The female shape and the 50-year-old myth

We largely hear about scientists finding new alternative sources of fuel or solutions to our aging problems or cures for our gravest diseases but if you have a more curious scope, you will find other kinds. I did. I found two separate studies that made me think that scientists are really having fun and are getting away with it.

First is a study that makes us rethink whether men’s brains are reduced to simple lusty jellos in the presence of a glorious female figure. Well, no question there — they really become lusty jellos but apparently there is some geometry and physics also involved in the way men look at women. Apparently, it is not mere weight that makes them feel “rewarded” when they look at certain women. This rewarding feeling was described to be akin to drinking alcohol or drugs. What turned out to matter is how this weight is distributed in the body of a woman to make for that classic cola bottle shape of a figure.

I have yet to find out the motivation for this fun study which I am sure they did not have problems recruiting male subjects for. The findings were published in the journal PloS One last Feb. 5 and reported in LiveScience.com last Feb. 22 in a feature by Charles Q. Choi. In the study, the researchers devised a plan that was ingenious. They did not virtually morph female figures to “re-shape” the same females with the same weight. They actually showed their subjects pictures of women who underwent cosmetic surgery which removed fat from their waists and replaced them in their “derrieres” so that their hips were transformed to shapes of what the researchers described as “optimal design.” I am sure the wowed male subjects called those shapes something else but in the interest of science, let us just stick to what the study called “optimal design.”

The experiments showed that when men are evaluating female geometry, their brain parts — the ones that do “simple visual evaluations of size and shape” — get activated. Because of this, the researchers speculated that the men’s preferences for optimally designed women may not be really deep in the fundamental wiring of the brain (passed on by what our ancestors learned) but more of what society promotes via media. A well-sculpted female figure may have been a reliable sign of overall health over the course of human history and as such, it was biologically necessary for men to recognize these. But what a “well-sculpted” female figure really means in terms of dimensions has varied across societies and across time so gentlemen, exercise care in what you consider “optimal design,” especially when your geometrically challenged female partner is nearby.

I think it is funny to describe a woman’s shape like we would a piece of furniture or an interactive exhibit. I am too amused to consider it offensive. I think it is just naïve for anyone to call a woman as either possessing an optimal design or a problematic one, like describing a statue. Treat any woman in your life as a statue she would be bound to treat you like her maintenance worker. “Design” also implies that there was some hand that guided the contours of either a glorious or a grotesque shape. If you believe that, then you have not really listened to enough women in your life talk about how our shape is more of a daily struggle to delay entropy (the scientific principle that explains why everything moves from order to disorder.)

The other study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine early this year was equally revealing the other way. They were looking for something in the female body and claimed they looked everywhere for it and they just could not find it. It was also reported in BBC online Jan. 4.

What is it? Let us just say that it is what the Galapagos Islands is to a biologist trying to find life in its rawest, most active spot. It is the G-spot (named after the German gynecologist Ernst Gräfenberg who technically described its coordinates). The researchers from King’s College London, after probing that area in the female terrain, raised their hands and basically gave up and said, “We could not find it.”

I don’t think the researchers involved were all male. If they were, we would have to frown as men are generally not known to find medium-sized mammals inside the refrigerator. The study had 1,800 women tested and announced that what many have been claiming for 50 years now is a myth. But the existence of this spot apparently is not being given up by Italian scientists who were also reported in BBC online last Jan. 4 to be ready to prove it exists using ultrasound technology. In science, when scientists could not find something, it is OK to say “it does not exist.”  It is up to the later studies if they can find it and say “there you go.” So the search goes on. I think the folks at the IgNobel Prizes will surely spot this good candidate of a study.

This column, as any, owes its ideas to many things that have crossed my funny brain but this week’s has been especially brought to you by scientists who embark on such unique adventures into our own biology and keep a straight face long enough to have them published.

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