Here is Russian high jumper Anna Chicherova praying for a gold medal yesterday. Not surprisingly, God couldn't resist.
Chicherova is 30 years old and took 2010 off to have a baby with her sprinter husband. She is listed at 5'11 and 126 pounds.
And here's the great war and sports photographer George Silk's classic Life magazine picture of Swedish high jumper Gunhild Larking sulking at the 1956 Olympics. She finished sixth. Silk shot two rolls and some of the other pictures are even more flattering.
High jumping in the past was kind of nuts since they didn't have modern airbags to land on, much like pole vaulting remains a pretty crazy sport today. (Here's Buster Keaton trying out for the 1925 USC track team in College by jumping a 5' bar into a sawdust pit. Keaton, a remarkable athlete, only needed a stunt double for the pole vaulting scene.) Future singer Johnny Mathis was invited to the 1956 U.S. Olympic trials as a high jumper, but he passed it up for a tryout for a recording contract because, as he later explained, going up was fun but coming down hurt.
Larking was listed as 5'8" and 123 pounds. Apparently, upper body muscularity is not very important in high jumping. This was also long the presumption regarding sprinting. I can recall reading with bafflement the Sports Illustrated cover story in 1987 about Ben Johnson's 100m dash world record as it tried to explain why Johnson's new found (and rather grotesque) body builder-style upper body helped him go faster.
One question I've seldom seen addressed is the relationship between elongation, elegance, and social class. Why do we assume that long and lean is classy? Why are femme fatales in film noirs long-legged rather than voluptuous?
Obviously, the well-fed tend to grow taller, but, all else being equal, they also tend to grow wider, in the manner of J.P. Morgan. (My father, born in 1917, referred to the rich as "the fat cats," and was unimpressed by my pointing out that rich people these days jogged more than poor people.)
So this apparent correlation between elongation and higher social class remains curious.
My guess would be that it's related to this tendency for girls to stop growing at puberty. Thus, taller women tend to have reached sexual maturity later, which is useful in making high class marriages. Aristocratic girls who got knocked up by the groom before they can be married off to the prince tend to not have a lot of aristocratic offspring. So, there could be a selection process that leads to higher class people getting more elongated until such point as they aren't robust enough to maintain their class privileges.
Incidentally, Larking found out after the Olympics that she was already pregnant and retired from athletics.
2008 high jump Silver medalist Blanka Vlasic (Croatia) is somemthing else. Definitely worth the time for a google image search.
ReplyDeleteI can recall reading with bafflement the Sports Illustrated cover story in 1987 about Ben Johnson's 100m dash world record as it tried to explain why Johnson's new found (and rather grotesque) body builder-style upper body helped him go faster.
ReplyDeleteNotice how the term "musclebound" has now disappeared.
And now she is an easy on the eyes 75 year old mother of three and grandmother of "sju" (six?). She obviously didn't spend her 20s turning her face into well-tanned SoCal shoe leather. Judging from her picture, I expect her husband can still see the cute girl he married when she smiles and her face lights up.
ReplyDeleteI remember when I first realized how crazy pole vaulting had been in the old days. In 1978 my family was moving away from the Chicago suburbs, and our very nice little old next-door neighbor Mr. Foss invited us over for a farewell drink. I was thirteen and bored by the grownups' talk, so I started poking around the room and noticed a framed medal.
ReplyDeleteI asked him what it was. "Oh, that's my Olympic gold medal," he said, which he'd won in pole vaulting at the 1920 Antwerp games. This came as something of a shock.
I would later discover that Frank Foss not only won the gold medal that day but also went on to set a new world record--for the hell of it, I guess--at 4 meters and change. That got me thinking about what it must have been like to come down from 4 meters in the air onto a pile of sawdust--assuming you'd so far managed to remain unimpaled on your snapped pole, that is.
Anyway, it all sounded like a pretty bad idea when you thought about it. It's probably the sort of thing that seems a lot more fun when you've spent a lot of time shooting down the Hun in your fighter plane over the fields of France, as Frank Foss had been doing only a couple of years before his Olympic triumph.
Looks like they've traded in hotness for anorexia these days.
ReplyDelete... She finished sixth. ...
ReplyDeleteActually she was fourth (places 2-7 were decided by tiebreakers).
Taller northerners conquered southerners to become the ruling class.
ReplyDeleteRich guys like leggy babes.
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=bernie+eccestone+and+daughters&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari#biv=i|0;d|JVRkUwyU4iquuM:
The biological baby clock was starting to have seizures at 30. lol.
ReplyDeleteCounterpoint: Queen Victoria
ReplyDeletePerhaps upper body strength--or at least abdominal strength--was not as important before the introduction of the Fosbury Flop.
ReplyDeleteThe Flop really requires a soft landing pad, though.
Normans vs the Saxons. Tall/long/thin vs short/squat/thick. Come to think of it, nearly all of history's great rulers are shown with long faces.
ReplyDeleteLet's assume puberty starting earlier generally correlates with higher female fertility. Also, if opposites attract, then you'd have shorter feminine women with masculine men and slightly feminine men with taller more masculine women. Let's also assume women date men taller than themselves no matter how tall they are.
ReplyDeleteOne way to test your theory is to look for a correlation between female height and fertility issues.
Aristocrats typically have fewer kids than the general population, and they typically have them at a later age than their ability to provide suggests. I once read you never see amateur porno in nice hotels or houses, which may not point to discretion but lower sex drive.
Here is this year´s Swedish contestant.
ReplyDelete(which God could resist).
My guess would be…
ReplyDeleteWait, what? Are you claiming that lower-class women got knocked up by just any old body as soon as they became fertile, since they weren't going to "marry up" and so nobody cared much about keeping their daughters "chaste" before marriage, a situation that only pertained among the wealthy?
That's certainly not my understanding of how the world used to work.
"One question I've seldom seen addressed is the relationship between elongation, elegance, and social class. Why do we assume that long and lean is classy? Why are femme fatales in film noirs long-legged rather than voluptuous?"
ReplyDeleteThe Norman invasion. Scandinavians were, as they are now, taller than other Europeans. The Normans were maybe 50% Scandinavian and imposed themselves as a ruling class upon the English. The same dynamic with Viking invasions happened before the Normans.
