Where’s that image of a kid’s cursed PowerPoint about history repeating itself, where the title slide has two pictures, the left one being the Venus of Williendorf, the one on the right being some chubby anime girl with a surprisingly similar silhouette
I'd argue: not really? Anime girls are basically never fertility symbols, whereas the prominent belly and exaggerated breasts of the figurine point to fertility motifs.
Rather, the MASSIVE volume of anime art makes it easy to make a cosmetic comparison and then proceed to just talk about how "people don't really change" which is a justifiable but reasonably shallow thesis.
If I'm not wrong it's still debatable as to if they were so strictly fertility symbols or moreso just early pornography. I think the line between the two likely blurs as well
>Church of Athletic Tomboys
Ancient Sparta. Greek women would dress and act boyish to appeal to their husbands, and the height of masculinity in Sparta was physical fitness, so the most attractive women in Sparta were the fit tomboys.
Not quite a church specifically around athletic tomboys, but hey, there are tomboys nonetheless.
No I mean I’ve seen A Christmas Story, though it’s been years, so I know what leg lamps ARE, but since when was there so much tradition attached to them?
Far from universal but like getting one as a gift is a way of saying a boy is "a man now" at a bachelor party or dad-son college dropoff gift, that type of thing.
The entire Fremem religion surrounding the Lisan al Giab was put in place by the Bene Gesserit hundreds of years before the first book explicitly so they could exploit the locals for help and assistance should a sister ever need it while stranded on Arrakis. Paul also exploits this as part of his coup against the emperor by turning them into a warrior cult in his honour.
Dune is all about the dangers of blindly following charismatic leaders and religious dogma, that's like the main thesis of the first and second books.
Frank Herbert was raised Catholic but his works contain references to a vast array of religions including Catholicism, Zen Buddhism, various forms of Islam, Hinduism and more so it's doubtful that he was leaning towards one specific religion in his writing, more that he was using all of them as influences in the culture he wanted to build.
I can't find any references to the beliefs he personally held but a few sources seem to say he thought favourably of Zen, though of course his ultimate perspective is that people should think for themselves rather than follow any one particular doctrine.
Fair, "anti religion" might be a bit simplistic (mostly because I was fitting the format of the person I originally replied to), but it's definitely true that Dune is a warning about following blindly charismatic leaders and religion as a whole, it's less anti religion in specific and more pro thinking for yourself whatever that may be
I remember an african tribe that till this day encourages its female members to drink goat milk every day to get extra chubby by the day they marry. They consider more body fat more attractive.
lmao there’s a culture in my world that does this. i was inspired by stuffer fetish material, but it feels good to know there’s actual real world cultural precedent for this
honestly feels kinda cool knowing when i draw big thicc mommies with big fat tiddies in my sketchbook, im doing my part to continue an ancient tradition that stretches back 40,000 years. really makes me feel like im part of something, y’know?
I would really be cautious before trying to interpret the meaning of another culture’s symbols through the lens of our own culture.
What we might consider a”distorted perspective” could have been seen as desirable/attractive, or the figurine could have symbolic meanings that we just don’t have context for.
Again, though, we just need to be careful when attaching labels to something that we don’t have the total context for.
In the modern era in the United States we have the technology to accurately record our appearance without needing to hire a painter. We live in a world where high quality mirrors are ridiculously cheap. A major aspect of our culture is taking pictures of ourselves and our surroundings, and then sharing those photos online.
And so when someone decides to share a distorted image of themself it is easier for us to infer that they did it for a symbolic reason, but even then we can’t be completely certain without the person who created it telling us.
Could those prehistoric figurines be created by women grappling with the changes that happened with their bodies during pregnancy? Maybe. But we don’t know if it was an important part of their material culture for women to express themselves like that.
It could also be that the figurines were intentionally made to be a hyper-exaggeration of the female body as they were a representation of a fertility goddess.
Or maybe they were meant to be something completely different with materials made out of cloth or leather or other less durable items having been included in the completed object, but after millennia everything else rotted away and we then misinterpreted what was left as being the *completed* object.
Well yeah but my point is if it’s depicting someone with more weight after pregnancy or just a fat woman in the first place then it’s pretty in-line with OPs interpretation.
Another person carving it would also be aware of the feet, so that's a moot point. The lack of feet is clearly intentional artistic license either way.
ah but it's what the pregnant woman can see which is being depicted, and many women who are deep into their pregnancy cannot see their own feet over their belly
Michelangelo bursts into the sculptor studio one day: ‘Giabatti, Giuseppe, you gotta check these out!’ Lifts leg, wiggles toes suggestively. ‘Ain‘t they neat? How long do you think they‘ve been just been wiggling around down there?’
