As a matter of fact, our artificial coverings have become so much a part of our life that one may perhaps be allowed to apply the methods of the naturalist to their consideration, and deal with them as if they were part and parcel of the creature which wears them.
The Heritage of Dress, Wilfred Mark Webb, 1908
‘Buying bigger jeans feels to me like giving up. I don’t know why. I have a real fixation with them. They’re my benchmark.’
Anonymous interviewee ‘D’
In Florence’s Brancacci Chapel hides a true landmark of Western art – a cycle of biblical frescoes painted onto wet plaster around 1424. The paintings’ remarkable naturalness and emotional power remain startling today, especially one particular image by Masaccio of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Yet when I visited the chapel many years ago, I was just as struck by the inept way in which later, more prudish artists had attempted to cover the naked figures’ genitals with crudely applied fig leaves. Since then, the fresco has been restored and the universal mother and father have regained their former glorious nudity, even though Genesis states that, ‘Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them’.
Of all the animals in existence, only humans seem to feel the compulsion to wear clothes – and anything unique to our species is inherently intriguing. Habitual complete nakedness is rare among human societies, yet not only do humans wear clothes, but they often wear far more extensive and elaborate clothes than are necessary simply to perform clothing’s basic functions. Our bodies are the aspects of ourselves which we present to the world, and clothes are a dramatic artificial modification of that presentation process. And for women especially, clothes are more about framing, emphasising, enhancing or concealing the shape of the body than the practicalities of keeping warm, and preventing unwanted wobblings and exposures of the flesh.
Of course the clothes women wear, along with other forms of appearance-modification such as makeup, depilation, piercings, tattoos and surgery, reflect the personal choices they make to create the ‘personal billboard’ which I first mentioned in the introduction to this book. And this element of choice is what makes them so interesting. In our quest to find out why women think about their bodies so much, it was important to investigate how those bodies evolved, how they develop, and how they affect health, mind and appetite – yet women do not have much control over those things. To some extent, women must make do with the body in which they happen to exist. Yes, they can decide to change their weight or tone up particular areas, but those things take time and frequently do not work, and surgery is risky and expensive. In contrast, clothes allow us to study what women do when they are able to freely alter their personal billboard – day by day, as they please.
We do not know when clothes were invented, or what form the first clothes took. Some ancient depictions of the human form suggest that ornamentation such as jewellery may have preceded clothes. We also assume that humans had lost most of their body hair before clothes first made an appearance, but again, this is conjecture.
In an attempt to find out when humans first started wearing clothes, scientists have turned to a strange quarter for help: lice. Because all lice live their lives among hairs or under clothes, it is thought that human body lice could not evolve until clothes were in widespread use. Body lice probably evolved from head lice, and the two species are certainly similar to look at, yet they each show distinct differences in behaviour – when placed on a human belly, head lice walk up, and body lice walk sideways (a more distantly related third species, the pubic louse, menacingly walks down). Thus it is argued that by determining the epoch in which head and body lice went their separate evolutionary ways, we can estimate the time when clothing was invented. Unfortunately, these estimates are inconclusive, putting the divergence of the two species anywhere between 40,000 and 110,000 years ago, and some still claim that clothes may have originated even earlier.
Clothing has three functions – some simple, some complex. It is thought that the first to emerge was concealment of particular parts of the body which were considered ‘private’ – a concept unknown in other animals. Around the world, those parts most often include the genitals, the bottom, and the female breasts – the regions covered by a bikini, in fact. There are of course cultural variations on this theme: on Brazilian beaches, for example, wearing a thong bikini that exposes the buttocks is considered far more ‘mainstream’ than on European beaches, whereas going topless is much more frowned upon – and is in fact illegal. At the other extreme, in some Muslim communities, it is believed that all of a women’s body should be covered, and mesh and wire frames may even be used to cover the eyes. And it was not so long ago that even the exposure of a female ankle was considered risqué in European society.
Clothing may actually be viewed as an enhancement of an ancient tendency for female body concealment to be built into human biology and behaviour. When humans started walking upright, the female genitals became ‘hidden’ between the thighs in a way completely unlike other primates. This ‘vulvo-cryptic’ appearance was further enhanced by the fact that the pubic area is one of the few regions of the female human body which still bear hair. Sex is also a much more private activity in humans than in other animals – although one could argue that bipedalism rendered men’s genitals more exposed, and indeed in some societies the function of male genital coverings is not to conceal the penis but to emphasise it, or even hold it in a mock-erect position.
The human brain can make anything complicated if it wants to, so body concealment has led to some paradoxical effects and it comes with a flip-side: shame and embarrassment at one’s nakedness. Indeed, in human societies from hot regions who use body paint instead of clothes, being seen in public without one’s paint is considered just as embarrassing as someone in the West appearing without clothes. However, the opposite can also be true, and nakedness is sometimes controversially used as a symbol of power and confidence by women in the West – a badge of their freedom.
