"If you take a broad sampling of the human population most of them will find a fairly consistent set of traits preferable in the opposite sex."

Yes, but the only traits that seem truly universal are bilateral symmetry and smooth skin. Weight and shape has little to do with it. There's a lot of human variation when it comes to secondary sex characteristics...and it seems to be because there's a lot of variation in human taste in that area.

"Add to that the need to please their patrons, and the secondary pressures in finding corpulent women attractive because for a short period it indicated a lack of disease and an ability to provide food (wealth) and you get aberrations like that... but it is just that, an aberration in a more common trend."

Given human history, I'd say that the aberration is periods such as our own, when food is plentiful. See the neolithic "Venus of Willendorf," one of the earliest known depictions of the female form.

In ancient Hawaii, fat was definitely beautiful. Queen Liliuokalani weighed 300 pounds or more, and worked hard to keep her figure, getting special massages to help her eat more. Women tend to carry more fat than men - is it so surprising that some might tend to fix on this as something that separates men from women, and is thus sexy?

I mean, if you just look at the human variation that exists in the world today, much of it of ethnic derivation -- it's strong evidence that what you think are universal standards of beauty are not so universal. It's also not a coincidence that so much of this variation centers on secondary sexual characteristics: breast size and shape, buttock size and shape, patterns of body hair, genital size and shape, etc.

Remember the so-called "Hottentot Venus," whose steatopygia so fascinated European men? She was normal for her ethnic group. Similarly, Asian women tend to have smaller breasts and flatter butts than European women. Are Asian men just unlucky? No -- that's what they like, so that's what they got.

We're all the product of millennia of sexual selection. We all look the way we do because somewhere, somewhen, it was considered pretty hot, even if it no longer does.

That was brought home to me once when I met an Asian art professor. I'm of Japanese descent, but my family's been four generations in the U.S. (so don't ask me to translate any of those Japanese Poser sites - I haven't a clue ;-). She commented that physical traits I consider flaws now would have been considered quite beautiful in the days of "The Tale of Genji." For example, short legs were desirable, because they made such a elegant line when you were kneeling on the floor in Japanese fashion. My ears - long, flat against the head at the top, sticking out at the bottom - were considered the ideal, because they looked good with the hairstyles of the time. Unfortunately, they look awful with earrings. Darn, I could've been a knockout, a thousand years ago! ;-)