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Miss Alabama Beauty Contest Offers Different Standards

Recently, there was a kerfuffle regarding beauty standards in the matter of Miss Alabama. Sara Milliken, a plus-size model, competed successfully in the National American Miss contest. The final word on this may be found perhaps at Snopes.

A famous science fiction example of similarly differing beauty standards can be found in Abercrombie Station, by Jack Vance, published by Thrilling Wonder Stories in 1952. In the novel, a space station with a somewhat closed internal culture takes an entirely different view of human appeal and beauty in the environment of microgravity:

Fat women, like bladder-fish in an aquarium tank. Fat women, round and tender as yellow peaches. Fat women, miraculously easy and agile in the. absence of gravity.

The occasion seemed to be an afternoon musicale. The hall was crowded and heavy with balls of pink flesh draped in blouses and pantaloons of white, pale blue and yellow.

The current Abercrombie fashion seemed designed to accent the round bodies. Flat bands like Sam Browne belts molded the breasts down and out, under the arms. The hair was parted down the middle, skinned smoothly back to a small roll at the nape of the neck. Flesh, bulbs of tender flesh, smooth shiny balloons. Tiny twitching features, dancing fingers and toes, eyes and lips roguishly painted. On Earth any one of these women would have sat immobile, a pile of sagging sweating tissue. At Abercrombie Station — “Adipose Alley,” so-called along the Pipeline — they moved with the ease of dandelion puffs, and their faces and bodies were smooth as butterballs.

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