Katharine Gammon (Wired) writes:

Oh, Playboy, why do you want your "readers" to lust after androids? That's the only explanation we can think of for the proportions of your lovely ladybots. We culled the stats for every centerfold from December 1953 (Marilyn Monroe) to January 2009 (Dasha Astafieva), then calculated each woman's body-mass index. A clear trend emerged: While real American women have steadily eaten their way up the BMI slope — just like American men — Playmates have gone from a sylphlike 19.4 to an anime-ideal 17.6.

This is supported by the following nice chart:

{Click to enlarge}

The funny thing is that by looking a little bit closer at the data you can see that the Playmate BMI reached a low in the mid 80ies and afterwards actually trended slightly upwards:


(Discard the first 10 years. There where lots of missing values and I just did a quick linear interpolation.)

R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing, R Development Core Team, R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.