U.S. trends in feminine beauty and overadaptation

Abstract

Men place more importance on the physical attractiveness of women than women do on the physical attractiveness of men. As a result, women's social opportunities are more affected by their physical beauty than are men's, so that women are under more pressure to conform to an ideal of beauty. Although standards of female beauty are not as arbitrary as is sometimes claimed, they do vary greatly over time and across cultures. Modern institutions of advertising, retailing, and entertainment now produce vivid notions of beauty that change from year to year, placing stress upon women to conform to the body image currently in vogue. The best known of these beauty standards are the “bosom mania” of the 1950s and 1960s and the current trend toward slenderization. As women attempt to adapt to each of these changes, a minority overadapt, sometimes to the point of incapacitation. Among these over‐adaptations have been hysteria, early in the century, which was an exaggeration of the fragile feminine ideal of that time; bosom anxieties of the 1950s and 1960s, when women worried if their breasts were sufficiently large; and anorexia and bulimia today.