Female body shape or figure is the cumulative product of a woman's skeletal structure and the quantity and distribution of muscle and fat on the body. As with most physical traits, there is a wide range of normality of female body shapes.
Human beings and cultures have perennially focused attention on the female body as a source of aesthetic pleasure, sexual attraction, fertility, and reproduction. There are, and have been, wide differences on what should be considered an ideal or preferred body shape, both for attractiveness and for health reasons. These have varied among cultures simultaneously.
Women's bodies occur in a range of shapes. Female figures are typically narrower at the waist than at the bust and hips. The bust, waist, and hips are called inflection points, and the ratios of their circumferences are used to define basic body shapes.
Read more about Female Body Shape: Impact of Estrogens, Fat Distribution, Muscles, Changes To Body Shape, Measurements, Female Shapes, "Dimensions", Social and Health Issues, Bodies As Identity, Alteration of Body Shape, See Also, References
Famous quotes containing the words female, body and/or shape:
“The same polarity of the male and female principle exists in nature; not only, as is obvious in animals and plants, but in the polarity of the two fundamental functions, that of receiving and penetrating. It is the polarity of earth and rain, of the river and the ocean, of night and day, of darkness and light, of matter and spirit.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)
“Now wait a minute, wait a minute. What kind of a deal is this? You can’t go shoving just anybody’s body off on me.”
—Seton I. Miller (1902–1974)
“‘A Shape all light, which with one hand did fling
Dew on the earth, as if she were the dawn,
And the invisible rain did ever sing
‘A silver music on the mossy lawn;”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)