Shabbat 57b ~ "A Well-Fleshed Woman"

In a list of the articles of clothing that a woman may wear on Shabbat, Ravina included something called a katla. Rashi explains that the katla was a bib worn by a woman, and that she would deliberatley pull its strings tightly around her neck so that she would appear plump. This is stated explicitly in the Talmud:

שבת נז,ב

הָכָא בְּקַטְלָא עָסְקִינַן, דְּאִשָּׁה חוֹנֶקֶת אֶת עַצְמָהּ — דְּנִיחָא לַהּ שֶׁתֵּרָאֶה כְּבַעֲלַת בָּשָׂר

Here we are dealing with a broad, ornamented strap [katla] hanging around the neck, to which a small bib is attached. A woman does strangle herself with a katla because the strap is broad and tightening it does not cause pain. She tightens it because it pleases her that she will appear fleshy. It was considered beautiful to have flesh protrude from the katla.

Or, as the ArtScroll translation has it “It is agreeable to her that she appear to be a well-fleshed woman.” Which is odd, given that today, the object of most feminine beauty is a thin female body. How, and why, have our proclivities changed?

“Her head was set on (as artists use to say) supported by a round necke, down behind to her rising shoulder, full and plump…her brawny arms, of good flesh and pure colour. ”

— William Sanderson. Graphice, the use of the pen and pensil, or, The most excellent art of painting. Robert Crofts, London 1658. 42

“Venus of Willendorf” discovered in 1908. It was made sometime between 30,000–22,000 BC. Photo by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen.

the paleolithic Venus of Willendorf

The earliest sculpture of the human body is known as the Venus of Willendorf, named for the village in lower Austria from where she was excavated. This curvaceous figurine was created from limestone about 30,000 years ago. According to Walpurga Antl-Weiser from the Natural History Museumin Vienna, it is “a rather realistic representation of an obese woman which combines the natural form with the stylistic scheme of Paleolithic statuettes reflecting past transcendental ideas.”

Why, wonders Nigel Spivey in his excellent book How Art Made the World, did our Paleoloithic ancestors exaggerate “to a grotesque extent” certain features of this and other excavated figurines?

in technical terms these [excessively fleshy] features amount to hypernormal stimuli that activate neuron responses in our brain . . . For palaeolithic people, the female parts that mattered most were those required for successful reproduction: the breasts and pelvic girdle. The circuit of the palaeolithic brain, therefore, isolated these parts and amplified them…

Another way of looking at this is that in art, even art that is 30,000 years old, the shape of the female body which tends to be emphasized is one which accentuates its biological functions.

The female body in Roman and Greek art

As Rosalind Woodhouse points out in her excellent review of obesity in art, the Romans and Greeks did not portray obesity. Their sculpture and pottery art tended to portray the human body in an idealised though still naturalistic way. They often attenuated the limbs, particularly the legs, and downplayed or omitted any deformity or sign of aging or disease, even in portrait sculpture. Indeed Hippocrates believed that obesity was a disease, and Plato advocated for what today we call the “Mediterranean diet.”

Later Portrayals of the body

With the emphasis of the early Church on asceticism (as we noted last time when we discussed bathing in the Talmud), saints and lay people all tended to be shown as slim or even emaciated. This may have been a reflection of the emphasis on fasting and the overall denial of the flesh, but may also just mirror a world where consumption was restricted and many, or perhaps most people, were chronically malnourished. Woodhouse notes that the shape of a woman’s body “might have been more vulnerable to the prevailing conditions than men’s, especially as women generally entered adulthood with a higher percentage of body fat than men.” In the later medieval and early modern period, calorie-dense food crops from the New World, most importantly rice, maize and the potato were introduced, and there was a weakening of religious embargoes on consumption, which led to a more calorie-rich diet. There were also changes in who commissioned works of art and why. Although the Church still remained a patron of the arts, wealthy lay people began to commission paintings. “The body ceased to be a focus of shame, to be depicted modestly, in a stylised way, and started to be a marketable commodity, to be promoted by the sitter or the artist, depending on who held the real power in the transaction.” Here is some more from Woodhouse:

A handful of prominent Flemish and Dutch artists stand out as advocates of the larger body. Among the best known, Rubens (1577–1640) and Rembrandt (1606–1669) both dwelt on the texture of flesh, but whereas Rubens concentrated on allegorical portraits or tableaux featuring the legendary or the lusciously nubile, Rembrandt, chronicler of life’s misfortunes, depicted all conditions of men and women, and was accused in his day of seeking out the gratuitously unappealing. Later, Degas (1834–1917) used a similarly wide range of (mainly female) subjects as Rembrandt for his mainstream work, but it is in his less well-known brothel monotypes that he explores a very different kind of nude: squat, short-necked and very far from his pastel studies of ballet dancers. Renoir’s (1841–1919) women ‘massive, ruddy ... with the weight and unity of great sculpture’ continue in the tradition of Rubens, rather than emulating Degas’ realism. However, in both instances there was an emphasis on fleshiness, either as a mark of sensuality or as a reflection of moral turpitude.

What Men Find attractive - THE waist : hip ratio

Today’s passage of Talmud suggests that women wanted to appear “well-fleshed,” presumably because this was the body shape that was considered desirable. Because concealed ovulation in females forces males to rely on extraneous cues to convey their fecundity and health, human mate selection relies on an emphasis on attractiveness of more salient morphological features. Scientists have long noted that women “choose males based on their high status and ability to provide resources for their offspring, and this is achieved through competition with other members of social and economic hierarchy. Therefore, physical attractiveness is assigned far more significance to women by men rather than vice versa.”

