Girl, Look at that Body: The 500 Year Evolution of the "Perfect" Woman

The more I look at women from the past, the more I'm noticing what should be obvious to most of us without much pondering at all: that true beauty can never really be stashed away from us behind walls of malnourished elves or unobtainable anime figures. And listen, I'm not really doing this to make you or me feel superficially better about our own physical plights (Lord knows that my physical body shape hasn't really been deemed all that super hot since well-fed chunky railroad tycoons landed all the best gals back in like 1846). I think this whole thing is more to reassure our deeper selves, if you will, that what we as a species tend to think of as the 'perfect body' often swings drastically from one end of the spectrum to the other over time.Which more or less proves that deep down in our human guts, most of us understand that the most truly beautiful women we will ever know (our daughters, our wives, our mothers, etc) come in way more sizes, shapes, and colors than we are often led to believe.
-By Serge Bielanko

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