A particularly powerful effect of concealment is that heterosexual men find female concealment arousing. Sexual encounters, pornography and men’s fantasies all frequently involve an almost ceremonial removal of women’s clothes as a prelude to real or imagined sex. In addition, women frequently retain some items of clothing during sex at their partners’ request – and of course those clothes may also make them feel sexier, or may reassure them by concealing some perceived bodily imperfection. However, they may also be baffled (or worried) that their paramour prefers them to wear them. Indeed, many men admit that they often find women sexier with their clothes on – the photographer David Bailey, best known for photographing beautiful women in the 1960s, once commented that he frequently only became sexually attracted to his previously-naked models once they were leaving his studio in their miniskirt and sweater. Many sexual fetishes also relate to the complex links between clothing or shoes and concealment, exposure, vulnerability, power and pleasure. In humans, sex is uniquely centred within our bizarrely complex (even men’s) brains to the extent that the promise of concealment, and delayed gratification, may overwhelm the immediate desire to copulate with a naked woman.
The second function of clothing is the most mundane: clothes and shoes are a good way to protect the skin against cold, heat, ultraviolet light, abrasion, puncture and biting insects. Although protective clothing is sometimes seen as socially and sexually neutral, when it becomes a uniform we can still apply social interpretations to it – think of doctors’ white coats, or street-cleaners’ reflective jackets. Protective clothing may also become imbued with sexiness if people come to link it to masculinity (for example, firefighters) or femininity (such as old-style nurses’ uniforms). If you think I have made this stuff up, visit uniformdating.com, or consider how many strippers arrive at the party dressed as accountants or, sad to say, university lecturers.
The third function of clothing is the most complex of all, and will monopolise most of this chapter: the alteration of appearance to signal something to other people. As we will see, women use clothing to emphasise parts of their body, flatter them, augment them, or conversely to hide them. They also use clothes to express their sexual status – their femaleness, maturity and availability may all be independently signalled. For example, a woman in her wedding dress is clearly stating that she is definitely feminine, she is mature yet not too mature to have many reproductive years ahead of her, and she is not (and has not been) available for sexual advances by all and sundry.
In the West there is also a fundamental asymmetry between the sexes in that it is often socially acceptable for women to wear men’s clothes, but not for men to wear women’s. Some suggest this is about appropriation of power or submission, but I am not so sure. Why indeed would most young men be happy for their girlfriend to slide out of bed and pull on their boxer shorts to go and make the coffee, while most young women would react rather differently if their boyfriend wriggled into their thong to do the same thing? The fact that women are often more judged on the basis of their shape and appearance makes it particularly remarkable that in the West it is men who are more constrained by the gender-specificity of clothes.
Expressing social status is also important, and teenagers and adults alike use clothes and fashion to express their membership of particular social cliques. Over time, social groups tend to homogenise their clothing – and this is a big issue for immigrant communities, who must actively decide whether to retain their previous dress style, or express their integration by changing to the prevailing ‘indigenous’ styles. Clothes can also be used to express formality (people usually laugh when I wear a suit and tie, for some reason), but also social rank and financial wealth – some clothes look ‘high-status’ and some look expensive, and many people look to fashion brands to send out immediate signals about the cost of their outfit. Status and wealth are not the same, of course – people can be surprisingly negative about others who appear ‘nouveau-riche’, and some very high-status people deliberately ‘dress down’, albeit sometimes with a knowing refinement.
As soon as children are born, we start to train them about the social role of clothes – babies are dressed in different colours and different styles according to who their parents want them to be, and who they believe themselves to be. Before the age of ten, children are already acutely aware of the importance of fashion, brands, and the social messages which clothes convey. They understand that they may be accepted, admired, excluded, teased or bullied because of what they wear, and this is especially true for girls.
Despite pressure to conform, children also learn that clothes are a way of expressing individuality – and girls quickly become adept at daily reconstructing their visual appearance according to what they want others to think of them. And that changes all the time – women wear different clothes on different days depending on how they view their body shape. Far more than men, women complain of having ‘fat days’ and adjust their clothes to their prevailing internal body image. Also, many women use tightness and looseness of clothes as their primary method of assessing their body shape, and studies show that the prime motivation for many women to change their body shape is to fit into certain ‘bellwether’ clothes. Jeans seem to be especially important in this respect, as my interviewees told me:
I do have some jeans that I can’t get into. They are tiny jeans, though.
Anonymous interviewee ‘A’
It’s my clothes that tell me if I’ve gained weight – it’s if my jeans are tight.
Anonymous interviewee ‘B’
I’ve got one pair of jeans that fits, and one pair that’s too small at the moment – I keep them because I will get back into them.
Anonymous interviewee ‘C’
If I’m going out for the night and I put on a pair of jeans and they don’t fit, than that’s the night ruined. One year my jeans made me cry on New Year’s Eve.
Anonymous interviewee ‘D’
In other words, clothes are far more than a passive external covering – they become part of their wearer’s psychology.
