Ouch. I know I am going to catch hell for posting this, but it is too interesting to pass up. Devendra Singh from UT performed a search of British literature from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The only consistently reported good bodily feature on women was a narrow waist:

A team in the United States surveyed accounts of female beauty in British literature from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and found that the only feature that consistently got authors' pulses racing was a slender midriff.

"The waist does not sound an intuitively sexy body part," admits Devendra Singh of the University of Texas, Austin, who led the study. But nevertheless, it was the one thing on which the hundreds of writers surveyed seemed to be unanimous. They didn't even agree on whether large breasts, that modern staple of sexual attractiveness, are nice or not.

A preference for a slim waist is also found in first-century Indian writings and fourth-century Chinese works, Singh's team previously found.

The popularity of a slender middle might be due to what it reveals about a woman's health and fertility, Singh says. Healthiness is associated with low levels of abdominal fat, and high levels of female sex hormones such as oestrogen pinch the waistline and give the body an hourglass shape.

Singh and his colleagues scanned a database containing some 345,000 works of British and American literature, selecting only older British writings, and cross-referenced terms such as 'waist', 'breast', 'hips' and 'buttocks' with words such as 'plump' and 'slim'. They report their results in Proceedings of the Royal Society B1.

The evidence for preference of a narrow waist from around the world and throughout the centuries suggests that it comes from something more inherent than fashion or the influences of global mass media.

"Nowadays there's no culture without Western influences, so it's easy to say 'oh yeah they're copycatting the West'," Singh says. "But this shows that it cannot be explained as a whim of Western culture."

I am little surprised that the duo of T&A were not more consistent, but I guess cultural variety does play a role. This may be the same deal as people like mates with symmetrical faces; a narrow waist in proportion to everything else may indicate reproductive fitness.