On the whole, male artists, whether they are a Rubens or a Moore,
tackle the female body through developing images of the anatomical
features responsible for gender signals. This means they concentrate
on the anatomical forms associated with the specialised role of women
as child- bearers and baby feeders. Compared with an average man,
an average woman’s pelvis is wider and rotated back slightly more than
in the male. Her waist is a little more slender and her thighs a little
thicker. Her navel is deeper and her belly longer. Her breasts are
swollen. These specialisations, which aid in the carrying of the foetus,
its delivery and its subsequent suckling, alter the outline of the human
female in several characteristic ways. However, studies of comparative
anatomy and physiology within primates indicate that the shape of
human breasts is primarily a sexual signal rather than a parental one.
Other primates do not have rounded breasts, yet they feed their young
with great efficiency. Another line of zoological enquiry presents the
idea that the female double breast shape has evolved to mimic the
female buttock signals because, unlike other primates, humans enter a
sexual encounter from the front, the underside, of the body.
Secondary sexual structures of the female are the basic motifs taken by
male artists for pictorial or sculptural development. They form a
seamless set of evolutionary adaptations that all rest with the female
body as an efficient machine for childbearing. Her protruding breasts
mean that her chest, although narrower than the male’s when seen from
the front, is deeper when seen from the side, even at a distance. The
female torso also has a distinctive hourglass shape created by the
narrow waist and the wide hips that cover a broad pelvis. The thighs
start wider apart from each other, and this results in a larger crotch-gap
in the female, and an inward slope to the thighs that often lead to an
almost knock-kneed appearance.
Because the pelvis is rotated backwards, the female buttocks protrude
more than those of the male making them much more conspicuous.
When a woman walks and especially when she runs, her childbearing
anatomy gives her a special gait. The inward sloping thighs force her to
make semicircular rotations of the legs. Her buttocks sway more and her
body tends to wiggle in a way that contrasts strikingly with the male gait.
In addition, her shorter legs mean that she takes shorter strides and her
running actions, apart from female athletes who conform more to the
male shape, generally are much clumsier than those of the male.
Gender signals can be quite subtle. Females have narrow shoulders, so
their upper arms are usually held closer to the sides of their chests than
in the male. The broad-chested male displays arms that hang down
away from the sides of his trunk. The typical female tends to have her
elbows locked in close to her body. If a man deliberately tucks his upper
arms into the sides of his chest and then spreads his forearms out
sideways he will find himself transmitting an effeminate gender signal.
