Also, many women have to work much harder than men to stay on the skinny side because they store fat easier. A 5’1” 110 lb woman with 18% body fat would need to eat 1500 cal/day to maintain that weight. That’s practically nothing! It’s harder still if you were raised in a family that encouraged overeating (several reasons behind this).
Then there’s the double standard that exists in many relationships where the woman needs to be “healthy and fit” at all times while the man can treat his body however he wants because practically nobody cares about an out-of-shape looking man.
I say look however you want and weigh however much you feel comfortable with. One life to live and all.
In any case, I mostly agree with everything you've written.
Cheap food is why the norms played out like they did. In places with less easy access to calories, fat is considered beautiful and thin ugly.
I’ll throw another othrogonal point into the mix: our definitions of “skinny” and “fat” are probably very different and very relative to our realities.
Anyway, I don’t claim to have the answers - it gets really messy to articulate the big question of “how do values form”.
Again, representing the extremes as norms is not great - I think we can both agree on this point at least. But if there was an ideal that I would rather society value - it would definitely err on the side of healthy and fit.