The evolution of the women’s body

PRIMA O POI VE LO TRADUCO...APPENA TROVO UN ATTIMO...NEL FRATTEMPO IMPARATE L'INGLESE ;) e non correggete il mio che sarà pieno di errori ma adotto un saggio modo di fare romano quello del famo a capisse


Anthropology has, like most other sciences, been traditionally male-dominated.
That’s why we always listen about the male evolution and we have just few theories
about the female body evolution.
Due to fights between males for the possession of females, sexual selection has
favoured bigger males; that will explain why males are selected for being large but lets
aside the question of selection on the female side. Actually, it has been shown that
larger females are also favoured by natural selection because their probability of dying
when giving birth is then reduced, so why female are significantly smaller than male?
The fact that being big is an advantage for men and women is challenged by another
hypothesis: the difference results from a difference of cost rather than from a difference
of benefits. Under gender hierarchical regimes found in all cultures, men are allocated
the best food. The interaction between evolutionary forces and cultural practices could
then lead to this disadaptive situation.
This suggests that in the theory o women’s evolution we should start thinking in terms
of differences in costs rather than in terms of benefits, this is a consequence of an
institutionalized inequality in favour of men that the social sciences have named the
gender order.
That is just the first example that can be given, it seems that, more or less, all the
changes in women’s body could be traced in some historical, cultural or social change.
Because of the fact that in every kind of culture, all over the world, in every edge of the
human history, the women are considered less than man, destructive for the society,
dangerous for the soul and spirit, impure, etc, the evolution of their body had to evolve
adapting themselves to the society instead the nature.
As a result of these adjustments, we observe today an extraordinary physical diversity
of the humans being which is not directly attributable to specific systematic categories,
is the existence of biological populations, but also culturally diversity distributed in
different geographical areas. During this evolution, the human species has kept intact a
set of emotional impulses, first of all sexual attraction.
In the course of human history, the various aspects of sexual dimorphism have taken
different emphasis in relation to changes in social mores, to which is the appropriate
way of presenting parts of the body exposed (like the face) or the more directly related
to sexuality (such as breasts or hips in women, muscular strength and virility in men).
The concept of beauty itself on, led to idealize different models of male and female
bodies. It is primarily the latter that over the centuries has suffered most from
environmental change, social structure, the cultural climate and the greater or lesser
attention given to the body or to spirituality. .

But no matter what greater extent of pelvic girdle facilitates gestation and then takes
both a symbolic meaning as the expression of fertility, is a specific value of sexual
attraction.
For the farmers is essential to ensure the heavenly favours for better harvests and
higher fecundity of women and crops. Symbolically, the women play the role of
intermediary between the world of the senses and the celestial world, as still occurs in
many African cultures.
These considerations may seem remote from our lives today, but the choice of partners
in the unconscious is still deeply related to the instinct of survival. If today the conditions
in which the coupling occurs are different from those primitive, sexual strategies are
the same and work with the same irresistible force. The psychology of the coupling
that we have developed during evolution remains the same: the only one we have, the
difference is that we apply this in a modern context.
The Professor Danilo Celleno, one of the most important Obstetric Anaesthesiologist
all over the world, was keen to anthropological history of the female body to support
the argument that giving birth does not need pain. He started with some studies of the
anatomy and physiology of pain in childbirth that later became a social framework of the
women in the history of mankind. ‘Childbirth is the physiological event underlying the
gender difference, around which the cultures have developed interventions and rituals
connected to building models of male and female” that’s the opening sentence he used
to start to explain why is so important to understand the socio-cultural and anatomical
history of women when we talk about childbirth.
Prof. Celleno started to explain that basically two story coexist in the ideal of feminine
beauty: one is the model of the “Greek Venus”, thin and slender models (typical of
adolescence), dominating today; the other is the “Palaeolithic Venus”, fat, with big
breasts and big hips, round (fertility symbols). Those two basic models have been
alternated during centuries.
‘You could also trace the history of female human body following the evolution of the
corset and the circumference of the basin: all that has changed the line of the hips -
tells the professor - In the Middle Ages, to the humanities the corsets had distort the
lines anatomical female. The torso is shortened, extends the line of the side, shaking
the pelvis, to amplify the belly, to represent her as always pregnant with a symbolic
projection, from the imaginary to real, and the woman is valuable only when generating
life. That idea has no precedent in history. Only in the 1907 Paul Poiret (stylist)
abolishes the corset from the women’s closets’.
Even in the artistic representation of the female body, the frequent focus on secondary
sexual characteristics does not respond to an exclusively aesthetic choice, but it also
reflects a general predisposition to ideologize female physical characteristics, according
to a vision that is centred around the stereotypes of woman-mother, woman-seductress
and muse-inspiring.

In historical times, purely anatomical factors have lost some of their importance in
sexual selection, while retaining their symbolic role. In women, sexuality and social
roles are identified: as a 'female' and 'mother' is given a marginal role, to be held in
the intimacy of the family. Sexual dimorphism and social role have become two sides
of the same coin, according to a conception remained unchanged for centuries. The
protection of the woman's body as his spirit has always been aggressive and heavy in
every religion and in every age. The woman is despised in every monotheistic religion.
The 1900 was a century full of events without precedent and has changed many
aspects of life, even daily. Significant changes have occurred in the sphere of the
female world: the century changed the design and the social position of women, how to
show, hide, and to design the body.
The aesthetic model of slimness is widespread in the European ruling classes of the
first half of the 20th century.
Then the devastating experience of war and the ensuing hunger revisited a physical
structure similar to that of the Dark Ages: in the fifties instead of the female figures that
stood out on the billboards were marked by particularly towards a prosperous and full
embodiment.
Only starting from the seventies and eighties the ideology of thin triumphed again,
reinforced also by the healthy needs, more and more important in today's society.
Since the beginning of this century a less 'gendered' idea of the female body took place,
it is less linked to reproductive activity, that’s partly the result of a new formulation of
male and female roles in the society.
This means that if the society asks the woman to be in accordance with the men figure,
she is forced to sacrifice her roundness, the "supplement" that represents her gender.
‘Nowadays it is not possible to change the skeletal features - continue to explain the
Professor - but you can act on the soft tissues to improve the aesthetic appearance with
cosmetics and, in extreme cases, resorting to plastic surgery, which helps to enrich,
even if by artifice, the picture of diversity. The ideal body is now in fact a body that
claims of being almost universal, a non-body in which the male and female are in pull
together to give space only to the representation of tenacity, security and strength’.