In response to JWelch's post "A gendered 'fit' body"

This post is in response to JWelch's post as well as based on ideas I had while listening to discussion in class.

While I agree that women and men certainly have the right to do whatever they want in sculpting their bodies, the specific "fit" body assigned to them by society has origins in biology. Men want to build muscle because they have been conditioned to by thousands of years of evolution. To defend themselves, defeat competition for mates, and to gather food men needed muscle; the more muscle one had the better chance you had of surviving. This was the role traditionally assigned to men. Women, on the other hand, had to raise children and take care of household tasks. Certainly this wasn't less important, but it required less muscle. Therefore, to attract the best male mate, women developed a desire to accentuate those characteristics most desirable to men. These include a petite frame and accentuated bosom and derriere. I imagine these types could easily be flipped if men were the ones who gave birth, but wouldn't men really just be women in the end? I feel we are trapped to have these two body types, because we need differentiation to reproduce. To have one androgynous body type would serve no purpose.  Also, I should add that these ideal types have been blown out of proportion by the media in the last century to unrealistic heights, but there is an explanation for them.

Therefore, I think that while there indeed is nothing wrong with striving for whatever body type you want, there also is nothing wrong with the stereotypical male and female image. When you see men and women striving for these bodies they are simply obeying their biological imperative. They may in fact be a bit outdated in today's increasingly post-modern society, but it's hard to ignore something so ingrained in the human psyche. It is designed to indicate the best genes and opportunity to pass on your traits to another generation. The real problem lies in the media, who have sensationalized these ideals to the extreme. Is there a solution to this? I don't think so, and I don't know if we need one. As I said before these ideal types serve a purpose. The best thing to do would try to have the media tone down their rhetoric, but by this point I think it's too late to affect change.