One of the most important ways women use clothes is to alter the visual appearance of their body shape. Every week, millions of words are printed about how various items of clothing can emphasise what women wish to emphasise and conceal what they wish to conceal. However, the basic morphological rules of women’s clothing are actually very simple.
I suggest that the female body-to-be-clothed is best viewed as an interconnected set of globose and cylindrical elements. Women instinctively want certain body parts to appear to be approximately spherical, such as breasts and buttocks, but want others to be elongated cylinders, such as legs, arms, neck and torso – and men like them to look like that too. This ‘ball and stick’ model of female body appearance may seem alarmingly simplistic, but it goes a long way towards explaining why women wear the clothes they do.
First, the globular bits. In earlier chapters, I explained how globular fat-laden buttocks and breasts evolved because they performed useful functions, or because they were sexually selected by men. Women consider them distinctively feminine and men find them sexually attractive, so they are a prime target for sculpting and emphasis by clothes. Because the globular elements of women’s bodies are not very structurally resistant to gravity – they sag with age, in other words – clothes often hoist them up to give the impression of youthful pertness. Skirts, jeans and, more recently, underwear and tights are designed with precisely this aim in mind – men’s jeans may leave their buttocks looking flat and formless, but women’s jeans are designed with structural intent.
For centuries in the West, corsets were the most common way to push bottoms out and breasts up and forward into spherical parodies of their natural appearance, but although cinched waists remain, it is the bra that has now taken over. We once thought that the bra was a relatively recent invention, but that changed with the 2008 discovery of remarkably modern-looking fifteenth-century bras at Lemburg Castle in the Austrian Tyrol. Although moth-eaten, these bras include all the main components of their modern descendants, even including lace trims – suggesting that bras may have supported women’s breasts for more of human history than we had previously thought.
As I mentioned in the introduction to this book, human females are unique in requiring mammary support if they wish to run without discomfort. However, most women’s breasts are not large enough to contact each other and form a cleavage without artificial support, and here again the bra comes to the rescue. Some modern bras can push the breasts together as well as upwards, and thus can give almost any woman a cleavage – ‘Hello Boys,’ as the Wonderbra advert once proclaimed, or ‘Look me in the eyes and tell me that you love me.’. And of course, bras confer the additional advantage of preserving the globular appearance of the youthful breast as the decades tick past, as well as emphasising it on a daily basis.
In my ball-and-stick theory, clothes not only support the globular elements of the body, but they also expose them to varying extents. Many skirts, trousers and tops contour tightly around the buttocks and breasts, and it has also been fashionable over the centuries to uncover varying expanses of breast. The upper part of the breasts has often been exposed by necklines of differing shapes and profundity, and the French even have a word – décolletage – for the region of ‘non-breast’ exposed above the neckline to give a provocative hint of what lies below. Also, modern advances in clothing technology now mean that women – especially on the Hollywood red carpet – can expose almost every non-areolar part of their breasts if they wish. However, the more the breast is exposed, the less scope there is for support, and these more dramatic feats of mammary exposure might be interpreted as individual women’s confident assertion that the breasts involved do not ‘need’ such support.
The final effect of clothes on women’s globular bits is that they define them – they demarcate them from neighbouring regions. Marking the boundaries between globular and cylindrical parts of the body has the effect of emphasising both – for example using necklines to set a boundary between neck and breasts. The lower boundary of the breasts is anatomically more clear anyway, but the upper edge of corsets gives it still greater definition, as does the more recent trend for women to wear opaque bras beneath sheer tops.
The lower boundary of the buttocks is again anatomically marked by an obvious skin fold, but many skirts and trousers tighten at this boundary to more clearly separate the buttocks from the cylindrical legs below. The upper boundary of the buttocks is more vague, which means that women can select from a variety of waistlines to visually define that boundary. Young western women are also increasingly lowering their waistline to expose the upper part of their buttocks, their underwear, or even the upper extremity of their ‘intergluteal cleft’, in an echo of what they have done with their breasts for centuries. It is striking that young men have also taken to wearing trousers which slip down over their buttocks, although in their case the buttocks usually remain resolutely covered by underwear – perhaps exposed male upper buttocks have too many connotations of crouching low-caste manual labourers. In fact, because men have flatter buttocks their trousers fall down much more easily, whereas the exposure of women’s rounded buttocks must by its nature be somewhat deliberate, contrived.
Finally, the ultimate buttock-definers are miniskirts and hotpants – those symbols of confident, modern femaleness. Their upper and lower bounds mark precisely where a women wants her buttocks to be seen to start and end – providing a clear demarcation from cylindrical torso and legs, especially if the midriff and thighs are bare.
The ‘sticks’ of my ball-and-stick model are the near-cylindrical elements of the female body – the neck, torso, arms and legs.