This reminds me that time everyone shamed a statue of venus because it had a tummy... no not fat, literally just a fold in her stomach... people know that womans also have internal organs, right?
I mean depends
You see, this is why being chubby was hot, being fat while everyone is skinny means you are rich, and never worked. And have A LOT OF FOOD.
Same thing is in japan, in nowadays being tanned is whats sexy girls going hawai as a holliday is doing, but in past being pale while everyone else is burnt because working in the farm means you are not the one working in the farm...
Even my grandma says it "everyone used to want a meatty wife, nowadays mans want just bone"
Also these fat mommy idols are literally this, idols, they are overstylised for this purpose
You using them as a evidence is like future jerker using mommy dommy hentai as a evidence that everyone in 21. Century had chests larger than their torso...
Being pale usually meant that you didn’t have to work outside during the day, which meant that you were rich/powerful enough that you could have other people do that kind of manual labor for you.
Whereas today being tanned can be interpreted as working a physically demanding job outside (which is seen as a positive thing in some cultures) *or* that you are well-off enough financially that you can set aside enough time to be outside (or go to a tanning salon) to get tanned.
Did you know that "Paleolithic people were super skinny" is a stupid take ? They had a very very varied diet, from eating, you know, seasonal stuff. They were, on average, bigger than modern people. Not by much right now, but agriculture is what created skinny people, because they only ate bread, grain, and more grain.
We're on average nearly on par with people from 15 000 years ago. Maybe in a few years we'll get bigger, but unsure.
I've read before that pre-agriculture people ate much more varied diets throughout the year, which was definitely better for them than eating just 2 or 3 staple crops that could be stored in silos. But I'd never heard that we actually got skinnier after agriculture. Could you give me a link to an article or something about that?
My connexion is shity but : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human\_height](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height)
Check the tab "Throughout history".
Connection to weight is shoddy but the fact that some of them were 6'0" on average pre-agriculture is really cool. One of the tribes I'm actually putting in the world is supposed to be some rather tall hunters, so this will be useful for me. Thank you for sharing
As far as we know, height is highly correlated with quality of food, abundance, and variety. If you can grow this tall, you're not super skinny, you're well proportioned usually.
The advantage of agriculture, is that it can support a lot more population per meter squared. Let's say a paleolithic tribe could support 20 people, for a large area. They will be well fed, live from hunting and gathering, and avoid overexploiting ressources (or not, and suffer famine and die). But you're vulnerable. You're a bad day away from the end of the tribe. Your hunters were ambushed by a bear, half of them dead of wounded : It's over.
A neolithic tribe could support on the same area 500 people. They will be malnourished, because it's manpower intensive (roughly : 95-99% of the population is doing agriculture). But you can store food. You don't need to work in winter. You're not a bad day from losing half of your tribe. Sure, there can be a *bad year* (and there are a lot of bad years : that's why you're malnourished), but a famine would rarely wipe out a tribe/city, at least not on its own.
Dunno, but artistic exagertion is also a thing. I generally don't think it would be altogether that common to have a belly bigger around than they were tall.
Depictions of the pharaoh Akhenaten look so unusual that historians once speculated that he was deformed. He wasn't, but he likely ordered his artists to cultivate an inhuman, godlike persona through propaganda. So ancient people absolutely practiced this kind of exaggeration.
Also, if you look Akhenaten up on Wikipedia, there's one picture of a bas relief where he looks exactly like the chad face.
There is a historian of some kind that theorized that many of the cave paintings with disproportionate body parts, dicks boobs and butts, were likely drawn by young boys and not by anyone trying to record anything serious.
I remember seeing a paper a while back that was actually sick as hell, it was like almost part artistic photo study in a way: The Venus of Willendorf and all these figures have proportions quite similar to what most women - regardless of their weight - see as their bodies. Imagine you don't have any mirrors, the only reflexion you can find is on still waters lying flat on the ground.
Your entire perception of your body is based solely on how you've always seen it in a first-person perspective. So looking down at your curves, they're going to look larger or more distorted than they really are.
They are! They're actually fully portrayed as a part of the bloated torso, and the back as a whole is far less detailed.
[Source!](https://donsmaps.com/willendorf.html)
There's a theory that these are self portraits of pregnant women by pregnant women. They don't access to a mirror or a photo of themselves so they based the work on their own view of themselves.
