You did, but you didn’t know it. Hip to waist ratio, apparent breasts, etc. for those attracted to women and strong shoulders, tall, etc. for those attracted to men. The science of sexual attraction is pretty far along. You can ask my buddy who is only 5′ 4″ tall all about it.
You’re still talking about tendencies, averages, statistics. Lots of people fall outside the averages so we’re a far distance from establishing beauty as any sort of cosmic fact applying everywhere under all circumstances.
Here is some evidence I ran across about 30 years ago. I think it was in Psychology Magazine (back before it got turned into a women’a publication). I’m forced to kind of paraphrase it because it somehow has not turned up on the Internet where Google might find it, unless I’m just using the wrong search terms.
It goes like this: A researcher wanted to prove that aesthetic attitudes are culture-based (a psychologist uses the term “attitudes” instead of “judgments,” which is more a philosophical term).
The structure of the experiment was clever and hard to argue with though one can quibble with its small scale.
He contacted leading artists until he had a few willing to participate. They were all acclaimed artists in their field.
He had each one offer what he felt was a great example of work in their field and another one that was more pedestrian. He had artists from a variety of fields, like Western painting, Japanese swordsmithing, African maskmaking, and several other fields. Then he had each artist look at the other artists work and decide which one of each pair was the better example.
He was floored. He actually proved the opposite of his theory. The artists consistently agreed with the artist submitting the examples.
Based on the result, one has to consider that there is a real objective basis for aesthetic judgments, just as the ancient Greeks maintained.
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