In Chapter 1 I mentioned that the small female ribcage leaves space for a relatively longer neck, and of course women often deliberately draw attention to it with necklaces, chokers and the necklines of their clothes. Famously, the Kayan women of Burma further lengthen their necks by squashing their collarbones down by the use of multiple large metal neck-rings. The small female thorax, and the absence of men’s shoulder muscularity – which probably evolved as an adaptation for throwing in these creatures who are more wedge-slab-and-lump than ball-and-stick – also mean that women’s shoulders are small and smooth. However, women more often wear clothing which exposes the shoulders, probably to emphasise just how small and rounded they are, and thus how little space their body occupies. This is, of course, the convention which was entirely subverted in the 1980s when women concealed and extended their small shoulders with shoulder pads and angular polygons of fabric, presumably to assert their confidence in a male-dominated world.
The small female ribcage also leaves space for a distinctively long and cylindrical (albeit flattened front-to-back) abdomen, which can be emphasised by corsetry or outfits in which the midriff is exposed or covered only by transparent material. Women also tend to twist and emphasise their abdominal region when they are flirting. The abdomen is a strangely conflicted area, however, because its long cylindrical form, which denotes youth and slimness, is intermittently replaced by a much more globose pregnant form, signalling fertility and health. No matter how utterly different these two shapes are, both are attractive to women and men, so the abdomen is given special dispensation to alternate between ‘ball’ and ‘stick’ configurations, as female biology flips between non-pregnant and pregnant modes.
However, clothing the pregnant abdomen presents particular challenges, and women are often offered a choice between voluminous maternity wear which conceals pregnancy, and shapeless androgynous clothes which defeminize it. In recent years, a realisation that sex, attractiveness and pregnancy are not mutually exclusive has led more women to wear contoured clothes during pregnancy – emphasising their globular abdomen by dint of wearing similar clothes to the ones they wore before they were pregnant. Despite this trend, many people still react negatively to women who expose their pregnant belly, unless it is in an ‘acceptable and unavoidable’ context, such as the beach. The furore surrounding the famous image of a naked pregnant Demi Moore which appeared on a 1991 cover of Vanity Fair is testament to the unease which can be induced by a juxtaposition of sexuality, motherhood and exposure.
The arms and legs are the body’s most obviously cylindrical components, but I have not discussed them much yet. They are especially cylindrical in women because larger amounts of subcutaneous fat and less muscle mass mean that the contours of women’s limbs are more even and straight. Also, due to hormonal differences during childhood and adolescence, women’s hands and feet are relatively smaller than men’s, so their cylindrical limbs are not terminated by the great hammy fists and plodding feet seen in men.
The distinctively smooth, cylindrical nature of female limbs is a major reason why women’s clothing exposes more of their arms and legs. Hosiery, especially, is important in enhancing the cylindricality of the legs, and has other functions too – artificially homogenising skin tone, allowing women’s legs to remain exposed in cold weather, and toying with exposure and concealment. The popularity of narrow trousers, pencils skirts and long boots shows just how important cylindrical legs are in the expression of femaleness, but there are two further reasons why women emphasise their legs so much.
The first of these is, I think, over-emphasised in the scientific literature. In the West we assume that men are attracted to women with long legs, but the evidence for this is equivocal. Studies show that men prefer female bodies with average, or slightly-longer-than-average legs (the measure used is actually the leg–body ratio). However, this preference is weak, and does not seem to be universal across the globe, so I suspect that it may be the result of conditioning of Western men rather than any deep biological imperative. But the debate continues, and data suggest that women with longer legs are at less risk of obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, liver disease and some cancers. One Chinese study even suggested that they tend to have more children. Thus it remains possible that men could indeed be pre-programmed to seek long-legged women for the genetic and health benefits they possess, and presumably confer on their leggy offspring.
However, I believe the main reason why women’s legs are more often exposed than men’s is that even if men do not prefer sexual partners with long legs, it makes a great deal of sense for them to choose women with straight legs. Having straight legs not only implies that a woman carries good developmental genes, but also shows that she was well nourished as she grew up – presumably by parents who have bequeathed their good child-feeding genes to her. Until surprisingly recently, limb deformities caused by dietary deficiencies were extremely common in the human population, so leg straightness was a highly salient trait for men to be attracted to. Indeed, a historical relic of this obsession survives in the name given to the entire branch of medicine involved with musculoskeletal disorders: ‘orthopaedics’ means ‘straight-legged children’. Thus leg straightness, not length, is the most important contributor to women’s attractive limb cylindricality – and it does not matter how light or heavy that woman is. Men have been selected for millions of years to identify straight female legs, no matter how skinny or curvy they are. This urge probably also explains why men find women’s stride and gait attractive.
High-heeled shoes are the most common artificial means by which women emphasise their legs, even if those legs themselves are covered. We are often told that women wear high heels to make their bottoms protrude and wiggle alluringly from side to side – think of Marilyn Monroe teetering down the station platform in Some Like It Hot. However, the biomechanical evidence for this is poor. As we saw in Chapter 1, a bowed lower back with protruded buttocks is indeed a distinctively human characteristic especially pronounced in women, but there is no evidence that high heels make women bend their lower spines forward or stick their bottoms out more. If anything, research suggests that they bow their spines less. Similarly, while women exhibit more swinging and rotational movement of their pelvis as they walk, kinematic studies show that high heels do not increase those movements, although they may induce a very small ‘rocking backwards and forwards’ movement in the pelvis.
