Anatomies: A Cultural History of the Human Body by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

ideas about diet and exercise helped them in this direction, as, surely, did the invention of the bathroom scales around this time. It is telling that the latest versions of such scales send small electric currents through your body so as to track changes in the weight of your fat quite separately from the weight of your body overall.
    One response to the growing fashion for thinness was to find new labels to suit those who were not thin. The splendid adjective Rubenesque dates from 1913. Derived from the voluptuous nudes painted by Peter Paul Rubens three centuries before, it is a reminder that ‘fleshy’ was not always bad. A Rubenesque figure is a paradox in the world where size zero is queen. It means not fat, not even large, but somewhat plump and definitely curvaceous – and desirable, not repulsive. It suggests soft flesh, not the hard body of homo clausus : more Marilyn Monroe than late-period Madonna.
    Scientists interested in attraction have recently examined the Flemish artist’s works in order to test the supposition widely accepted by evolutionary psychologists that men are biologically conditioned to prefer women with low waist-to-hip ratios, around 0.70, equivalent to a twenty-five-inch waist and thirty-six-inch hips, despite evidence that in some non-Westernized societies attraction is primarily driven by a high body weight. They measured the waist-to-hip ratios of twenty-nine Rubens nudes, accepted as representing an artistic standard of beauty, and found that they came out substantially higher, at 0.78, providing further evidence to suggest that the hourglass figure represented by the 0.70 ratio is not an ideal for all societies or all times.
    So how much fat is too much? Fat is known to serve a number of vital functions, of which the most obvious is the storage of energy. There are around thirty billion fat cells in the body. This figure does not change if you gain weight – at least at first. What happens is that each cell stores more energy-rich lipid, increasing up to fourfold in weight. If weight gain proceeds beyond a certain point, however, these cells begin to divide, and new fat cells are formed. After that, it’s harder to lose weight. Fat performs a number of other useful jobs, though, such as providing fatty acids that control cell activity and the hormones that regulate various body functions.
    It’s clear, then, that fat is not merely stuffing or padding, although it remains far less studied than flesh, bone and the organs of the body. Yet this is how it easily seems to us. It may be present in abundance or largely absent. When it appears, it is amorphous and unruly. It seems continuous, homogeneous, without structure and potentially endless. It serves no visible purpose but accretes anyway, making its own space in the expanding envelope of the body. It flouts the rules of ideal human form. And, bulging out almost anywhere, it makes a mockery of pert homo clausus .
    Pliny the Elder was one of the first to take against fat, in his Natural History , where he tells us that fat is without sense. Flesh can feel and touch, but a layer of fat is a spongy obstacle to sensation and therefore a hindrance to our connection with the world. In contemporary discourse, too, fat is seen not as the necessary complement of flesh, but in some ways as its inverse. Some people even equate the removal of fat with the addition of muscle tissue or the development of a leaner physique. One cosmetic surgeon I interviewed explained that an increasingly popular operation for men is the removal of subcutaneous fat from the stomach in narrow furrows so as to leave the illusion of a ‘six-pack’, that is to say, a well-developed rectus abdominis, the large, flat muscle that stretches across the stomach, and in which, with good definition, three transverse tendon lines appear.
    The questions don’t go away when the fat is no longer part of us. Is it waste or a useful resource? It is classified as clinical waste in