger ideal than did women – larger in the waist and bust.

Harrison also found that the more television the women viewed, the more likely they were to choose a smaller waist and hips, and either a larger bust – for those who perceived themselves to be small-busted – or a smaller bust – for those who perceived themselves to be large-busted. Men’s ideals were unrelated to their exposure to ideal-body television images.

Moreover, for both women and men, exposure to ideal-body images on television predicted approval of women’s use of surgical body-alteration methods such as breast implants and liposuction.

This suggests "that eating disorders are not the only potential adverse outcome of exposure to thin-ideal media images," Harrison wrote. "Feeling pressured to change their bodies surgically could put young women at risk for doing ‘double damage’ to themselves, by pairing extreme dieting and disordered eating with potentially risky medical procedures."

TV is not the only culprit, Harrison noted. Popular music also perpetuates unrealistic ideals. Consider the line from the Commodores’ song, "Brick House": "How can she lose / with the stuff she use / 36-24-36 / Ow! What a winning hand."