Long and lean is refined, non-crude, and elegant, and aristocracies always value elegance, refinement, and the not crudely physical - things that make it clear that they don't do manual labor and are less grossly and crudely "physical" than the brawny, thick limbed lower classes, who have more "functional" bodies. Any physical or other indication that one is free from the necessity of doing physical labor will be favored by any aristocracy and quickly become part of its identity. The new rich might well be fat or large bodied, but very soon if it develops into an aristocracy a lean, non-physical, almost ethereal body type will come to predominate. It's why white skin is preferred today in Asia and used to be in the West - it indicates freedom from toiling in the open sun and a sign of greater refinement.
ReplyDeleteThe newly rich are usually crude and gross, but if it develops into a hereditary aristocracy than refinement in all things - body, mind, and emotion - immediately comes to be it's distinguishing mark. Good manners, gentleness (as in "gentleman"), spare, elegant physique - all marks of refinement and all marks of a herditary aristocracy.
Even though most aristocracies originated in a military caste and thus probably had superbly "functional" bodies to begin with, over time the quest for refinement leads to a change in physique. Already in Elizabethan times, if you look at portraits of aristocrats and courtiers, the spare, elegant, pale, long and lean type predominates. They hardly look like warriors at all, although they were still martial in spirit and had lost none of their caste pugnacity.
That is when an aristocracy is at its best - when it is far enough from its crude origins as a conquering caste or self-made millionare to have acquired refinement and class, but has not yet lost much of its original vigor and energy. Later, the tendency towards refinement culminates in becoming effete.
So this apparent correlation between elongation and higher social class remains curious.
ReplyDeleteWell, there's the obvious question of the extent to which IQ correlates with height [within any given population].
And no, I am way too exhausted on a lazy Sunday morning to even consider going over to Google and finding the answer for myself.
Thanks.
According to Roman writers the northern barbarians were taller so in western culture taller people from the north expanded south and became the aristocrats.
ReplyDeleteThe interesting question then might be why were they taller and if they were, why were they tall and lean rather than tall and bulky?
The answer to the second question might be they needed to be taller (for some reason) but they also needed to minimize how many calories they required hence tall but lean.
(This would also tie into the invention and use of longswords i.e. swung around the head, where height and long arms might provide more momentum than brute strength alone.)
The Maasai are tall and very lean, perhaps for the same reason, perhaps not?
One question I've seldom seen addressed is the relationship between elongation, elegance, and social class. Why do we assume that long and lean is classy? Why are femme fatales in film noirs long-legged rather than voluptuous?
ReplyDeleteTaller = fitter. Lean = taller-looking. Tall & lean is exceptional in a good way, as opposed to short and squat. It's a subconscious reference to breeding.
Tall = good genes. Slim = youth.
ReplyDeletePaging agnostic...
ReplyDeleteI don't know Steve. It seems to be an inherent natural bias hard-wired into the brains of European descended peoples, at least, to equate tallness and slimness with social superiority - the converse is that short, fat and dumpy is not held to be dseirable at all, and for some unknown reason is associated with the peasantry,shetland ponies, and a general orc like population. Tallness is associated with nobility, steeded nomads, conquerors and generally a better stock than the son-of-the-soil peasants, strangely enough it seems to have a Hutu versus Tutsi dynamic.
ReplyDeleteWhy I don't know, because height in itself is certainly no indicator of social class, income or IQ in the west.
Methinks it is down to some ancient, prehistoric and traumatic event.
Use of the word "groom" confusing in this context. Had to read twice. Intentional?
ReplyDelete"Why do we assume that long and lean is classy? Why are femme fatales in film noirs long-legged rather than voluptuous?"
ReplyDeletePerhaps because in nature, we view long and sleek as elegant. The most elegant spider is one of the most deadly--the black widow. It's sleek shiny black, it's elongated to a point legs seem to evoke both fear and respect for its beauty.
The big cats are muscular, yes, but have an elongated body that looks even more elongated, sleek, when they are stalking their prey. Even our house cats look this way.
Length and leanness of all or part of a body suggests elegance and grace of movement (as in ballet)and inspires awe, I think, as well as a bit of fear, for such movements can result in a sudden and silent attack. I think we probably feel that sleek, leggy women are much like cats or that elegant widow--beautiful but dangerous. Beware!
Why do we assume that long and lean is classy? Why are femme fatales in film noirs long-legged rather than voluptuous?
ReplyDeleteI would think you would know. More estrogen, or more responsiveness to estrogen, means more voluptuous, more maternal, less ambitious. Leaner of course means less body fat, less female hormone etc..
As for classy, its probably associated with what doesn't look animal or functional. Peasants are always depicted as being stocky and robust; whereas regality is almost frail. Think the princess and the pea: Ethereality and exquisite sensitivity.
Ben Johnson remains a one-off - most sprinters today do not look like they could bench-press a car.
ReplyDeleteI would think that being tall but light is an obvious advantage in the high-jump.
Why do we assume that long and lean is classy?
ReplyDeleteMy guess would be that it's related to this tendency for girls to stop growing at puberty.
Then why are long and lean men considered classy?
I think the perception is that tall and slender people are resistant to the baser human appetites. Endomorph's are seen as craving food. Mesomorph's are seen as carnal and/or violent. Ectomorph's are perceived as being more resistant to the lures of food and the flesh.
Height works in dominance games.
ReplyDeleteAlthough the only rich people I know aren't tall so much as fit and well-dressed.
(My father, born in 1917, referred to the rich as "the fat cats," and was unimpressed by my pointing out that rich people these days jogged more than poor people.)
ReplyDeleteIsn't it the upper middle class professional types that jog the most?
Maybe the truly rich still don't exercise as much.
How about the possibility that only members of the aristocracy tended to be involved in warfare for, for the English at least, at least 1000 years? Given that being a male in the aristocracy was a dangerous business and that peerages were delivered to those who were helpful in battle, I'd imagine that there was selection occurring on the battlefield. The Tudors were relatively tall for their day, as I recall. So was Edward IV.