Instead, I suggest that women wear heels for completely different reasons. First, they force them to walk slowly, and with shorter steps, thus emphasising those two characteristic features of female locomotion. One biomechanical study demonstrated that women walk like this to compensate for the instability inherent in high heels – they are not trying to walk in an ultra-feminine way: they are simply trying not to fall over. The second reason for wearing high heels is that tilting the foot makes it take up less horizontal space, thus creating the illusion that it is smaller. Relatively small feet are also a distinctive feature of women, and have been shown to be attractive to men in many different cultures around the world – indeed, some cultures resort to foot-binding to artificially shorten girls’ feet. The third reason for wearing high-heeled shoes is that the foot is tilted to become more vertical. This creates a further illusion that the foot has been somehow incorporated into the cylindrical portion of the limb, making it appear longer (which may or may not be desirable to men) and straighter (which definitely is). The same applies to long gloves, which make the hands appear smaller by ‘incorporating’ them into those alluring arm-cylinders.
Women put up with a lot when they wear heels. They alter their gait so that hips and knees must bend and straighten more; there is more sideways movement at the knee and ankle; the foot rotates differently when it strikes the ground; and there is more stress on the knee, which may cause arthritis in later life. Muscle activity is greater, leading to rapid fatigue, and venous blood ascends the legs more sluggishly. It is believed that the brain has to completely rewire its locomotor control systems to cope with high-heeled shoes, and this could have knock-on effects on other brain processes – one rather far-fetched scientific paper even suggested that wearing high-heeled shoes is linked to schizophrenia. And in a triumph of excessive accuracy, it has been calculated that the average pair of high heels causes pain after being worn for 66 minutes and 48 seconds. In another study a third of women admitted to dancing barefoot at parties because their high heels hurt too much, and a third admitted to having walked home barefoot for the same reason.
Yet the urge to meld the foot into the leg-cylinder must be strong because one-third of women also admit to buying high-heeled shoes which are too small for them, simply because they are beautiful. And indeed, high-heeled shoes are often beautiful objects in themselves, and the more expensive they are, the more likely they are to be presented like fetish-objects in smart boutiques. The average Western woman owns more than twice as many pairs of shoes as the average man, and they certainly seem to be comfort items – one study showed that women who react with greater insecurity to images of attractive female bodies tend to own more shoes.
All in all, the ball-and-stick model of clothing the female body goes a long way towards explaining how and why women use clothes to emphasise, augment or conceal their body shapes. Yet one further aspect of clothing which often irritates and mystifies women is why fashion models are so skinny – why they are all stick and no balls, as it were. Modelling clothes on exceptionally slim women could be argued to be counterproductive – it makes it difficult for most women to imagine what they themselves would look like in those clothes, and it probably makes many assume that the clothes are ‘not for them’.
Of course, stick-thin models could all be the result of the old problem, the cult of slimness, although that would not explain why fashion models are usually thinner than actresses or television presenters. However, fashion models are employed to sell fabric, not bodies, stories or information, and much of the imagery of fashion is akin to ‘fabric porn’, with material flowing, floating and billowing as models move, often in filmic slow-motion. And thin models are like human coat hangers from which fabrics – the product – can hang unimpeded, with no distracting curves on which to get snagged. Fashion is about advertising and like all advertising its imagery – the clothes, the bodies and the lifestyle it peddles – is somewhat removed from the real world.
In addition to manipulating the ball-and-stick system, women can also alter the appearance of the shape of their bodies by exploiting the colours and patterns of fabric. Studies show that women tend to feel more strongly about the colours of clothes than men do, and there seem to be differences – either innate or learnt – between colour preferences in the two sexes. In surveys, women are more likely to express a preference for particular favourite colours, although those favourites are more likely to be pale and pastel shades, than the simple bright colours which men prefer. However, colour is important to both sexes, and in one study in which people were asked to select their favourites from a series of pictures of women wearing various outfits, the most common reason for liking or disliking the clothes was their colour. There also seemed to be a remarkable consensus between the experimental subjects and a panel of fashion ‘experts’ as to which colours looked best.
Even before they can speak, there is evidence that babies prefer red, blue and purple, yet dislike pink. There has been a great deal of argument about why little girls get dressed in pink and little boys get dressed in blue, and this issue is important because gender-specific colouring persists throughout life. Most theories have focused on the link between blue clothes and the greater ‘value’ of male children – blue pigments made from minerals such as lapis lazuli or azurite were historically more rare and expensive than pinks, and perhaps even considered ‘regal’. Blue was the colour of the sky and spirituality, so blue may have been thought to protect valuable boy-children from danger (although families throughout history have dressed their young sons like girls to trick evil spirits into not considering them worth harming).