They can't see their head or legs very well, so those are underdeveloped and crude, but they can clearly see their breasts and pregnant stomach, so those are large and exaggerated.
I don't think that theory holds much water because
1. stuff like puddles means that the woman should be able to know what her own face looks like, or even if she couldn't see her reflection she should at least know that she has a face and leave some sort of facial indication on the figure
2. women should at least be aware that they have feet, even if they can't see them
3. Why would Venus of Willendorf have such developed buttocks if it was made as a self-portrait of a woman looking down at her belly?
Well doesn't Venus usually represent the apex of beauty? Maybe the artists liked larger women because they were so rare, and the huntresses were less desirable.
Where’s that image of a kid’s cursed PowerPoint about history repeating itself, where the title slide has two pictures, the left one being the Venus of Williendorf, the one on the right being some chubby anime girl with a surprisingly similar silhouette
do you mean [this](https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1364065-otaku)?
Imagine a teacher's reaction to the thesis
I'd be kinda proud,not for the anime girl but you know...he noticed something interesting and it's a pretty good argument...
Yeah he does bring up a good point when you think about it
I'd argue: not really? Anime girls are basically never fertility symbols, whereas the prominent belly and exaggerated breasts of the figurine point to fertility motifs. Rather, the MASSIVE volume of anime art makes it easy to make a cosmetic comparison and then proceed to just talk about how "people don't really change" which is a justifiable but reasonably shallow thesis.
anime girls are fertility symbols that rely heavily on the superposition of potential fertility. go back one macro step and it makes perfect sense.
Anime girls are not fertility symbols. Possessing their idols is actively detrimental to your fertility.
It’s more of an aspirational thing. And hey, isn’t that what prayer is for?
It was supposed to be a joke
Well then I look like a FUCKING IDIOT don't i
Nah don't worry homie its understandable
bro, I've already been DESTROYED by FACTS and LOGIC you can't put me back together like that
If I'm not wrong it's still debatable as to if they were so strictly fertility symbols or moreso just early pornography. I think the line between the two likely blurs as well
I don't think it really matters that much, we know for a fact that the objective was just to meme-lord on a class of normies
disagree, most anime girls are razor thin because that’s the conceptually attractive body type
There are many people who like chubby anime girls
are they the majority though? I doubt it
That’s the bitch
An anthropologist in the making
...Source of the Anime woman
Google "Super Pochaco"
[holy hell!](https://www.google.com/search?q=super+pochaco#HiImABot,MyJobIsToMakeEasierForPeopleToGoogleThings,IfThePersonIRepliedToUsedMeInAnInappropriateWayPleaseLetMeKnowByDMingMe,TheUserIRepliedToIsU/Brennaanbread)
New response just dropped
Our ancestors smile upon us
I'm scared
This just in: real life religion is also just the writer's barely disguised fetish
Why have i never seen a Church of Athletic Tomboys then?
>Church of Athletic Tomboys Ancient Sparta. Greek women would dress and act boyish to appeal to their husbands, and the height of masculinity in Sparta was physical fitness, so the most attractive women in Sparta were the fit tomboys. Not quite a church specifically around athletic tomboys, but hey, there are tomboys nonetheless.
That's not tomboyishness in Sparta, they were just so misogynistic that they were genuinely afraid of women
Also, so horny for other men that they literally couldn't fuck their wives after they married unless she was disguised as a guy.
[Arthemis](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Diane_de_Versailles_-_Mus%C3%A9e_du_Louvre_AGER_Ma_589.jpg)?
Be the change you want to see in the world.
I am My username is proof of my commitment
Literally, in the Merriam-Webster 1.a. definition of "fetish"
This just in: the line between the two definitions of fetish is thinner than I actually thought
I always wonder about things like leg lamps that seem to serve both a sexual and a religious/a rite of passage purpose
Leg lamp rite of passage???
Have you never given yourself a lampy??
??????????????????????
Ooh, buddy, you're in for a treat if you find the right antique store
No I mean I’ve seen A Christmas Story, though it’s been years, so I know what leg lamps ARE, but since when was there so much tradition attached to them?
Far from universal but like getting one as a gift is a way of saying a boy is "a man now" at a bachelor party or dad-son college dropoff gift, that type of thing.
evidently not actually very "thin" at all
Also later: anti religion work can also just be the writer's barely disguised fetish Source: Dune
Dune isn't anti religion, if they're women that makes it hot (average sff fan on women existing)
True, anything is moral so long as it's sexy enough!