ReplyDeleteSteve, if you look at the preferences of the elites during the time of Henry the Eighth, the sort of period I presume that this sort of thing would be selected for, your theory is bunk. In her youth Katherine of Aragon was short in stature, very fair-complected with red-gold hair, and a curvy (not fat) figure. Her looks were the ideal in that era where girls whose parents could afford dowries married them off as quickly as they could when the girls became fertile because so many children died in infancy that a girl could easily have 10 pregnancies and only raise 3 children to adulthood. Henry the Eighth's grandmother Margaret Beaufort was married (for the second time) at age 12 and at 13 was widowed and pregnant. Because of her youth she nearly died giving birth and was rendered infertile. Pre-teen marriage and pre-teen births were not uncommon(and is still common in certain parts of Africa) in Europe during this period.
ReplyDeleteIf you read letters from that period regarding marriage negotiations kings were frequently concerned that their brides be large-breasted. Despite her wit and charm Anne Boleyn wasn't considered to be a beauty in part because of her olive complexion and black hair and eyes, but also because she was tall and thin rather than petite and curvy. The fashion for tall, thin builds in women is a modern one that isn't even 100 years old. My grandmother, for instance was 5'7 and considered too tall and skinny in the 30s.
Gloria
http://www.nbcolympics.com/nations/nation=india/index.html
ReplyDeleteANOTHER ONE!
"U.S. women Olympians ‘hoping we have a million little girls who are inspired’"
ReplyDeletehttp://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/us-women-olympians-hoping-we-have-a-million-little-girls-who-are-inspired/2012/08/12/be5a1bf6-e48f-11e1-936a-b801f1abab19_story.html
"The defining storyline for the U.S. Olympic team at these London Summer Games can be viewed either in heartwarming, eye-moistening and inspirational terms, or on a purely calculating and practical level.
As American women athletes here used the Olympics as their personal stage, furthering the tide of advancement initiated by the 40-year-old sports-equity law known as Title IX, Team USA by necessity rode their accomplishments.
Women won two-thirds of the U.S. team’s golds and nearly 60 percent of the overall medals, not only offering a jubilant plug for Girl Power, but also propelling the United States back to the top of both the overall medal table and the gold-medal table — two perches that seemed under serious threat by China at the Summer Games in 2008.
"If the U.S. women were their own nation, they would have finished third in the gold-medal table with 29 medals. The U.S. men won 15, trailing the men from China (17) and Great Britain (16).
The many times female stars stole the spotlight surely helped enhance the perception that strong and feminine don’t conflict, Harrison said.
“Being a strong female competitor is the best thing we can do to sort of fight that,” said Harrison. “It doesn’t matter how you look when you win a gold medal, because you just won a gold medal. . . . I’m hoping we have a million little girls who are inspired right now.”"
56 is my new favorite number.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nbcolympics.com/video/wrestling/highlights-toghrul-asgarov-wins-mens-60kg-gold.html
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nbcolympics.com/video/wrestling/highlights-artur-taymazov-wins-third-consecutive-gold.html
Central Asian iron men.
Ectomorph's are perceived as being more resistant to the lures of food and the flesh.
ReplyDeleteYes but ectomorphs are also perceived as weak, submissive, etc.
http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/wrestling/highlights-120kg-medal-ceremony.html
ReplyDeleteCentral Asian, Russian, & Eastern Europeans especially in wrestling tend to be most sullen when they don't win the gold.
In most events and from most nations, even winners of silver and bronze seem happy, but wrestlers(especially from aforementioned regions)tend to be the biggest sourpusses. Is it the nature of the the sport that is so grinding that it doesn't make for happy spirits unless one wins gold? Or is it cultural?
"One question I've seldom seen addressed is the relationship between elongation, elegance, and social class. Why do we assume that long and lean is classy? Why are femme fatales in film noirs long-legged rather than voluptuous?"
ReplyDeleteRita Hayworth in GILDA and LADY FROM SHANGHAI was on the voluptuous side.
Also, femme fatales are not really classy. They're often sassy with only the veneer of class. They are not well-bred women but often low-bred women clever enough to use faux-style to fool men and get what they want. They're high-priced molls than fancy dolls.
Is it me or does it seem that China cleaned up on the women's events?
ReplyDeleteThe whole ectomorph, endomorph terminology is incredibly dated. Not sure if anybody under 60 even uses those terms anymore.
ReplyDeleteThere is no science behind it. It's just some grab-ass terminology invented by a crackpot psychologist back in the 40s. It had some pop-psych fame in the 50s and nobody has taken it seriously for decades now.
If you want to sound like a internet crank commenter, keep using quack science terms like ectomorph.
"Here is this year´s Swedish contestant.
ReplyDelete(which God could resist)."
If you look like that, you don't need another victory, but you probably need some humility. Hubba Hubba.
What's the preferred body type in China? That's an ancient civilization that doesn't have the Saxon-Norman history.
ReplyDeleteMethinks it is down to some ancient, prehistoric and traumatic event.
ReplyDeleteIt's likely due to our origins in primate social groups. Primate social groups have social hierarchies in which raw physical size, including height, is the important dominating factor.
Estrogen is a bone growth inhibitor and is inversely correlated with height. There are overlaps between this and your hypothesis, but I think this specific factor (especially with regard to the surrounding correlates of high estrogen) might be stronger and more direct than delayed sexual maturity.
ReplyDeleteThis thread has generated some of the stupidest comments I've ever seen. So our culture considers long and lean more classy because of the Norman Conquest? OK, here's a news flash: the Normans and Saxons were BOTH tall, blue-eyed Teutonic races. If anything, the Saxons would be the taller and fairer ones, given that the Normans had been breeding with the darker Latin races in France.
ReplyDeleteI've read that in earlier centuries, blond hair was actually considered declasse in England, and a theory for this was that ever since the Norman conquest, blondness was associated with being a downtrodden Saxon peon. This theory is probably also bullshit, but it makes more sense than the notion that Anglo-Saxon culture has associated blondness and height with the Norman overclass for a thousand years.
What makes vastly more sense is a previous commenter's point that tallness and fairness seem rather to be universally admired among humans: see e.g. the dominance of tall slender Tutsis over the short bulky Hutus. Why this is is anyone's guess. Personally I go for the short, plump and voluptuous physique, but perhaps I'm an aberration.