I suggest that dressing girls in pink is actually the first stage in the deliberate packaging of the Caucasian female body as something to be exposed and viewed. Pink is, obviously, very close to Caucasian skin colour – it is almost like not wearing clothes at all. And as soon as toddlers wear clothes, little girls are more likely to expose their legs and arms than little boys. As we have seen, this continues into adulthood, with women’s clothing exposing greater expanses of leg, arm, neck, back, chest and midriff than men’s. Women’s clothes enhance this sense of exposure with lace and other semi-opaque materials rarely seen in men’s clothes – indeed, men’s clothes are usually distinct, blocky shapes, with clear edges and boundaries which emphasise their ‘wedge-slab-and-lump’ body shape. So pinkness is just another way in which the female body is made to inhabit the marginal zone between being clothed and exposed. And ‘nude’ fabrics and shoes, which have become increasingly popular in recent years, take this process to its logical conclusion, by clothing women in a colour explicitly designed to look like it is not even there.
It seems rather hypocritical that women are told to cover their modesty, yet continually pretend to expose themselves. However, pink and red may also have deeper biological and psychological effects. Most mammalian species can discern colour – pet cats and dogs can, hoofed animals can, and fruit bats are probably just as colour-discriminating as we are. In many species the colour red is attractive to males – so red is often used as a sexual lure by females. It may not seem likely that this phenomenon could extend to humans, but studies show that wearing red makes men see women as more sexually desirable, although not more kind, intelligent or likeable – it is, after all the colour most associated with the vamp or femme fatale. Conversely, wearing red does not seem to affect women’s perceptions of each other. But when women were asked to select a picture of themselves to put on their web profile, those who had previously said they were interested in finding a sexual partner were statistically more likely to choose an image in which they were wearing red. Similarly, women selecting pictures to place on a dating website oriented towards relatively casual sexual relationships were more likely to choose a red- or pink-clad picture than women registering for a dating website focusing more on long-term relationships.
In fact, there is increasing evidence that women use coloured clothing to send men signals about sex and fertility. Humans are exceptional among mammals in that women do not exhibit obvious phases of oestrus or ‘heat’ – distinct time-windows of sexual receptivity around the time of ovulation – almost all other animals do, including our closest relatives, the chimp and gorilla. Thus human males are effectively kept in the dark about female fertility. Indeed, there is good evidence that non-scientific human societies do not actually know when women are most fertile – the ancient Greeks thought women conceived when menstruating, and present-day Hadza hunter-gatherers still believe that women are most fertile immediately after menstruation.
However, women do seem to use clothing – largely unconsciously – as a way to give men some heavy visual hints about their fertility. For example, men rate women’s clothing choices as more attractive at times of peak fertility – and cyclic fluctuations in the perceived attractiveness of clothing are greater in single women. Women’s oestrogen levels correlate strongly with the tightness of their clothes and how much skin they expose at social events, and their stated desire for sex correlates with the sheerness of their clothes. Finally, women are three times more likely to wear red or pink around the time of ovulation.
But it’s not just red that sends out signals: white and black also speak loud and clear. White clothes provide a very clear body outline, and contrast strongly with dark and tanned skin, and it is for this reason that women tend to wear white when they are feeling confident. However, black is the most frequently worn colour of all, partly because it does not clash with anything, but also because it serves other, sometimes contradictory purposes. During the day it provides a bold outline, while at night it does the opposite, making the body seem smaller. Also, although it provides strong contrast with pale skin, a predominantly black outfit provides almost no contrast across the body, so women can use it to conceal perceived body-shape imperfections. This double-nature of black probably explains why it is so popular, and especially why the ‘little black dress’ has become almost a uniform of smart, sexy femininity – it reduces the apparent size of the body, emphasises the globularity of the buttocks, accentuates and exposes the cylindricality of the limbs, exposes an acceptable amount of cleavage, yet cannot look chromatically gaudy.
Indeed, women anecdotally report that they feel better about themselves when they wear red and black, and this may have unexpected effects. In one study, women were photographed wearing different colours, and then those images were cropped so that their clothes were not visible. When other people were asked to rate their attractiveness, women wearing red and black were considered more attractive, even when their clothes could not be seen – so presumably wearing those colours makes women appear visibly relaxed, confident or happy. Wearing black and red really does seem to make women ‘act beautiful’.
Women are also not averse to using optical illusions to alter their apparent body shape. Perhaps the most simple example of this is the recent trend for dresses to include elongated triangular panels of sharply contrasting dark fabric which ‘indent’ the visual appearance of the sides of the body to make the waist look narrow. Yet the most common way in which women attempt to fool the casual observer is by wearing clothes with vertical stripes in the belief that this will make them look taller or thinner. This is actually based on a complete misunderstanding of what is called the Helmholz illusion. In fact, the nineteenth century scientist Hermann von Helmholz actually noted that vertical stripes make an object appear shorter and squatter than it is, whereas horizontal lines make it look taller and thinner. The illusion is a very real one, and works with bodies just as well as with other shapes. It is unclear why the fashion industry got it so utterly wrong.
Beyond clothing, there are several other forms of female self-alteration, ranging from the mild to the unnatural or invasive.
