"Golden Age" BMI

[tongodeon]

Occasionally I'll see a photo of a beauty queen from days gone by accompanied by the comment "It's sad that women who look like this now are considered fat." I am dubious of this claim, primarily because I don't think those women look fat, and neither does anyone I know. But it got me wondering: "Are today's movie stars and models thinner than the stars and models of the 40s-60s, and if so by how much?" I've heard that "back in the old days they appreciated a woman with a little meat on her bones", but how much more meat did old timers appreciate? Being a fan of objective measurement, I took the top 20 from FHM's 100 Sexiest Women and compared them to available statistics from golden age actresses. I made this spreadsheet and have arrived at a variety of conclusions:

• Today's actresses would need to gain 12.1lbs or yesteryear's actresses would need to lose 11.73lbs to achieve BMI equivalence. (The difference is due to a 1" increase in actress height.)
  
  
• The "normal weight" range is [18.5-24.9]. BMIs of actresses from either era are on the low end (18.92, 20.85), which seems to make actresses about as "unhealthy" as I am on the high end of the "normal weight" range (25.03). (Obviously I'm exposing myself to different health risks than they are.)
  
  
• Actresses tend to gain weight as they get older: both Demi Moore and Marilyn Monroe gained about 20lbs over the course of their careers. An unknown 118lb Marilyn Monroe got roles, and a well-known 140lb Marilyn Monroe did too, but it's possible that Norma Jean might not have been as successful had she started auditioning as an unknown at 140.
  
  
• Regular people, not professional circus sideshow weight-guessers, can estimate someone's weight to within ten pounds or so. Today's stars being ~12lbs thinner is statistically significant, but it's getting close to the measurable noise floor as far as human eyes are concerned.
  
  
• I'm coining a unit of measurement, the "starlet-year", to describe the length of time that it takes for a society's neuroses to cause starlets to drop one BMI unit. I am 3.4 BMI units heavier than Brad Pitt, or 89 starlet-years behind Brad Pitt. (I would be considered by 1918 society to be as sexy as Brad Pitt. The stars in the year 2089 will make Brad Pitt look like me by comparison.) On the bright side, I'm 510 starlet-years in front of a 300lb Marlon Brando. Fat-Brando would have been considered as sexy I am today if he were teleported back to the year 1497.

I also have a long list of disclaimers and mea culpas, hopefully to spare you the trouble of pointing out how wrong I am about all of this:

1. This "study" is riddled with generalizations and inaccuracies, is missing significant data, and exhibits selection bias not to mention good old-fashioned inaccurate, exaggerated figures taken most likely from unreliable press agents. If anyone's got better numbers from more reliable sources please let me know.
   
   
2. BMI is a far from perfect gauge of health. In 1973 Arnold Schwarzenegger's weight was 235 (BMI 30) but he was still in much better shape than I am today. Perhaps today's actresses are more muscular, artificially increasing their weight and making the gap appear narrower than it is. Or perhaps yesteryear's actresses had more fat *and* more muscle, making the gap appear larger than it is. I have no data to support this speculation.
   
   
3. It's possible that today's stars aren't thinner but younger, age correlating with weight in both males and females. I have no data to support this speculation.
   
   
4. It's possible that today's stars appear thinner due to selection bias: "Kate Winslet battles Anorexia" makes headlines, and we tend to see the least-flattering photos of today's stars a lot more than we see the least-flattering photos of 60s stars.
   
   
5. It could be argued that the gap is larger than what I've found here, since old-timey publicists would subtract a few pounds from their pudgy clients' official weight, whereas today's stars are barely-conscious bulemics teetering at the edge of malnutrition and scurvy whose publicists are inclined to add a few pounds to their clients' official weight to make them appear healthy. I have no data to support this speculation.
   
   
6. The camera adds 10 pounds, but Photoshop can remove 5 of them. You can remove the other five with liposuction, cosmetic surgery, thinner, clingier textiles from more manufacturers, better sewing machines and smarter topologists. Our culture might be as obsessed with body image as it always is, but more effective at micromanaging that obsession.
   
   
7. Fake boobs will artificially increase BMI, and I see a few of those on the list.