The “beauty standard for women” is not all that standard. You will have to differentiate:
Beautiful for whom?
A model for some Haute Couture event will probably never be truly “thick” or just curvy, but tall and slim - because on this body type the clothes look great and they look enticing when presented by tall, elegant women. A tall model usually just walks way different than a curvier one - and if you have a curvy woman on the catwalk, she might take away the attention from the garb that is being presented.
An female lead actor has to have a face that is “memorable”, usually with slim shape, not roundish, balanced and with larger than average eyes. Often, actors are never as slim or thin as models, you will see far more body types, although they usually have larger cup sizes and upper body dimensions than models. From what I can tell, at least over here in Europe, most women have quite small breasts compared to the width of their hips, that is maybe the reason why so many actors get judged by the appearance of their upper bodies.
If you ask men about their preferred looks in a woman when looking for a mate, the average gravitates usually to a curvier, thicker build and often, women who are not too tall are preferred. A generally healthy and fit aspect is also seen as beautiful. Symmetry in face and body is also greatly appreciated. Such women may look “thick” compared to a supermodel or certain actors. That preference has not changed much at all.
I have seen a few pictures of “Pretty woman” Julia Roberts in today’s paper. She is rather tall, 175 cm or about 5 ft 10 inches. But she weighs in at 50kgs, or 110 pounds, giving her a Body Mass Index of around 16, which is extremely low. She easily could weigh 20 kgs more at her height and no one would consider her to be obese. On these pictures, she looks anything but “pretty” to me.
They’re not, it may appear that way, especially living in America but it’s mostly related to the shift in the size of Americans, whom are a huge cultural impact on the world, are becoming increasingly bigger and bigger, therefore what is considered the “new standard” is basically just becoming the new norm.
You can’t have a bunch of thin and shapely models put up on this pedestal of beauty while the rest of society sinks into obesity, there’s going to be an impact into fashion and into what models and celebrities should look like as more and more obese people become famous and therefore have an impact on society and the cultural norms surrounding that.
You have famous women these days like Adele, Lady Gaga, but even more so you have more curvier women from African American backgrounds and Latina’s that have a more unhealthy food culture that tend to be larger and more curvier.
With the minority populations growing as a whole in the United States, you’re starting to see a shift or at least you have been now for many years, into what is popular and what is considered an appropriate weight or body type, especially since a lot of these little girls are of the same ethnic background.
Also, with the cultural of instagram and people wanting to look good and stand out, especially in American culture, than bigger is better. Bigger booty, bigger hips, bigger breasts, bigger lips, bigger thighs, but skinny(er) waist. It’s just part of the normal cultural shift and the reality is either being just skinny or just fat isn’t really a body shape that people are going to want to emulate, so you’ve got to have these outrageous and exaggerate every part of your body just to break the mold and be different.
People who argue that they’re just thick but mostly healthy are just basically lying to themselves. There’s no medical validation for their argument, being overweight is being overweight. And gauging your current health now while being overweight and/or obese and saying you’re perfectly fine now, is a gross misunderstanding of how health works. I’m no medical expert but it’s common sense to know that obesity plays a long term role in your health, meaning that your body, your organs are being affected, overworked so that sometime in the future, those issues from that extra weight will start to play a bigger role in these people’s lives.
Obesity is essentially a crisis in the health sector, it’s entirely preventable but obesity related illnesses are going to sky rocket the cost of health in the future and cause more deaths than all the stories and injustices and everything else you hear people complain about as being the bane of society and earth, nothing is going to kill and affect more people than anything else and yet people are pretty happy about it being a silent killer and part of their lives for the most part, like if it’s not really a big deal.