No matter whether men were attracted to overweight pale women in past years or slim, athletic ones today, the main driving force has been and always will be "Go ye forth and multiply". Sex drive for men especially is all about finding suitable partners most able to successfully plop out healthy offspring.

Slim women in Renaissance times would have indicated possible disease and bad nutrition as you mentioned so our lizard brains equated the larger body sizes with better odds of successful offspring.

Today, our intellect goes beyond that, coupling our animalistic instincts with the knowledge we have about the coupling of health, longevity, and reproductive success to the more athletic amongst us. Young, slim women are attractive to us not only because the media tells us they should be but because our programming wants to impregnate them all even if our intellect tells us to slip on that rubber. Our fixation with breasts isn't as shallow as feminists make it to be. It's instead linked to the ability for women to give nutrition to the young lives we create.

The most intense and enjoyable sex I've had in my life has always been when there was the highest chance for reproduction in spite of my conscious fear of the consequences. I wonder if part of our evolution will be a deprogramming of that urge as our intellectual minds begin seeing our environment wiped out due to overpopulation? It's a fascinating subject to me.

Art