The first of these is skin-colouring. Even more than the clothing industry, the cosmetics industry aggressively promotes the idea of a visual ideal to which women should conform, and that to conform they must conceal their blemishes. Cosmetics companies frequently use phrases like ‘airbrush’ and ‘age rescue’ in the names of their products. And, whether or not the science behind these claims is plausible, it seems that wearing cosmetics does consistently improve women’s assessments of their own attractiveness – it is no wonder that many women refer to their makeup as war-paint. Makeup makes men rate pictures of women as more attractive too, even if they are exposed to those pictures for as little as one-quarter of a second.
One of the main functions of makeup – for the face, but increasingly for the body – is to homogenize skin tone, something which we instinctively associate with health, youth and stubble-less femininity. Also, eye-tracking studies show that people’s gaze dwells longer on faces with an even skin tone, even though there is actually less surface detail to look at – the observer basks in a reflected featureless glow.
Modifying skin colour transmits several different messages. Paleness is seen as an attractive ideal for women in most human societies, suggesting that it is a preference which has deep biological and evolutionary roots. Indeed, a whole skin-whitening industry has developed, focused on darker-skinned ethnic groups. Paleness is probably a strong psychological indicator of femaleness, because male sex hormones tend to darken the skin. Indeed, this male desire for paleness has been claimed to explain the surprising speed with which human populations emigrating from sun-drenched Africa lost their skin pigment. Genetic studies suggest that Europeans and East Asians independently and rapidly lost much of their skin melanin, despite the fact that it still confers considerable protection from the sun even in temperate zones – and the speed of this pigment loss may be explained by sexual selection of pale mates by men. It was once thought that this process also explained the evolution of blond hair, although there is no evidence that men have an inbuilt preference for blondes, whatever Marilyn might have claimed. Only 2 per cent of the world’s women are blonde, and studies suggest that men are attracted to blondeness simply because it is unusual.
Pale skin also creates a greater contrast with facial features, nipples, pubic hair and genitals, and this contrast is in itself attractive to men. Skin contrast is greater in unmade-up women than in men, and makeup further enhances this feminine contrast by darkening eyes and mouth, and making skin paler. For example, computer-generated images of androgynous people can be made to appear more feminine or masculine to independent observers simply by increasing or decreasing their colour-contrast. Contrast is also enhanced by reddening the lips to mimic the effects of oestrogen or sexual arousal. In this context, the cheekbones seem to qualify as facial features too, as they are also often blushed with an artificial mimic of a womanly oestrogenic glow to set them apart from the surrounding skin.
If pallor is universally attractive, then it seems strange that suntans go through phases of being considered beautiful. However, tanning is not considered desirable in most human cultures, and even in the West it was viewed as a sign of a life of low-prestige outdoor labour until relatively recently. With the advent of Riviera holidays and Mediterranean cruises in the 1920s, tans became associated with affluence, leisure and the jet-set lifestyle – and this is presumably why cheap, inept artificial tans entirely negate tanning’s allure. I would also argue that tanning temporarily homogenises the appearance of the skin, and that the gradations of tan between exposed and less-exposed areas accentuate the smooth cylindrical appearance of the limbs, thus making the body look younger and thinner. Of course, long-term sun exposure decreases skin tone evenness and increases wrinkling, yet the drive to look glowing and well-travelled in our youth often seems to override most concerns about later-life leatheriness.
Along with skin-colouring, depilation is one of the most common body alterations, although it does not really affect body shape. Surveys in developed countries suggest that up to 99 per cent of women remove some sort of body hair – perhaps 96 per cent remove leg and armpit hair, 60 per cent remove at least marginal strips of pubic hair, and among those, 48 per cent remove most pubic hair. There is evidence from the graphic arts that female depilation has a long history – in Western art few pre-twentieth-century female nudes have pubic hair, for example. The aim of most non-pubic depilation is probably to enhance women’s relative hairlessness – or rather the fact that much of their hair is the almost-invisible ‘vellus’ kind, instead of the coarse, pigmented ‘terminal’ hairs which cover men. In contrast, there is evidence that pubic hair removal is more related to sex. In many cultures it is associated particularly with the sex industry, but the now widespread trend for increasing depilation demonstrates the tendency, first noticed by the Romans, for the proclivities of sex workers to gradually work their way into the mainstream. In the West, pubic hair removal is more common in young, sexually active women, some of whom claim it improves the physical experience of sex. Some women say they depilate because it makes them feel clean, and others because it makes them feel young. This leads to a potential conflict which may explain why complete pubic hair removal is less common – women may want to look young, but they do not want to look like children.
Moving further along the ‘unnaturalness’ spectrum of body alteration, we come to piercing, tattoos and scarification. These may in fact be the oldest body alterations of all – for example, a 5,000-year-old man found frozen in ice in the Austrian Tyrol had very distinct and elaborate tattoos. More than any other form of body adornment, tattoos are linked to initiations into particular groups, expressions of status, and reclamation of power over one’s own body. Certainly, they are found all around the world – the word ‘tattoo’ itself is probably derived from Tahitian. They can be signals of defiance or spirituality, record milestones in one’s life (including drunkenly stumbling into a tattoo parlour, presumably), but are increasingly used by women to enhance their appearance.
