Someone once told me I was short-legged. I remember the incident well, on account of its oddness. A woman whom I had just met hollered across the room to inform me that my legs were short. Shorter, indeed, than she had expected.
What do you say to that? Why did she have expectations about my legs? My mind crowded with confusion, mild embarrassment, unanswerable questions. I was stumped, apparently literally.
But according to new scientific research – most likely unbeknownst to her – she was complimenting me on my masculinity indicators.
It's nice when science is on your side, when the vagaries of perception and personal preference can be put aside, and the scientific facts of the matter laid bare. Contrary to the impression so many of us were labouring under, scientists from Brunel University have revealed that physical attraction is all down to bodily symmetry. Oh yes, and big tits.
The thing here, though, is that big breasts are not held to be attractive merely because they are big breasts, but because they are powerful signifiers, evolved to advertise to potential mates a bodily symmetry that in the normal run of things would be imperceptible. As Dr William Brown, the lead researcher on the project, put it, "we found that shorter, slimmer females with long slender legs, a curvy figure and larger breasts are more attractive."
Now, it's hard to question the value of research when it is reported in this way. Certainly, from a PR point of view, if it gets around school corridors that scientific research can lead to a career deliberating which kind of breasts you find most attractive, take-up of science GCSEs will receive a considerable and well-deserved boost.
But for all the cleverness of the measuring machine employed in the experiments, uniquely accurate in its ability to measure irregular 3D forms, it seems legitimate to ask whether very much has been proved. The conceptions of gender offered, and redeployed as physiological norms, are neither novel nor permitting of anything like the requisite complexity.
Instead, such research tends to be interpreted as suggesting that aspects of our perceptual awareness – such as what and whom we find attractive, beautiful or sexy (not that these qualities should necessarily be conflated, which they often are) – are merely the chimerical clothes of processes which "in reality" are genetic and subconscious.
Norms of physical attractiveness vary enormously across culture and time. One indication of how complex our sense of physical attraction has become is that, among both men and women, norms of sexiness and beauty seem to have separated to an almost radical degree. Very few of the flat-chested, frighteningly elongated fashion models upon whom so much of the our culture's desires focus themselves seem at all promising from a reproductive point of view. As for the men, many of them look pretty much like the women. Meanwhile, at the 'glamour' end of the modelling trade, one regularly finds breasts paraded which seem to signify nourishment not so much for one's own potential offspring as for that of the local osteopath.
It is interesting that Stone Age representations of ideal femininity – or at least what are taken to be such – correspond in some ways to the norms identified in this latest research. Certainly the so-called Venus of Willendorf had big enough breasts. But if one searches for a paragon of womanly excellence among today's population, the only group to whom Frau Willendorf actually bares much resemblance are female weightlifters – fine athletes, but hardly exemplars of an hourglass physiognomy.
I watched the thoroughly gripping final of one of the women's Olympic weightlifting competition. Here are women whom, if one saw them on the bus – especially nowadays when obesity has joined the swelling ranks of social crimes – one would hardly suspect to be athletes. But from the peerless champion, the Korean Jang Miran, to the towering Australian Deborah Lovely and the simply gargantuan runner-up, Ukranian Olha Korobka (at 167kg, the heaviest athlete, male or female, in the entire games), these women, with their magnificent wobbling midriffs, enormous, vibrant bellies and expansive thighs that ripple gently in balanced absorption of the shock of lifting, these women, when it comes to this particular field of human endeavour, are paragons of perfection. Watching them work, as the emotion and exhilaration animates the features lightly etched into the mountains of supple flesh, one realises these women are not just extraordinary: they are beautiful, fine and supremely attractive.
It's true that when my wife came home I refrained from force-feeding her spaghetti carbonara and suggesting a career change. But it doesn't take long to realise that, among human beings, beauty and sexual attractiveness can be found in an immense variety of forms. Indeed, this is one of the most wonderful things about being human: that we can change our minds about things.
Social forces and pressures that make us want to be normal are damaging enough already, especially when the norms are sent into ridiculous inflation by mass marketed images of universal beauty. But when such norms are backed up by science – to the extent that people whom society already considers to be ugly find that this ugliness relates to genetic or even ante- and post-natal "defects", as the report from Brunel seems to suggest – they become more pervasive and forceful still.
So next time the scientists compliment us on our short legs, rather than get out the callipers to see how Marilyn Monroe squares up to Angelina Jolie, we should try harder to remember that being human isn't all about being normal. Beauty pertains, after all, not to norms but to individuals, and how can you be individual if all you are is normal?