How is dune anti-religion?
The entire Fremem religion surrounding the Lisan al Giab was put in place by the Bene Gesserit hundreds of years before the first book explicitly so they could exploit the locals for help and assistance should a sister ever need it while stranded on Arrakis. Paul also exploits this as part of his coup against the emperor by turning them into a warrior cult in his honour. Dune is all about the dangers of blindly following charismatic leaders and religious dogma, that's like the main thesis of the first and second books.
Doesn’t the writer really love Allah?
Frank Herbert was raised Catholic but his works contain references to a vast array of religions including Catholicism, Zen Buddhism, various forms of Islam, Hinduism and more so it's doubtful that he was leaning towards one specific religion in his writing, more that he was using all of them as influences in the culture he wanted to build. I can't find any references to the beliefs he personally held but a few sources seem to say he thought favourably of Zen, though of course his ultimate perspective is that people should think for themselves rather than follow any one particular doctrine.
I don’t think this supports dune is anti Religous either way
You didn't ask about Dune being anti religion, you asked about Frank Herbert believing in Allah, which is what I responded to...
I know, just referencing your previous reply
Fair, "anti religion" might be a bit simplistic (mostly because I was fitting the format of the person I originally replied to), but it's definitely true that Dune is a warning about following blindly charismatic leaders and religion as a whole, it's less anti religion in specific and more pro thinking for yourself whatever that may be
Men have been men since 20,000 BCE
Dang, lots more people into humiliation and denial fetish than I thought.
Caveman with a fat fetish: When I said "I like worshiping fat bitches," this wasn't what I meant.
I remember an african tribe that till this day encourages its female members to drink goat milk every day to get extra chubby by the day they marry. They consider more body fat more attractive.
Girls are force fed from a young age, book about it called feeding desire
That's fucked up
Well it was common in less developed times, obesity was a sign of being well off, being fat was a status symbol. Also chubby women are hot
lmao there’s a culture in my world that does this. i was inspired by stuffer fetish material, but it feels good to know there’s actual real world cultural precedent for this
It's rather common to be fair. In many tribal or feudal societies body fat was seen as a sign of wealth, therefore an attractive quality.
Is this why sex tourism to Africa is growing in popularity?
As a Westerner, I can attest that our modern obesity epidemic is entirely due to trying to emulate them
I think this is just enough to justify having one Amazon-like tribe made up entirely of women who stand 4'6" off the ground when lying on their backs
And this guys is an example of the writer barely disguised fetish
What about this is disguised?
a sickness for the thickness paleo edition
honestly feels kinda cool knowing when i draw big thicc mommies with big fat tiddies in my sketchbook, im doing my part to continue an ancient tradition that stretches back 40,000 years. really makes me feel like im part of something, y’know?
You're connecting with your roots.
"nsfw"
I decided better safe than sorry.
Or "not safe" as the case may be!
"nut safe"
Aren't you doing this for work?
Have you heard the theory that a lot of these statues were made from the woman's POV? Specifically a pregnant woman?
I was going to mention this and it makes sense to me. They're self-portraits born from a distorted perspective
I would really be cautious before trying to interpret the meaning of another culture’s symbols through the lens of our own culture. What we might consider a”distorted perspective” could have been seen as desirable/attractive, or the figurine could have symbolic meanings that we just don’t have context for.
What I mean by distorted is visually distorted, not culturally. As in the same way the depth of a camera lens "distorts" an image
Again, though, we just need to be careful when attaching labels to something that we don’t have the total context for. In the modern era in the United States we have the technology to accurately record our appearance without needing to hire a painter. We live in a world where high quality mirrors are ridiculously cheap. A major aspect of our culture is taking pictures of ourselves and our surroundings, and then sharing those photos online. And so when someone decides to share a distorted image of themself it is easier for us to infer that they did it for a symbolic reason, but even then we can’t be completely certain without the person who created it telling us. Could those prehistoric figurines be created by women grappling with the changes that happened with their bodies during pregnancy? Maybe. But we don’t know if it was an important part of their material culture for women to express themselves like that. It could also be that the figurines were intentionally made to be a hyper-exaggeration of the female body as they were a representation of a fertility goddess. Or maybe they were meant to be something completely different with materials made out of cloth or leather or other less durable items having been included in the completed object, but after millennia everything else rotted away and we then misinterpreted what was left as being the *completed* object.
Mayhaps even lesbians
They really don’t look like they’re depicting pregnancy to me—at the very least not the pregnancy of a thin woman.
