How did people decide what was beautiful (male/female) in the past?

[LRDtheFeministDragon]

Just that, really. I know about medieval standards of beauty a bit, and I know they had a huge thing for blonde women, liked their men bearded, and so on. But I don't know much about the last 500 years or about whether it's different in different bits of Europe. Obviously I guess it must be once you get outside Europe!

But how did people judge what was attractive in a man or a woman?

I know that people must have varied as much as we do but there must also be things we'd think were completely odd to find sexy, but that were attractive back in the day. I know in about 1375 Chaucer has the Wife of Bath say she's attractive because she has a gap in her teeth.

I also wonder how much people genuinely looked very different in the past and now. Of course we are healthier on the whole and I understand we're a bit bigger than women used to be, but I wonder what else has changed.

I think sculptures of Venus/Aphrodite are probably a reasonably good indicator of what the "ideal" Greco-Roman body shape for a woman was. Generally smallish breasts and wide hips.

There are various epithets for women and goddesses in Homeric poetry that probably indicate attractiveness, like 'ox-eyed lady Hera' or 'white-armed' or 'lovely ankles'.

Roman women did body hair removal - they used pumice or other abrasives to rub it off. Athenian women singed it off. Ouch. But I think that overlapped with class stuff as well - upper class women were more likely to remove body hair, at least in Rome anyway.

They rubbed off their body hair????

Yes, lots of stuff is about showing 'I'm rich enough to have the time/money for this shit' rather than conforming to the general beauty ideal. Who knows, it might even have looked weird to people at the time.

Roman men did a lot of plucking.

You can get these little sandpapery pads to rub off body hair in M&S today, hester. They do work, though they tend to give you ingrown hairs.

Singing sounds nastier!

Ox-eyed is one of those that doesn't quite cross the cultural divide, eh?

I do see loads of it is about money. I would love to untangle it all, though I suspect we'll never know completely.

Ox-eyed only sounds weird because we're not familiar with oxen. We might use doe-eyed.

Speak for yourself!

Ok, admittedly, what I am familiar with is bullocks and cattle, but I did grow up with them all over the place and their eyes are the same.

It would be fascinating to work out which animals are seen as beautiful. Because I think of a doe as being all graceful and nimble, so it's an appropriate one to choose ... but then I guess maybe cattle were rather less clunky and heavy back then too!

'Horsey' seems to be a pretty common term of abuse for an ugly woman. Cf. 'flanders mare'.

I've always assumed that the desirability of blonde hair and blue eyes across western history is related to2 things, looking youthful, thus fertile and healthy and a cultural dislike of darkness as bring demonic (also early racism, perhaps)

Wow at Charles II. Knew he was unfortunate due to all that inbreeding, but never seen a portrait before. Spectacular. Poor chap.

'Hapsburg jaw' reminds me of that Jewish curse-may you have a disease named after you.

He was described as "an imbecile" and died young. Poor Charles :(. Or Carlos, we should say.

What a brilliant, horrible curse.

sassy that makes sense, completely.

"His ancestor, Joanna of Castile, actually appears in his family tree no less than fourteen times because of first and second cousins intermarrying. It is also said that his genetic makeup was more muddled than it would have been if his parents had been brother and sister."

Obviously I am very busy today...

How interesting!
I think there must've been lots of fashions that we don't know about because they weren't among the rich.

Crikey. That is really disturbing. Is that Juana the Mad (as we learned to call her in a really PC history lesson)?

Oh that subject, I read that Tutunkamen's dynasty had funny-shaped heads due to inbreeding.

jazz - YY, that is what I would love to know about!

I guess there might be evidence from when people started recording more about working-class voices, or even early photos.

Yes, I would love to know that Jazz.
I was trying to find out last year whether there was any difference in clothing between the north and south of England in the 16th century (because there was a north-south divide in other ways) and drew a complete blank.
And yet, you can imagine there being local styles, like maybe in one area they folded their headrail in a particular way, or wore their aprons a certain length, and local people would have spotted the difference at once, but we will never know!

In medieval Welsh and Irish poetry there seems to be a big fixation on the slimness of women's feet. And their breasts are always like 'globes'.

Written by frustrated monks I suppose.

I think it is Juana the Mad, yes. Sister of Juan.

I read a book about the history of the Habsburgs once. I've forgotten almost all of it, it's so complicated.

Funny you should mention Tutankhamen - I was just reading about hi,. They took inbreeding to insane levels. Generations of brothers and sisters marrying each other. So many miscarriages, stillbirths and deformities resulted.

It's possible dialect words for clothing might help? Really hard to know, though.

I love the bit in Lark Rise, where the author describes how bustles as a fashion item really caught on and people didn't want to give them up, because they were so cheap to make. That must have an impact too.

Ooh, brilliant. I have slim feet.

hester - it's really sad, isn't it? What are you reading? I could do with something new.

Look at this.

Complicated, too, is the history of the marriages among Queen Victoria's
children and grandchildren. Lots of cousin unions, which, of course, helped spread hemophilia across the Royal Families of Europe.

It is fascinating to me that much of the intermarriage had to so with the notion of not diluting the blood royal, which to Victoria's credit, did not bother her as much as it did her German relations. When she agreed that her daughter Louise could marry the Marquis of Lorne, heir to the Duke of Argyll, many European royals were horrified because he was not of royal blood. Of course in Scotland, the perception was that Louise was marrying up.

Angela, your BBC link includes a knitting programme from 1976! Thank you - I'm going to watch it when I've got time

Great thread! I have been clicking links, fascinating.

The ox-eyed thing was partly a poetic device to do with metre IIRC. The characters would have one or more such epithets specific to them, which the poet could insert as necessary. "Ox-eyed" was always Hera, Athene was "bright", I can't remember whose the white arms were maybe Helen?

i always thnk people looked boggly eyed in old pictures, but then i you ever looked at old pictures of horses they are properly out of proportion.