"Here is this year´s Swedish contestant.
ReplyDelete(which God could resist)."
It looks like she has a wicked hematoma on her right ankle - not that I was examining the photo that closely.
jgress's comment is, of course, correct. I can't believe people are posting in this thread about "short, dumpy Saxon peasants". What the hell is going on? Perhaps Steve should set up an IQ test instead of a captcha in future.
ReplyDelete--bbtp
Yeah: Queen Victoria. She topped out at 4'-11"--not a tall woman at all. They should have called her Victoria Shortshanks.
ReplyDeleteTall skinny people get more respect because they are superior. Evolution is progressive (in the long run, and overall) and over millions of years of trial and error, incipient humanity lost muscle and gained height, because a tall skinny body gives you more bang for your caloric buck. A short beefcake might be able to lift more and punch harder, but these abilities are no match for a tall skinny man who can punch faster, reach longer, run and walk quicker, jump higher, see further, and do it all on far fewer calories, so over time, evolution favored height over muscle and humans instinctively know that body type is the most elegant parsimonious solution..
ReplyDeleteThat's largely why the short stumpy Neanderthals went extinct despite having big brains. It's too metabolically expensive to be muscular and barrel chested and if you're short muscles become a liability and with that advent of spears and sharp tools, a liability.
The Norman French were, at the time of the conquest, a mixture of mostly Celtic peoples, still, some Roman influence, and a whole lotta Franks. The Saxons were, at the time of conquest, a mixture of still mostly Celtic people, some Saxons, some Angles and Jutes, and some Vikings, with nearly no Roman influence (Britain was lightly settled and irregularly ruled by the Romans). So they mostly looked that same as jgress points out.
ReplyDeleteSomewhat OT, Megan Rapinoe, the US Women's Soccer team star, came out to great acclaim. So parents wanting their daughters not to turn out to be lesbians are likely to dump soccer as that sport becomes gayer and gayer, and move towards more feminine sports, if there are any. My guess is soccer rapidly becomes as lesbian as softball and women's basketball.
ectomorphs are also perceived as weak, submissive, etc
ReplyDeleteWho is doing this perceiving? I don't know anyone who perceives ectomorphs in that fashion.
Estrogen is a bone growth inhibitor and is inversely correlated with height
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure why everyone is focusing obsessively on women on a thread about human body shapes. Granted, Steve sort of started things off in the wrong direction by only mentioning women high jumpers.
And btw - estrogen is not a bone growth inhibitor.
BTW, what is the origin of "dumb blonde" jokes:
ReplyDeleteare they a recent phenomenon?
are they only told in the U.S?
The whole ectomorph, endomorph terminology is incredibly dated. Not sure if anybody under 60 even uses those terms anymore.
ReplyDeleteI bet you don't believe in IQ either.
Here's a body building site discussiong ectomorphs, endomorphs, and mesomorphs.
http://www.bodybuildingpro.com/bodytype.html
I tend to like skinny girls, but the ones high jumping were freaks.
ReplyDeleteYeah, delayed sexual expression is probably part of it. But I think a lot of it is simply the female preference for long, lean elegance in women.
ReplyDeleteContrast swimsuit models (preferred by men) with fashion models (preferred by women). Because women are more obsessed with social class and hierarchy, their tastes tend to define what is seen as "classy."
I grew up with a number of wealthy young men, and their tastes in women's figures are essentially the same as working class stiffs' -- T&A is the rule.
Yes but ectomorphs are also perceived as weak, submissive, etc.
ReplyDeleteNUUUUUUUUUURRRRDS!
The whole ectomorph, endomorph terminology is incredibly dated. Not sure if anybody under 60 even uses those terms anymore.
ReplyDeleteWhat about brachycephalic and dolicocephalic? Did these terms die out with the Nazis?
"Is it the nature of the the sport that is so grinding that it doesn't make for happy spirits unless one wins gold? Or is it cultural?"
ReplyDeleteIn wrestling (and other combat sports) coming second means you've just been beaten in a (simulated) fight. It's a little bit different to someone over in another lane being 0.03 seconds faster than you.
I'm moderately tall, though tending to be more muscular than thin. Still, I would not say that tall or thin is a naturally superior body type. There are a lot of factors that come into play.
ReplyDeleteThe metabolically efficient East Asians get a lot of brains and people per calorie. In a modern war where anyone carrying a rifle can inflict enough damage to kill any human target, they should be an effective body type. That body type involves less testosterone and probably less urge for war. Though, that is not necessarily the case, if we look at Genghis Khan.
Climactic considerations also play a role. Hot climes favor the skinny. Cold climes favor the low surface area to volume ratio - larger, more meat and blubber.
Who is doing this perceiving? I don't know anyone who perceives ectomorphs in that fashion.
ReplyDeleteThat's the traditional view:
http://www.innerexplorations.com/catpsy/t1c4.htm
"Tall/long/thin vs short/squat/thick. Come to think of it, nearly all of history's great rulers are shown with long faces."
ReplyDeleteNot true. Look at the oval faced Greco-Romans, the round faced Mongols. Look at Napoleon, Mao etc
"BTW, what is the origin of "dumb blonde" jokes"
ReplyDeleteI grew up in the Soviet Union. Ethnic jokes were extremely popular there and the attitude towards ethnic stereotypes was quite relaxed outside of the public sphere. The dumb blonde stereotype was completely absent. Never heard it once.
This is Chicherova, too:
ReplyDeletehttp://atlechic.webcindario.com/chicherova13.jpg
LOL.
"I've read that in earlier centuries, blond hair was actually considered declasse in England, and a theory for this was that ever since the Norman conquest, blondness was associated with being a downtrodden Saxon peon."
ReplyDeleteIn Russia the downtrodden serfs tended to be much blonder than the aristocracy.
More on Soviet ethnic stereotypes:
ReplyDeleteThere were no Polish jokes in the American sense. There were "a Russian, a German and a Pole" jokes in which Germans were portrayed as robotic and uptight, Russians as disorganized, simple-minded and very masculine, and Poles as something in between those two extremes. There were no stereotypes about Poles being either smarter or dumber than their neighbors.