Most women’s tattoos come in relatively few formats – the first of which are usually no more than small, often hideable, badges of femininity, individuality or love – a name, symbol, or a figurative or abstract design. The second type consists of sinuous or floral designs twining around the arm, ankle or even the torso, presumably to emphasise the slim, cylindrical nature of those body parts. The third is the increasingly common ‘tramp stamp’ – a variety of horizontal motifs etched just above the bottom, as a permanent demarcation between the straight back and the globose buttocks.
Piercings are much more common in women than men, and the almost ubiquitous earlobe piercings are now often accompanied by piercings of the ear cartilages, lips, tongue, nose, nipples, navel, clitoral hood, and almost any other piece of skin which comes to hand. Tongue and genital piercings often have sexual symbolism or uses, but most other piercings enhance the perception of body shape by contrasting their physical hardness and metallic ‘foreignness’ with the most distinctively soft and vulnerable parts of the female body – necks, lips, noses, bellies and breasts. The more tender the area, the more arresting the piercing.
Finally, the most extreme form of body-shape repackaging is surgery – which shows just how far women will go to change their own and others’ perceptions of their body shape. In the US, and probably most developed countries, the most common cosmetic surgical procedure is breast augmentation and reshaping. The most frequent motivation for breast augmentation is usually women’s own body dissatisfaction, and it seems that male sexual partners rarely suggest the procedure. Most women who undergo breast augmentation are young and married without children, although the demographic range is wide. Although most surgeons would prefer to create enlarged breasts which retain the natural, pendulous teardrop shape, many women ask for their upper breast to be especially enlarged, to give the bosom an unnaturally spherical shape and provide a dramatic cleavage in plunging necklines – a sign not only of the importance of clothes in body image, but also how the ‘ball-and-stick’ urge can get out of hand.
Almost as common is liposuction. Women more often wish to lose fat from their thighs than from their bellies – although there are few data regarding how often men actually want their partners’ adipose deposits to be reduced in this way. Next is the abdominoplasty or ‘tummy tuck’, which is often carried out following dramatic weight loss, or to expunge the effects of pregnancy on the abdominal skin. And, following on from the popularity of breast augmentation, the use of artificial implants to expand other female curves such as the buttocks is, although infrequent at present, rapidly becoming more popular.
Surgery to change the shape of the body is inherently controversial. Many cultures believe that the body is a heaven-sent thing which should not be unnaturally altered, and many non-religious people feel the same way. Plastic surgery was originally developed to help people with injuries and disfigurements, but the idea of surgery as a valid way to enhance healthy bodies has progressively taken hold over the last century. Surgical augmentation is, by its nature, something which women can take or leave as they wish, but in this new century that view of cosmetic surgery is being overtaken. Many fear that surgery is becoming normalised – an accepted way not just to augment a healthy body, but also to achieve acceptance and conformity by excising perceived flaws, and gain membership of an exclusive club of women sculpted in distinctive, recognisable ways by particular surgeon-designers. A gradation of procedures now exists in which botox and fillers are seen as innocuous, almost makeup-like activities, but which may act as ‘gateway’ procedures – the cannabis of cosmetic alteration, leading inexorably to ever more invasive and irreversible surgeries. Women seeking surgery – an ordeal once only countenanced for the most severe and acute illnesses – now often see it as a way to increase their control over their lives and to hold on to their youthful allure.
Controlling the appearance of women’s body shapes – redesigning the personal billboard – has become a dominant force in our society. Each year in China a beauty contest takes place which women may only enter if they have undergone a cosmetic surgical procedure – and they must submit written medical evidence as proof of their surgery. On the other side of the world, the clothing company Abercrombie and Fitch have provoked criticism for offering men’s clothes up to size XXL, but women’s clothes only up to L, in response to which their CEO Mike Jeffries said that he did not want ‘fat and ugly’ people wearing his company’s clothes, let alone working in his shops.
We are continually told that the ideal body is something to which women must aspire yet never reach, at enormous financial and emotional cost. And the elaboration of the body – connecting up those balls and sticks, all that homogenisation, plucking and puncturing – is the most overt expression of that idea. Being able to alter one’s body shape may seem like the ultimate in choice, but really there is not much choice at all. Women are encouraged to be visually and aesthetically individualistic, but only if they are individualistic like everyone else.
Body shape can seem like an internal, smouldering furnace of unease and dissatisfaction at the centre of modern women’s lives, yet as we near the end of this book, I still have not fully explained why they care so much about it. In my introduction I said that my quest into female body shape was driven by two interlocked questions. We have explored the first question – why human females have such a special body shape, and how that strange shape feeds into almost every area of their lives. So it is now time to draw together everything that has gone before, and answer the second question. It is time to find out why women think about their bodies so very much.