Theories of conspicuous consumption (Veblen 1899), costly signalling and the handicap principle (Zahavi 1975), and the body as physical capital (Bourdieu 1984; Shilling 1993) have developed largely in disciplinary isolation, and the substantial feminist literature on the female body as a surface for status display (Bartky 1990; Bordo 1993; Wolf 1990) has not been read systematically through the costly-signalling lens. This paper assembles these literatures into one argument: that the human body, under particular cultural-aesthetic regimes, is itself a Veblen good, and that the male and female cases are structurally identical. Female restriction-display (the corseted waist, porcelain skin, the long unworking nail, the leisure-fit silhouette) and male bulk-display (the metabolically expensive hypertrophied physique) make the same claim, namely that the bearer commands surplus sufficient to maintain a body whose specifications actively impair its own function. The appearance of asymmetry, whereby female display is read as oppression and male display as benign or simply unexamined, is argued to be an artefact of Binary Bias (Temte 2026a) rather than a real difference in the underlying mechanism. The paper then identifies a closed-loop tragedy at the centre of the system: the Veblen body is honest signalling, but the resource it advertises has already been consumed in producing the advertisement, so mate selection within the regime necessarily depletes what it selects for. Cross-cultural evidence that bodies optimised for genuine survival demand converge on the articulated multi-purpose form rather than on bulk marks the bulk aesthetic as an outlier requiring explanation; an American-specific reading locates that explanation in a compensatory inferiority architecture. The paper closes with the anti-Veblen alternative: the body specified for its bearer rather than for an audience.
Storm Bjørn Temte (Sat,) studied this question.