Speaker
Paddy Young
Appearances over time
1 episodes
Episodes
1Podcasts
Quotes & moments
Paddy Young noted that John Casablancas, father of Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, invented the supermodel and described his ideal as a 'woman child' — and is considered a certified paedophile.
Galton invented an early clicker device to covertly rate women on the streets of British cities as 'attractive', 'neutral', or 'repellent'. He never published the full map, but noted London topped the rankings and Aberdeen was the most repellent city in Britain.
In the 1850s, Francis Galton travelled to what is now Namibia and was stunned by the indigenous women's proportions. Unable to speak the language, he hid at a distance and used a naval sextant to measure their buttocks, then walked to the spot to calculate exact dimensions. He then came home and built an attractiveness map of Britain.
30,000 years ago the ideal woman was all hips, thighs, and enormous breasts — fertility was beauty. Then ancient Egypt flipped the script entirely: thin limbs, no curves, full hairlessness achieved with flint scrapers. The pendulum was already swinging before civilisation had even got going.
The '60s mod era idolised Twiggy: androgynous, childlike eyes, flat chest, barely pubescent. The hosts connect this to the simultaneous rise of predatory culture at BBC Radio 1. When the female beauty ideal most closely resembles a young boy, something has gone very wrong.
Among the Berber people of Northwest Africa, obesity was the beauty ideal — so 'fatteners' force-fed girls as young as five up to 20 litres of camel milk and 2 kilos of millet with butter daily. Nearly 21,000 calories. More than a sumo wrestler.
The 2010s were an 'opposite decade' — social media gave people the power to publicly pretend they didn't find what they actually found attractive, attractive. The result: everyone acted like body positivity was a genuine preference while secretly finding Sydney Sweeney phenomenal.
Rome brought the bush back. After Egypt's hairless obsession, Romans saw vanity as weakness — the hairier and smellier, the better. Meanwhile Nero's wife bathed daily in donkey milk to fight wrinkles, requiring hundreds of lactating donkeys on staff.
The Renaissance tried to make beauty mathematical — facial symmetry, classical proportions, the rediscovery of Greek and Roman ideals. Then the Baroque period swung back to 'abundant flesh', celebrating fullness and softness as the Rubenesque ideal. The pendulum never stops.
In the spirit of their idol Francis Galton, the hosts produce calipers and measure Paddy Young's skull live. The verdict: small forehead, large overall head — meaning Paddy has an animalistic, puppyish drive but limited scholarly intellect. A himbo, in clinical terms.
Christianity made vanity a sin — so Medieval Europe turned beauty on its head. The ideal woman had a huge plucked-back forehead, tiny mouth, and small hands. Looking good was morally suspicious. Harry Maguire would have been a medieval pin-up.
The Kardashians don't follow beauty trends — they lead them. Horatio argues they darkened their skin when hip-hop dominated culture and whitened it as Trump returned to power, while Kim reportedly reduced her implants as the bum era gave way to the Sydney Sweeney tit era. The best-resourced plastic surgeons in the world as sociological barometer.
Victorian women swallowed tapeworm eggs in pill form to stay thin. They also used belladonna eye drops for a dreamy, dilated look — with side effects including hallucinations, diarrhoea, dementia, and potentially death. Heroin chic had nothing on this era.
Before body positivity was a hashtag, it was a militant movement. The Fat Underground operated in radical cells at universities like Berkeley and Harvard in the 1970s, modelled on the Black Panthers — driven by hunger and fury, not acceptance and affirmation.
Analysis
What they talk about
- History 50%
- Society & Culture 50%
Connections
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