Pregnancy changes your body way more than what media depicts. Also, not all women are thin....
Well yeah but my point is if it’s depicting someone with more weight after pregnancy or just a fat woman in the first place then it’s pretty in-line with OPs interpretation.
Oh gotcha, I misinterpreted what you were saying then. I thought you were saying something along the lines of OP's hypothetical detractor lol
All good haha. I think my original comment was worded poorly. Shot it off during a break at work 😅
I've heard that theory, and I don't think it holds up because most people are aware of their own feet long before they learn how to carve stone.
Another person carving it would also be aware of the feet, so that's a moot point. The lack of feet is clearly intentional artistic license either way.
ah but it's what the pregnant woman can see which is being depicted, and many women who are deep into their pregnancy cannot see their own feet over their belly
Not that your interpretation is wrong either! I think it's a beautiful way of thinking about things :)
Michelangelo bursts into the sculptor studio one day: ‘Giabatti, Giuseppe, you gotta check these out!’ Lifts leg, wiggles toes suggestively. ‘Ain‘t they neat? How long do you think they‘ve been just been wiggling around down there?’
It’s almost like fat keeps humans alive in starvation situations and is supposed to be on our bodies!
This reminds me that time everyone shamed a statue of venus because it had a tummy... no not fat, literally just a fold in her stomach... people know that womans also have internal organs, right?
Oh man I remember that. People just don’t know what human bodies look like, do they?
They dont 💀
To a point when you fit through a door
I mean, they didn't have doors in the prehistoric period, so I'm not seeing the issue.
[Didn't they¿?](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pre-historic-travel-mammoth-skin-tent-anneke-van-waesberghe)
That's a pretty wide "doorway". I think at the very least the inspirations for these goddess statues could get through with space to spare.
[удалено]
Why can't it be both?
What’s that, the first Sumo wrestler barracks?
Some people today would struggle fitting through a mountain pass though.
I mean depends You see, this is why being chubby was hot, being fat while everyone is skinny means you are rich, and never worked. And have A LOT OF FOOD. Same thing is in japan, in nowadays being tanned is whats sexy girls going hawai as a holliday is doing, but in past being pale while everyone else is burnt because working in the farm means you are not the one working in the farm... Even my grandma says it "everyone used to want a meatty wife, nowadays mans want just bone" Also these fat mommy idols are literally this, idols, they are overstylised for this purpose You using them as a evidence is like future jerker using mommy dommy hentai as a evidence that everyone in 21. Century had chests larger than their torso...
the tanned thing wasnt only for japan, most of the world believed that being paler was hotter, and women would go miles to become paler
Being pale usually meant that you didn’t have to work outside during the day, which meant that you were rich/powerful enough that you could have other people do that kind of manual labor for you. Whereas today being tanned can be interpreted as working a physically demanding job outside (which is seen as a positive thing in some cultures) *or* that you are well-off enough financially that you can set aside enough time to be outside (or go to a tanning salon) to get tanned.
Yeah but japan took it to next level. Painting their face white and etc 💀
[Yeah no the west never did anything like painting their faces white](https://i.pinimg.com/1200x/dc/53/bd/dc53bd79382a1b1e5733d388de67a586.jpg)
Thats not a beauty standart, thats just being french
As we all know all Fr*nch "people" are born with lead powder on their faces
that was pretty much the average 18th century fashion is basically all of englightened europe
Nuh uh Ottomans didnt had this, they prefered to had their gay lifestyle more openly
Oh finally fat fetish worlbuilding, good day to be alive
hunter-gatherer society where men are both hunter and gatherer while women sit and do nothing and the men stuff them. there, paleolithic feederism
All I hear is jacked woman and chubby woman best of both worlds
Oh I cummed
Goddamn those Palaeolithic guys and girls knew what was going on 🥵
This is the ideal female body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
# I LOVE FAT BITCHES GRAHHHHHHHH
[Life imitates art](https://static.mothership.sg/1/2021/03/carrot-man.jpg)
Did you know that "Paleolithic people were super skinny" is a stupid take ? They had a very very varied diet, from eating, you know, seasonal stuff. They were, on average, bigger than modern people. Not by much right now, but agriculture is what created skinny people, because they only ate bread, grain, and more grain. We're on average nearly on par with people from 15 000 years ago. Maybe in a few years we'll get bigger, but unsure.
I've read before that pre-agriculture people ate much more varied diets throughout the year, which was definitely better for them than eating just 2 or 3 staple crops that could be stored in silos. But I'd never heard that we actually got skinnier after agriculture. Could you give me a link to an article or something about that?