My guess is that Steve has little respect for his commentators and likes to watch them self-destruct over trivial topics involving their most emotionally-invested topics of which Nordic looks are a favorite. And for the most part they take to it like catnip.
ReplyDeleteGloria.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Cimino#Possible_sex_change
ReplyDeletehaha
Catperson wrote "That's largely why the short stumpy Neanderthals went extinct despite having big brains. It's too metabolically expensive to be muscular and barrel chested and if you're short muscles become a liability and with that advent of spears and sharp tools, a liability."
ReplyDeleteActually that's just a wild-ass guess about neanderthals w/o much in the way of data to support it.
FWIW the most reproductively successful human in recent history was probably Ghengis Khan, and he and indeed the mongols in general were short and squat. That didnt prevent them from conquering much of the known world, hopelessly inefficient body types not withstanding.
In wrestling (and other combat sports) coming second means you've just been beaten in a (simulated) fight. It's a little bit different to someone over in another lane being 0.03 seconds faster than you.
ReplyDeleteA little bit. Or maybe being .03 seconds slower means being eaten by that smilodon. Just sayin'.
BTW, what is the origin of "dumb blonde" jokes
ReplyDeleteSame place as the Polish jokes.
"Catperson wrote "That's largely why the short stumpy Neanderthals went extinct despite having big brains. It's too metabolically expensive to be muscular and barrel chested and if you're short muscles become a liability and with that advent of spears and sharp tools, a liability."
ReplyDeleteActually that's just a wild-ass guess about neanderthals w/o much in the way of data to support it.
FWIW the most reproductively successful human in recent history was probably Ghengis Khan, and he and indeed the mongols in general were short and squat. That didnt prevent them from conquering much of the known world, hopelessly inefficient body types not withstanding."
- I guess if the neanderthals had been the ones with horses, then perhaps they'd be the ones blogging about us.
Still, after all these generations, to have a few pct. presence in the humsn genome, suggests they had some useful traits that carried forward long after their death.
In any case they had a run around 1/2 million years. We still have a ways to go without blowing each other up or doing ourselves in in some other way to be their equals.
http://edge.org/conversation/a-new-kind-of-social-inspired-technology
ReplyDeleteWhat a dork. Geeks, whether this guy or Bill Gates, have no fashion sense.
"Maybe the truly rich still don't exercise as much."
ReplyDeleteWe were vacationing in Sun Valley a few years back and drove through a random neighborhood to see...Edgar Bronfman, Sr. (worth $3.9 billion at the time) walking/jogging through the neighborhood.
So yes, the rich do exercise. If you want to see a group of people who are almost uniformly slim, read through the pages of the Forbes 400.
"BTW, what is the origin of "dumb blonde" jokes"
ReplyDeletean underappreciated scots-irish legacy
OT, Steve, but you really need to do a post on this guy. No need for a lengthy post even. Just note that he is a Mexican illegal immigrant who won the silver running for the US but he still has, shall we say, fond feelings for the old country.
ReplyDeleteBig Bill:
ReplyDeleteThat text about Gunilla Larking means that she is the Grandmother of seven gradkids.
And now she is an easy on the eyes 75 year old mother of three and grandmother of "sju" (six?).
ReplyDeleteSeven.
"So our culture considers long and lean more classy because of the Norman Conquest? OK, here's a news flash: the Normans and Saxons were BOTH tall, blue-eyed Teutonic races"
ReplyDeleteWhich just pushs it back in time to the Saxon invasion. The critical point is after the northern invasions - including the Celtic ones imo - the aristocracy (at least initially) was taller.
.
"What makes vastly more sense is a previous commenter's point that tallness and fairness seem rather to be universally admired among humans: see e.g. the dominance of tall slender Tutsis over the short bulky Hutus. Why this is is anyone's guess..."
Yes a simpler explanation than history is childhood might create a learned deference towards taller people.
.
"Personally I go for the short, plump and voluptuous physique, but perhaps I'm an aberration."
I don't think the height thing is a sexual preference but more of an authoritative preference. This may double as a sexual preference for women but less so for men apart from those who like to be dominated. With men, even if it's not a sexual preference, the authoritive preference may still make the tall lean shape admirable if not desirable.
.
"so over time, evolution favored height over muscle and humans instinctively know that body type is the most elegant parsimonious solution."
Except it didn't.
There are only a few times and places where it happened that i'm aware of: northern europe, maasai, tutsis etc. If anything it seems that selection aims for shortness - which if humans have a learned deference towards height from childhood - might give those few taller than average groups a distinct advantage.
.
"what is the origin of dumb blonde jokes"
Jewish racism.
The etiolated appearance of the English upper class used to be put down to their marrying fragile beauties. Their "chinless" appearance in particular.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, healthy people tend to be taller, and the upper classes would have been taller for that reason. I understand that the high mortality of upper class young men in WWI was partly due to their ability to pass the medical tests to join the army. I seem to remember that they were taller on average too.
Paul Fussell had illustrations of the high class vs prole physique in his book "Class". The upper class male was depicted as pencil-necked and the prole as thicker necked. This article gives some of the flavour:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/03/class-dismissed/7274/
Dumb blonde jokes probably originated in the dumbness of blondes. I have read that blondes have higher oestrogen levels than usual, and that tends to make them less intelligent, especially in the visuo-spatial dimension. Many blonde jokes play on the blonde's lack of mechanical or spatial understanding.
ReplyDeleteI have known some smart blondes, but they do tend to be the exceptions. When a bluestocking is portrayed, she will usually be shown as a brunette.
I think it was Sheldon who came up with the ectomorph, endomorph and mesomorph categories. For some reason their use has always irritated some people, but I must say I find it quite a helpful descriptor and I do use it.
ReplyDeleteIt is a bit like choleric, sanguine, melancholic and phlegmatic. The original science behind these categories has not worn well, but people still know what they mean.
As for you Americans riding on the success of your womenfolk, it is also possible that you might have done even better at the Olympics if your men had not been held back by the same Title IX or whatever it is. I am also fond of pointing out that Australia had its Golden Girls winning gold at the Olympics in the 1950s and 1960s, and indeed even now, without the "benefit" of the equivalent of Title IX. I think all it shows is that it is easy for a small country, or a country in which men are held back artificially, to make up ground in the less contested women's events. This is the point Steve makes about women's soccer. In the real world, nobody cares about women's soccer.
