A Theory of why popular culture prefer stick thin tall woman

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Sid

And you have personality too!

I've noticed that there frequently is a worrying correlation between not being skinny and being overweight and being obese. "Fat" is a dangerous word, often horribly abused.

As far as height goes, a lot of guys have told me that a girl being taller than them is an absolute turn-off. (Personally I don't understand this, but then again I don't remember ever meeting anyone of the opposite sex who was taller than me.) So I don't think that being very tall as well as thin is necessarily an advantage outside of modeling.

I admit it! I watch the model and fashion shows, not because of the women but because of the clothes. I've watched plus sized models (plus sized being a size six, seriously) be rejected and sent out of casting calls because they were bigger, so, the hype, the modeling and the publicity do reign in on the skinny tall models. What a lot of girls want is the fame, to be on the cover of Elle magazine and to be the person that random strangers talk about when they walk into a barnes and noble and read the stacks of magazines with their picture on the cover. I'm not saying all women are like this but I know that a lot of females want to be this way. Fashion designers want a runway model that can walk in their clothes and they want them to be able to drape themselves accordingly, which requires a very long legged woman that can fit into a size two garment. I know nothing of the historical aspects of humans except that we used to be short (go me! I guess i'm living in the past!). But i do know that my cousin is almost six feet tall and she's thin and beautiful but she has the hardest time with guys because they don't like dating someone taller than them, why? i really don't know. Actually i'm not entirely sure what this has to do with the thread, i guess i just wanted to say it .

My feelings on the matter is if you think about advertising and marketing, in order to sell something you have to make people feel they need it. If all models were average sized women, the women that buy the products wouldn't feel they needed the clothes because they looked like the models. But since they are probably shorter and fatter than the models they may subconsiously think that if they buy the clothes they may look taller and slimmer.

I've got a few rather provocative crackpot theories to throw in here. I'm not willing to stand by any them nor do I necessarily subscribe to them (it's all in jest, really)...

1.The influence of rich gay European men on the arts and high fashion is runs deep financially and aesthetically (hasn't it been that way since the Renaissance? Greco-Roman times?). They prefer the tall lithe ectomorph male form over the full childbearing woman's and this naturally goes into the design and the type of model. Notice the androgynous look to a lot of the models, their lack of secondary sexual characteristics, their pouty boyish faces. The often unflattering clothes are evidence of an apparent detachment from the female form -- unforgiving to hips or breasts and no attention at all given to how women might actually move and function in them. What do you expect from men for whom women play little or no part in their intimate lives?

2.People aren't attracted to these unnaturally thin women and their ugly clothes just because. It takes a lot of conditioning and marketing. Fashion has always had a form of cultural hegemony running through it with always the gay European man at its highest tier. The latest fashions from the gay European elite hit the runways of Milan and Paris, make their way across the pond to NY where the who's who quickly latch on, make their way to the red carpet for all to see until finally they are tweaked and redesigned for mass consumption at the Gap. The clothes and the thin women that sport them are one and the same. If you buy these clothes you must subject yourself to a kind of body image bondage to fully enjoy the experience...

3.The designers are crap and none of the clothes would look good on any other body but a 22-22-22, hence the skinny model. Skinny model gains acceptance, skinny model goes from glorified coat hanger to universal standard of beauty. Took about 40 years but here we are.

I'm a crew-cut sporting carpenter pants and t-shirts kind of lady so why should I care?

^ Took the words right out of my pie hole.