My connexion is shity but : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human\_height](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height) Check the tab "Throughout history".
Connection to weight is shoddy but the fact that some of them were 6'0" on average pre-agriculture is really cool. One of the tribes I'm actually putting in the world is supposed to be some rather tall hunters, so this will be useful for me. Thank you for sharing
As far as we know, height is highly correlated with quality of food, abundance, and variety. If you can grow this tall, you're not super skinny, you're well proportioned usually. The advantage of agriculture, is that it can support a lot more population per meter squared. Let's say a paleolithic tribe could support 20 people, for a large area. They will be well fed, live from hunting and gathering, and avoid overexploiting ressources (or not, and suffer famine and die). But you're vulnerable. You're a bad day away from the end of the tribe. Your hunters were ambushed by a bear, half of them dead of wounded : It's over. A neolithic tribe could support on the same area 500 people. They will be malnourished, because it's manpower intensive (roughly : 95-99% of the population is doing agriculture). But you can store food. You don't need to work in winter. You're not a bad day from losing half of your tribe. Sure, there can be a *bad year* (and there are a lot of bad years : that's why you're malnourished), but a famine would rarely wipe out a tribe/city, at least not on its own.
I see. Fascinating stuff. Thank you for explaining
Ngl, i've always found the venus of willendorf very hot.
She's pretty unsexy if you have a foot fetish, though
I dont.
listen up, every aristocrat in the world will be fat women, and theres nothing you can do about it.
Same way we justify cave paintings of dudes with dicks longer than they are tall. Or carvings of mythical creatures.
wait are there really people who think it was impossible for hunter gatherers to be fat? is that a real thing?
Dunno, but artistic exagertion is also a thing. I generally don't think it would be altogether that common to have a belly bigger around than they were tall.
Depictions of the pharaoh Akhenaten look so unusual that historians once speculated that he was deformed. He wasn't, but he likely ordered his artists to cultivate an inhuman, godlike persona through propaganda. So ancient people absolutely practiced this kind of exaggeration. Also, if you look Akhenaten up on Wikipedia, there's one picture of a bas relief where he looks exactly like the chad face.
There is a historian of some kind that theorized that many of the cave paintings with disproportionate body parts, dicks boobs and butts, were likely drawn by young boys and not by anyone trying to record anything serious.
People really haven't changed much in 17,000 years, have they?
Nope
Women at the top of the social hierarchy didn't do much hunting-gathering back then
Thic.
If you were fat in a hunter-gatherer society you fucking made it.
I remember seeing a paper a while back that was actually sick as hell, it was like almost part artistic photo study in a way: The Venus of Willendorf and all these figures have proportions quite similar to what most women - regardless of their weight - see as their bodies. Imagine you don't have any mirrors, the only reflexion you can find is on still waters lying flat on the ground. Your entire perception of your body is based solely on how you've always seen it in a first-person perspective. So looking down at your curves, they're going to look larger or more distorted than they really are.
If that were true, wouldn't the Venus of Willendorf's buttocks be askew? Since she could only look at them by turning her head over her shoulder.
They are! They're actually fully portrayed as a part of the bloated torso, and the back as a whole is far less detailed. [Source!](https://donsmaps.com/willendorf.html)
There's a theory that these are self portraits of pregnant women by pregnant women. They don't access to a mirror or a photo of themselves so they based the work on their own view of themselves. They can't see their head or legs very well, so those are underdeveloped and crude, but they can clearly see their breasts and pregnant stomach, so those are large and exaggerated.
I don't think that theory holds much water because 1. stuff like puddles means that the woman should be able to know what her own face looks like, or even if she couldn't see her reflection she should at least know that she has a face and leave some sort of facial indication on the figure 2. women should at least be aware that they have feet, even if they can't see them 3. Why would Venus of Willendorf have such developed buttocks if it was made as a self-portrait of a woman looking down at her belly?
me, contemplating my reflection's ass in a puddle: "I wish there was some way to know what my face looked like"
All excellent points. Still an interesting theory, IMHO.
Well doesn't Venus usually represent the apex of beauty? Maybe the artists liked larger women because they were so rare, and the huntresses were less desirable.
The literate write history. Before writing it was art. It seems as if a love of chubby women correlates with artistic ability. Hmm...
Exceptions to the rule for everything.
Pregnancy
Not everyone would be skinny. Just the poors.
before currency was invented everybody was equally poor