Not entirely sure what Steve's point is here except for some jerking off over his favorite athletic type (Scando).
ReplyDeleteDo better next time?
I think it was Sheldon who came up with the ectomorph, endomorph and mesomorph categories. For some reason their use has always irritated some people, but I must say I find it quite a helpful descriptor and I do use it.
ReplyDeleteSheldon's work was much more sophisticated than is commonly perceived.
It isn't a simplistic 3 category theory. People are mixtures of the 3, and he quantified the "mixture" of the 3 types in different people.
Sheldon was brilliant and he appears to have discovered a relationship between various physical dimensions of the body and personality and behavior. Of course this kind of thing is very politically incorrect, and his work has been dismissed, ignored, and suppressed.
There's some good material on him and his work here:
http://www.innerexplorations.com/psytext/the2.htm
In my country, we have chunky, thick-framed, flat-browed Polynesians and a number of more svelte quasi-Celtic hybrids in charge (zero Jews for what it's worth or otherwise.
ReplyDeleteThe distinction between the two is stark. Polynesians clean and labour (with a strong presence of Indo and Chinese who are steadily replacing both white and "brown" in all but the highest echelons (speaking loosely now)) while Scots-Irish-English pretend to rule.
"what is the origin of dumb blonde jokes"
ReplyDeletePerhaps it goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks and Romans to whom the blond tribes living north of the Alps were nothing but dumb barbarians?
If you recognize women's inferiority and give them their separate events in the name of fairness, then giving it same weight as men's events makes the event unfair on many men or even high-school boys who can beat the pants off these women in many events.
ReplyDeleteMaking two women's medals equal to one men's medal should be only fair. Besides the solution of hacking off it separately into a women's olympics.
(any similarity to a religious tradition is purely co-incidental)
"Dumb blonde jokes probably originated in the dumbness of blondes."
I would lack of cunning.
"Dumb blonde jokes probably originated in the dumbness of blondes."
ReplyDeleteNo, the average Nordic has well above world average IQ- somewhere ~110. Dumb blonde jokes arose during the early PC age, as it was 'okay' to crack jokes about whitey but not about minorities...
Roissy, or whatever he's calling himself now, recently suggested that short men haven't been extinguished because their short sisters are still pretty attractive.
ReplyDeleteA 5'4'' guy might have trouble reproducing, but his 5'0'' sister does not.
Similarly, we might have a lot of tall women around because their 6'5'' brothers do quite well.
Why tall people might be considered classy is left as an exercise for the reader.
anon-
ReplyDelete"ectomorphs are also perceived as weak, submissive, etc
Who is doing this perceiving? I don't know anyone who perceives ectomorphs in that fashion"
Anon, you are quite clearly either a cynical Endomorph, a rambunctious Octomorph, an inquisitive Nordic Capricorn, or a lazy Latin-American athlete who will only bother hurdling a fence if it means taking off in Mexico and landing in Texas.
If you let me read the bumps on your head I can also tell you the hip-to-waist ratio of your future ex-wife and the number of medals Chinese-Canadians will win in the next Commonwealth games.
Gloria,
ReplyDeleteI like you. I look forward to reading your comments, which are informative and instructive.
Of course, most of this is utter crap, with Steve throwing out a hunch, and his band of dittoheads falling on it ravenously. As soon as "Whiskey" joins the fray you know it's over.
I think the thing here is novelty. Men love novelty. Much of what we call beauty (nowadays) isn't beauty, it's just something different.
I do sense that there are universal standards of beauty lurking around somewhere in the male heart (they do have them) but most guys, esp. the kinds who come here, would be ashamed to admit what they are.
Perhaps Mildred Baena is really the feminine ideal.
She didn't do too badly!
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/kiriblakeley/files/2011/05/arnold-schwarzenegger-baby-mama1.jpg
PS - in the latest Psychology Today piece of BS-pseudo-science about what attracts men, and why women have a certain hip to boob ratio, the accompanying picture was Marilyn. (Monroe, if you have to know the last name.)
Funny thing that - they always use some famous actress to illustrate these supposedly hard-wired, biological impulses. Yet the example given is often a woman who died, miserable and childless, trapped in the cage of her own excessive good looks. As Marilyn did.
"This is the point Steve makes about women's soccer. In the real world, nobody cares about women's soccer."
ReplyDeleteWhat do you mean, "nobody"? Middle class parents care about soccer. That's not nobody. It's not a major league sport in the US but then again, neither is hockey. Does that mean, "nobody" is interested in hockey?
"I understand that the high mortality of upper class young men in WWI was partly due to their ability to pass the medical tests to join the army. I seem to remember that they were taller on average too."
ReplyDeleteNo, it was because they became officers and quickly discover
ed that the job of "platoon leader" sucks when it involves leading said platoon across No Man's Land.
How about combo sports?
ReplyDeleteLike high jump diving? You high jump over the bar and then dive into the water.
blanka vlasic is the best jumper right now, but she had a terrible 2012 and dropped out of the olympics with an injury and did not compete. she's the ultimate human giraffe.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYdYZ1pIRWs
This Swedish jumper is so attactive more because of her facial features, not so much because of her body type.
ReplyDeleteBeing tall and lean is generally only attractive when a woman has that 07 waist-to-hip ratio with some boobs.
some more vlasic. she does a little dance like that michelle jenneke hurdler from australia.
ReplyDelete2007 world championship
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TADJh_DZOfE
2008 diamond league meet
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TADJh_DZOfE
2011 world championship
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JprOPxGABPo
It's a pity Larking's photos aren't available in 1680x1050.
ReplyDeletewhat's interesting about high jump is that it is universally agreed that the flop is the superior technique, whereas in shotput there is no agreement about whether the glide or the spin is better.
ReplyDeletethomasz majewski, the olympic champion, is a glider, as is david stohrl, the runner up. whereas the americans who came in third and forth are spinners. i don't know enough about shotput to say if that's the trend, americans are spinners and europeans are gliders, but that's the same pattern with the world record holder and the guy who is second all-time behind him. randy barnes was a spinner, ulf timmerman was a glider.
