Upper Class Taste On Beauty And WORKING CLASS Taste On Beauty?

[trapped]

Don't mean to be stereotypical or to stereotype anyone but stereotypes do exist for a reason. Why are there a lot of WORKING CLASS Men who like curvy girls meanwhile on the other end of the spectrum there are a lot of UPPER CLASS Men that like skinny girls? Just curious. There are studies and researches about these too that I cannot remember anymore.




Good Day Gents

 

[LizzieMaine]

Perhaps it's because -- stereotyping unapologetically -- upper class women seldom do their own physical work. They have paid staff to do the washing, raise the kids, clean the house, and other such things. It would be considered declasse for the wife of an upper-class man to have a bit of heft to her, because it implies she actually has to do physical labor. A lean, skinny, pale, angular woman implies that she's the trophy of a man who requires nothing of her other than that she act as a social accessory.

Stereotyping, of course.

 

[Fading Fast]

Not a direct answer to your question, but throughout history, it seems (if I remember correctly some articles I've read over the years) that if food is scares, then curvy / full-figured women were a mark of the upper classes as they could afford the necessary food (and weren't burning calories doing, God forbid, house chores). Also, sometimes it seems the "standard" can be set by a few key members of the upper class - i.e., the king's wife looks like this and, hence, many upper-class women want to look like that.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That was very much the case up thru the nineteenth century. Images began to change during the twentieth century -- while you'll still see the image of the huge-bosomed Margaret Dumont-type dowager in popular culture up until the war era or so, as early as the twenties, the lean, angular, pale Anglo-Saxon type was becoming the upper-class beauty ideal, and the stereotypical working-class woman was becoming a big, beefy gal of obvious European peasant stock, most often Irish, Italian, or Slavic.

Immigration, I'd venture, had a lot to do with this -- the peasantry, so to speak, made up the bulk of immigration into the US in the years before WW1, and formed the backbone of the twentieth century urban working class.

 

[Fading Fast]

I live on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but in the not-affluent East-of-3rd-Avenue section where the socialites would rather die than be seen, but owing to the proximity, I see the UES socialite women all the time and, my God, I do not think three-quarters of them eat, period. So for whatever reason (and Lizzie's thought certainly, IMHO, is at least part of it), being thin is almost a religion to these upper-class NYC women.

They are also referred to as "the ladies who lunch" because all the charity committees they are on / head up meet for luncheons and, more broadly, lunch is when "the women" socialize because their husbands are at work. I always find this funny as most of them don't look like they've eaten a single sandwich in the last decade. There's a sitcom on cable right now "Odd Mom Out" that is mainly about these women - which I enjoy for the parody and, even more so, it is fun (if you are easily amused) to see your neighborhood on TV.

Tan skin has also gone in and out of fashion among the upper classes as when most people worked outside and were regularly tan, the upper classes wanted pale women to show that their women didn't need to work. Then, when vacations became popular, it was fashionable to be tan to show that you could afford to go to a warm climate in the winter. Obviously, I'm not going into all the timelines and details, but you get the idea.

Last thought. I'm not even sure this insane x-ray thin "ideal" is simply about what the upper-class men want in women, the competition seems to be more amongst the women themselves. For example, most men have no idea about women's shoes, but shoes are a bloodsport to UES women. There seems to be a brutal competition for these arbitrary standard that is, IMHO, not simply driven by men's taste, but at least in part by some crazy UES women subculture.

 

[trapped]

Guys.

Yes. Like you guys have pointed out. The irony is that people of The Upper Class from The 1800s valued " BEEFINESS " as a sign of class beauty and emaciation as a symbol of lower class stature. Otherwise is true today. Why and when this happen today? I really wanna know guys.

 

[Fading Fast]

Lizzie touched on the timeline in her post - the 1920s. That is when the flapper became a social phenomenon and they definitely wanted to be thin but also asexual - so much so, that they taped their breast down and idealized the hip-less shape.

It was in part a rejection of their parents' (or mothers') values in that, until then, even thin women tended to look bulky owing to all the Victorian Era undergarments they were wearing and the abundance of fabric and folds in the outer garments.

This is where it gets tricky, IMHO, to ascribe one factor or trigger, but rejecting their parents, feeling freer and more athletic (tennis and golf were becoming popular with upper-class found women) where all part of it. Even "the bob," a short blunt cut hairstyle for women, popular amongst flappers, was both a rejection of their parents value (if you read the literature of the time, the bob was as controversial then as, for some, getting a tattoo is today) and a de-voluming and de-feminizing of a woman's look.

But that was all in a relatively wealthy period for the country. Once the depression hit, looking thin was becoming less fashionable as everybody looked thin owing to there not being enough to eat. The war years were also lean years, so it probably isn't a surprise that full figures (think Marylyn Monroe, Jane Mansfield) became popular in the post-war years - people wanted to put that time behind them and look full-figured and healthy versus the thin depression and war years.

 

[LizzieMaine]

A big part of the postwar full-figured look also had to do with the baby boom. The wide-hipped big-breasted look telegraphed the idea of "I WILL BEAR YOU MANY STRONG CHILDREN," and the Boys From Marketing were pushing that image for all it was worth, especially to middle-class women who were being urged to get out of the workplace and back to the maternity ward.

If you look back to the prewar era, large bosoms were not especially significant. Most of the female stars of the thirties were rather moderately endowed, and surviving film footage of girlie shows at the New York World's Fair show nude dancers and performers who were exceedingly small-breasted by the standards of today. There were exceptions, Mae West being the most prominent, but in general, overt bust fetishism of the sort we see today is largely a postwar development.

 

[GE-Man]

I second Fading Fast. No man wants an anorexic, too skinny woman!
That phenomen of size zero and below is a competition amongst upper-class-woman, because "competition" is an important value within the upper-class.

When men reduce women only to their body... What do they want?
anorexic pl*ym*tes - nonexistent!
anorexic p*rn st*rs - almost nonexistent! (rule 36 applies)