Knight takes the survival of the full-figured beauty as proof that "even the media can’t combat" one thing: "your culture."

natural seduction

The shapelier figure idealized by black Americans like Knight is just one example of the cultural relativity of beauty.

The emaciated models of the 1990s would never attract a mate among the Matsigenka population of Manu Park. Men in this remote part of Peru, uninfluenced by western media, prefer rounder women with thicker waists, according to "Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?" a November 1998 article in Nature magazine by Douglas Yu and Glenn Shepard, Jr.

"The people who we gasp over in magazines aren’t the most fit," Yu says. He and Shepard are evolutionary biologists attempting to understand this Darwinian contradiction. By comparing cultural differences, they look for clues to the biology of attraction.

Men in the Mastigenka part of Peru prefer rounder women with thicker waists.

The preferences of Matsigenka men defy the theories of evolutionary psychologists like Nancy Etcoff, author of "The Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty," (1999) a book about the biological sensitivity to beauty.