Other than today’s talmudic passage, we do not know what body shapes were appealing to the men in talmudic times, but we have plenty of research about what men find attractive today. It turns out that the best marker of what men find attractive today is the waist:hip ratio, or WHR. In 1993 the late evolutionary psychologist Devendra Singh published an important paper that looked at the role of the WHR in female physical attractiveness in three experiments.

First he looked at the WHR of female models (Miss World winners and Playboy centerfolds). This taxing research revealed that the “WHR for Playboy centerfolds increased slightly from .68 to .71 over the years examined, whereas Miss America contest winners had WHR decrease from .72 to .69.” Most importantly, although the body weight of these models had gone down over the years, the WHR remained in the 0.68-0.71 range. “It seems” he wrote, “that, in Western societies, a narrow waist set against full hips has been a consistent feature for female attractiveness, whereas other bodily features, such as bustline, overall body weight, or physique, have been assigned various degrees of importance over the years.”

Ever the scientist, Singh had to prove that it was the WHR and not some other feature - “such as the size and shape of breasts, legs, etc.” - that was responsible for assessing attractiveness. To this end he found 106 male students to rank a series of line drawings of female figures in order of attractiveness, as well as other features, like “looking youthful”, “sexy” or “capable of having children”.

Stimulus figures representing three body weight categories: underweight (I), normal weight (II), and overweight (III). (Waist-to- hip ratios [WHRs] shown under each figure in each weight category, along with a letter and a number in parentheses identifying body weight category WHR). From Singh D. Adaptive Significance of Female Physical Attractiveness: Role of Waist-to-Hip Ratio. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1993. 65 (2): 293-307.

Singh’s student subjects judged both fatness and thinness as unattractive, and these figures were not perceived as having especially high reproductive potential. Other studies had also found a low attractiveness rating assigned to overweight figures, but the low attractiveness for underweight figures, as a group, however, was unexpected.

In a third study, Singh tested older men and their rankings of the line drawings. He used this age group for two reasons. First, in order to label any trait as adaptive it must be demonstrated to be “transgenerationally stable.” If the WHR signals female attractiveness and if attractiveness indeed has adaptive significance, then it should be possible to demonstrate that both younger and older men use WHR to assess female attractiveness. And second, if the ideal of female attractiveness is arbitrary and ever changing, no evidence of transgenerational stability in the meaning of the WHR should be found, as older men are more likely to be exposed to different ideals of attractiveness than are younger men. He found some differences here and there, but overall, the rankings of attractiveness and other attributes were strikingly similar for all age groups, and no age trends were discernible for differential rank assignment as a function of age.

“...body fat and its distribution play a critical role in judgments of female attractiveness, health, youthfulness, and reproductive potential”

These three experiments led Singh to conclude that “body fat and its distribution play a critical role in judgments of female attractiveness, health, youthfulness, and reproductive potential. All of these attributes are associated with a female figure of normal body weight and low WHR. But neither body weight nor WHR alone is associated with female attractiveness. Highly attractive women must have a low WHR; yet deviation from normal body weight, either lower or higher, reduces attractiveness and perceived healthiness.”

Singh also noted that attractiveness and health were strongly linked; figures judged to be highly attractive were also perceived as very healthy. Perhaps then, good health is the defining feature of attractiveness.

the obese Rabbis of THE talmud

It should be noted that while the women of the Talmud would try and emphasize their girth, some of the rabbis of the Talmud were equally proud of their weight. One of these was Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, known as Resh Lakish, who lived in Israel in the third century. Although he had become quite wealthy, he spent most of his money on food and drink, rather than on material possessions. In Gittin (47a) we learn that when his daughter offered him a mattress, Resh Lakish replied בתי, כריסי כרי - “my daughter, my stomach is my mattress!” Not to be outdone, Rav Pappa, who lived a century later in Babylon, was so overweight that he claimed could break a wooden bench if he sat on it (Bava Kamma 10a). But perhaps the most famous description of corpulence in the Talmud is of Rabbis Yishmael and Elazar:

בבא מציעא פד,א

כי הוו מקלעי ר' ישמעאל ברבי יוסי ור' אלעזר בר' שמעון בהדי הדדי הוה עייל בקרא דתורי בינייהו ולא הוה נגעה בהו 

When Rabbi Yishmael, son of Rabbi Yosei, and Rabbi Elazar, son of Rabbi Shimon, would meet each other, it was possible for a pair of oxen to enter and fit between them, under their bellies, without touching them, due to their excessive obesity.

These rabbis were so obese that a Roman noblewoman wondered whether, anatomically speaking, they could have sired any children:

אמרה להו ההיא מטרוניתא בניכם אינם שלכם אמרו לה שלהן גדול משלנו כל שכן איכא דאמרי הכי אמרו לה (שופטים ח, כא) כי כאיש גבורתו איכא דאמרי הכי אמרו לה אהבה דוחקת את הבשר 

A certain Roman noblewoman [matronita] once said to them: Your children are not really your own, as due to your obesity it is impossible that you engaged in intercourse with your wives. They said to her: Theirs, i.e., our wives’ bellies, are larger than ours. She said to them: All the more so you could not have had intercourse. There are those who say that this is what they said to her: “For as the man is, so is his strength” (Judges 8:21), i.e., our sexual organs are proportionate to our bellies. There are those who say that this is what they said to her: Love compresses the flesh.

Perhaps that is where we should end. Love compresses the flesh. While we may be wired by evolution to find a certain male or female form attractive, beauty remains firmly in the eye of the beholder. It is for this reason that Jewish husbands sing to their wives every Friday night, and remind them that, as the Book of Proverbs (31) puts it:

שֶׁקֶר הַחֵן וְהֶבֶל הַיֹּפִי: אִשָּׁה יִרְאַת־ה', הִיא תִתְהַלָּל

Charm is deceptive and beauty is illusory; But a woman who fears God, she is worthy of praise.