In any case they had a run around 1/2 million years. We still have a ways to go without blowing each other up or doing ourselves in in some other way to be their equals.
ReplyDeleteErm, I think we'd have to blow ourselves up to be their equals. Otherwise how are we going back to living in caves?
"Central Asian, Russian, & Eastern Europeans especially in wrestling tend to be most sullen when they don't win the gold."
ReplyDeleteit's because in wrestling the guy who got silver was defeated in physical combat and ended his tournament on a loss. the guys who got bronze physically beat their opponent in a hand to hand fight and ended their tournament on a win. this is a well studied, well documented psychological pehonomenon which literally affects a man's hormones. losing a fight instantly drops the amount of testosterone flowing in their bloodstream.
you see the same thing in the ball sports tournaments. the bronze medal winners are happy, the silver medal winners are dejected. nobody was less happy to get silver in london than the brazil volleyball team.
I think dumb blonde jokes originated because of women dying their hair that color. That's really all there is to it. Probably weren't enough natural female blondes around (in all but the Scandinavian countries, at least) before that to have a stereotype about anything other than their beauty or rarity. I've always noted that in adulthood there are far more natural blond males than females. Most of the women people think of as "blonde" are actually lighter brunettes with hair dye. Men have a harder time discerning hair dye and thus usually are under the assumption that there are more blonde women than in actuality.
ReplyDelete"Roissy, or whatever he's calling himself now, recently suggested that short men haven't been extinguished because their short sisters are still pretty attractive.
ReplyDeleteA 5'4'' guy might have trouble reproducing, but his 5'0'' sister does not.
Similarly, we might have a lot of tall women around because their 6'5'' brothers do quite well.
Why tall people might be considered classy is left as an exercise for the reader."
Tall guys love short women (e.g. Will Smith - Jada Pinkett type combinations, or practically any pro-athlete + cheerleader).
I think the most attractive women out there are the tall women who are models or look like models. Unfortunately, only a very small number of tall women have this body type. Most tall women are much heavier in terms of both muscle and fat, big boned, etc. Men don't find that attractive. A short girl whose chubby will still find a man, but a tall girl whose "big" will have a very hard time. Her size will repulse men, including most tall men.
Sheldon was brilliant and he appears to have discovered a relationship between various physical dimensions of the body and personality and behavior. Of course this kind of thing is very politically incorrect, and his work has been dismissed, ignored, and suppressed.
ReplyDeleteWell, I can tell you that the link here (posted by someone else) *nails* me as an ectomorph! I'm quite impressed.
Steve has found that posts on pop music & hot chicks really bring 'em in. Doesn't take any effort, either.
ReplyDeleteA female commenter named "Aging HBD Skeptic" has just told us that men are attracted to women who look like Schwarzenegger's maid and that Marilyn Monroe was miserable.
ReplyDeleteThe inescapable conclusion is that "Aging HBD Skeptic" looks like Schwartnegger's maid, but would have liked to look like Marilyn Monroe instead.
Roissy, or whatever he's calling himself now, recently suggested that short men haven't been extinguished because their short sisters are still pretty attractive.
ReplyDeleteA 5'4'' guy might have trouble reproducing, but his 5'0'' sister does not.
Similarly, we might have a lot of tall women around because their 6'5'' brothers do quite well.
Nah, it's because small people survive famines better than big ones.
Look at cultures that practiced intensive agriculture (prone to famines) vs. those who practiced non-intensive (not famine prone).
The best comparison would be Polynesians and their ancestral people, the Taiwanese aborigines. Genetically, they are very close, and they look quite similar, but there's a considerable difference in size.
Considering that they only diverged a couple thousand years ago, it's a pretty rapid change, and shows how quickly human morphology can adapt.
Sheldon's work was much more sophisticated than is commonly perceived. It isn't a simplistic 3 category theory. People are mixtures of the 3, and he quantified the "mixture" of the 3 types in different people. Sheldon was brilliant and he appears to have discovered a relationship between various physical dimensions of the body and personality and behavior.
ReplyDeleteHmm, I wonder if Sheldon plagiarized from the ancient Ayurvedic concept of 3 body types: Vata, Pitta, Kapha; without giving due credit? Sure sounds like it to me.
I hate to intrude with reality; but the tall girls just tend to grow more than the short ones before puberty hits. So it;s not like they add a foot in height between ages 11 and 13.
ReplyDeleteSince you're talking about Olympics, you just might be impressed that at nearly my full adult undertall in 4th grade, I could fast walk faster than my 5' 5" + female classmate. So there!
"I think the thing here is novelty. Men love novelty. Much of what we call beauty (nowadays) isn't beauty, it's just something different."
ReplyDeleteYep, just like women and fashion. Or women and interior design. Or women and hobbies.
"In any case they had a run around 1/2 million years. We still have a ways to go without blowing each other up or doing ourselves in in some other way to be their equals.
ReplyDeleteErm, I think we'd have to blow ourselves up to be their equals. Otherwise how are we going back to living in caves?"
- Not an accurate comparison. They were living 30,000+ years ago. Our ancestors weren't exactly sending rovers to Mars at the time either.
Very few Dumb Blonde Jokes are anti-Scandinavian. For various historical reasons, Scandinavians were never hated and feared by darker peoples quite as much as WASPs.
ReplyDeleteReally? And do the purveyors of blonde jokes take the trouble to say its only about WASPs?
More like Jewish revenge - and Italian revenge, Greek revenge, etc.
Revenge? Revenge for what?
The only people the Greeks might want revenge on would be the Turks and Im not seeing them as typically blonde.
The jews might want revenge on the Germans, why would they target WASPs but not the more Germanic Scandinavians.Why would they target WASPs at all?
And who the Italians supposed to be seeking revenge on exactly?
You see if you think their 'revenge' on WASPs is somehow legitimate because they represent the group who were running the USA, founded it, you therefore totally endorse a point of view which argues that WASPs should never have allowed these groups to settle in the US in the first place.
You do understand that dont you?
@ jody:
ReplyDelete"some more vlasic"
Not a marked improvement over Chicherova. What all these women high jumpers have in common is that they are tall, super slim, and they have freakishly long legs.
