Kim Kardashian has managed to keep herself in the headlines and the spotlight of pop culture for years now. Finally, science has managed to explain why.
Researchers claim that scientific studies show that men are particularly attracted to women with a back that curves exactly 45 degrees from the top of her butt. This attraction dates back to mankind’s most primitive instincts: this buttock/back angle would have been especially beneficial to a pregnant woman in early hunter-gatherer societies, researchers claim.
These findings could explain why big-bottomed celebrities like Kim and Jennifer Lopez get so much attention garnered from their posteriors – it all boils down to the extra mass enveloping their buttocks and thus enhancing the curvature of the spine.
The studies in question identified two main points which get the most positive reactions:
1. Extra mass in the buttocks that enhances spine curvature
2. Physical curvature of the spine itself, known as vertebral wedging
One of the scientists involved in the study, Dr. David Lewis, a psychologist at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, commented, “‘[The curve] would have enabled ancestral women to shift their centre of mass back over their hips during pregnancy, a time during which there is a dramatic forward shift of their centre of mass…This benefit is critical: without being able to do this, women would experience a dramatic increase in hip torque (pressure) subjecting them to risk of muscular fatigue and injury…Consequently, ancestral women who possessed this degree of lumbar curvature would have been able to forage longer into pregnancy and would have been able to carry out multiple pregnancies with a reduced risk of spinal injury.”
Lewis explains that this trait could be instinctively attractive to men because of its Darwinian “survival of the fittest” advantageousness. Similar claims have been made regarding women’s studied attraction to taller men.
Without the curve in question, a primitive female in prehistoric times would have experienced increased pressure on her hips during pregnancy, leaving her immobile, vulnerable to sickness or animal attack and unable to help in community chores. A 45-degree angle in vertebrae, however, would have optimized a primitive woman’s mobility, aiding movement but not causing back pain and slipped discs that result from too much curvature.
The study, published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, examined the reactions of 300 men when shown different women with varying spinal silhouettes. The men’s attractiveness ratings showed a significant bias towards a spine curve of 45.5 degrees.
Additionally, the preference was not connected to (and should not be confused with) a woman’s buttock mass, researchers found – meaning that, while we thought that it was a big bottom men wanted, it was really a perfectly curved spine.
Lewis explains, “Men may be directing their attention to the butt and obtaining information about women’s spines, even if they are unaware that that is what their minds are doing. Alternatively, men may have preferences for both lumbar curvature and buttock size.”
