Photo: UGArdener / Flickr

Curves – men love them and women want them… or do they? In our body obsessed culture real curves are rarely seen in popular magazines or television shows. We seem to have forgotten that a curvy body requires a bit of padding. But one television drama has brought back the glamour of the buxom hourglass figure, and in order to maintain their beauty the female cast members of Mad Men have been banned from the gym.

The show

Mad Men is set in the 1950s, a time when ‘men were men’ and women were only valued as mothers or mistresses. The sexual revolution was still a decade away and few women ever managed to make it in the masculine world of business. With the exception of one female character, all the women in Mad Men are either seductive secretaries looking for a husband or they are bored housewives.

The ideal body

Photo: dotpolka / Flickr

Since the 1950s the ‘ideal’ female figure has changed drastically. It is interesting that as women have become more empowered, the pressure to have a hard muscular body has increased. One might argue that we are now far more ‘health conscious’. But studies show that the type of excessive exercise many actresses and models do to attain the modern ideal body can also be harmful. It is well known that television adds pounds, and in order to look good on screen, actresses tend to be underweight.

In the eye of the beholder

We have become used to seeing hard, skinny bodies in the media. So it comes almost as a shock to see the buxom beauty, Christina Hendricks’, rounded hips looking so sultry and glamorous on screen. The actress who used to get turned down for big roles because of her body shape has now become a famous Hollywood sex symbol.

It goes to show the power of the media to retrain people’s concepts of beauty.

Tags: beauty, sex symbol