Jody, all the spinners are chasing the ghost of Brian Oldfield. Unfortunately, they're not nearly as juiced up as he was.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.polishjoke.com/polish_joke-index.htm
ReplyDeleteA 747 recently crashed in a cemetery in Poland. Polish officials have so far retrieved 2000 bodies.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you do when a blonde throws a grenade at you?
ReplyDeletePull the pin and throw it back.
A 747 recently crashed in a cemetery in Poland. Polish officials have so far retrieved 2000 bodies.
ReplyDeleteDid it crash into Katyn Forest?
What do you do when a blonde throws a grenade at you?
ReplyDeleteWhat do you do when a Polish blonde throws a grenade at you?
Mount your horse, draw your sword, and charge the Polish blonde's panzer division!
Maybe ... but why no dumb redhead jokes, or dumb brown-or-black-hair-with-white-skin-jokes? I think the real butt of blonde jokes are the women who dye their hair.
ReplyDeleteToo many Jewish redheads for them to crack a lot of redhead jokes. Plus, there are a lot of Irish redheads (or at least, that's the stereotype) and they wouldn't want to threaten the alliance.
- Not an accurate comparison. They were living 30,000+ years ago. Our ancestors weren't exactly sending rovers to Mars at the time either.
ReplyDeleteWTF are you talking about? The comparison was between us today and neanderthals. Of course it's not an accurate one. It's an idiotic one.
http://www.polishjoke.com/polish_joke-index.htm
ReplyDeleteHey, how about some diversity:
Joke Directory
You should be more careful. Ben Johnson was a hero to many - like my Canadian body builder brother-in-law.
ReplyDeleteHe growled at me when I foolishly claimed that tall and willowy was the best body type for running. His admiration for Johnson was strong.
The only job he could hold was as a bouncer. He developed a criminal record from his work. He once told me this story about how three guys had thrown him though a plate glass window. He then told me how he had hunted each one of them down and evened the score.
Maybe you needn't worry after all. He didn't read much. But I'd be careful about disparaging Johnson on TV. He's a real hero to the lumpy guys.
Albertosaurus
Why are femme fatales in film noirs long-legged rather than voluptuous?
ReplyDeleteHave you seen "The Bridge Wore Black"? It features a very poorly miscast femme fatale. She's old, short, and dumpy, but men fall for her anyway.
There's a scene of her with a schoolteacher. The schoolteacher looks like the femme fatale, and she looks like the schoolteacher!
"The inescapable conclusion is that "Aging HBD Skeptic" looks like Schwartnegger's maid, but would have liked to look like Marilyn Monroe instead."
ReplyDeleteNo, and you are an idiot.
Marilyn *was* miserable. Read any account of her life. She was unstable, insecure, and killed herself.
And Mildred Baena IS more reproductively successful than Marilyn - or Charlize Theron, or Sandra Bullock, or any number of Hollywood beauties, past or present.
You can't argue with these facts, so you insult.
You are very typical of the Sailer-sphere, and the HBD-sphere in general.
Fact is, looks and reproductive success have nothing to do with one another.
As for my own looks, what is the point of telling a lame-brain twit like you what I looked like? I was a fabulously HOT young woman. It didn't make me happy. It only got me the attention of a lot of pests.
What do you look like?
"Have you seen 'The Bridge Wore Black'? It features a very poorly miscast femme fatale. She's old, short, and dumpy, but men fall for her anyway."
ReplyDeleteThat's the incomparable Jeanne Moreau, you idiot!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbb7LBLJvoc
Hmm, I wonder if Sheldon plagiarized from the ancient Ayurvedic concept of 3 body types: Vata, Pitta, Kapha; without giving due credit? Sure sounds like it to me.
ReplyDeleteNo, because his work was more sophisticated and innovative than crude type theories from the past.
Just as modern atomic theory is more sophisticated than Democritus's atomism.
Why are femme fatales in film noirs long-legged rather than voluptuous?
ReplyDeleteLast I checked, just about all the women in all American cinema are "long-legged rather than voluptuous".
Christina Hendricks is as "voluptuous" as femme fatales in American cinema get, and she's 5'8". Quite leggy, by the standards of normal women.
Why are movie actresses so weirdly tall and long-legged?
Have you seen "The Bridge Wore Black"?
ReplyDeleteNo, but I've seen "The Bride on the River Kwai". Also "Seven Bridges for Seven Brothers".
"- Not an accurate comparison. They were living 30,000+ years ago. Our ancestors weren't exactly sending rovers to Mars at the time either.
ReplyDeleteWTF are you talking about? The comparison was between us today and neanderthals. Of course it's not an accurate one. It's an idiotic one."
Obviously, the comparison I brought up in the first place was that they had LASTED 1/2 million years, whereas modern humans have not gone but only ~200,000 or so yrs, so match them on the ultimate Darwinian test, we'd need to go that long first before writing them off. But yeah, if you are going go set up the straw man argument to be about who has had greater technology, of course we do, though its an absolutely stupid comparison because no one at the time they were still around had any technology worth shouting about. You're really off your mark this week, Svigor. Time to refill the Midol.
"Have you seen 'The Bridge Wore Black'? It features a very poorly miscast femme fatale. She's old, short, and dumpy, but men fall for her anyway."
ReplyDeleteYou mean A Bridge Too Noir? That wasn't a short, dumpy femme fatale, that was a hump-backed bridge.
" I was a fabulously HOT young woman."
ReplyDeleteOf course you were.
Weren't we all?
Revenge? Revenge for what?
ReplyDeleteFor the WASPs being so morally perfect, both in word and deed, and never abusing their social privileges, and being great leaders by example to everyone else.
.For the WASPs being so morally perfect, both in word and deed, and never abusing their social privileges, and being great leaders by example to everyone else.
ReplyDeleteok mr. snarky
who's been a better elite? Who have been better custodians?
Last I checked, just about all the women in all American cinema are "long-legged rather than voluptuous".
ReplyDeleteNot Ashley Judd.
Last I checked, just about all the women in all American cinema are "long-legged rather than voluptuous".
ReplyDeleteTara Strong is 5' 2.5" but then again she is Canadian.
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