The pinup is a contested object in cultural circles both for its artistic form and its social content. The pinup may actually be the root of modern women's body image problems. Before the pinup, most representations of the feminine form were contained in either high art or pornography. In either case, these representations were removed from the experience of most women, either by allegorical distance as representations of a goddess or nymph, or by simply being a private object for men's consumption only. However, the pinup deviates from both these traditions, and moves into the real world, thrusting its idealized forms via magazines, posters, and prints into the everyday lives of women everywhere. Once injected into normal experience, these artificial, impossible forms with narrow waists, slender legs, and heart-shaped faces became objects of desire for men, emulation for women, and, unachievable by either, have contributed to considerable emotional strife on both sides.

Or so the story goes. And it is somewhat true.

But there is another truth, a truth that is important for both pin-ups as cultural icons and cosmetic surgery as social practice. Pinups are, in the words of scholar Abigail Solomon-Godeau, "an image type predicated on the relative isolation of its feminine motif through the reduction or outright elimination of narrative, literary, or mythological allusion [and a] decontextualization, reduction, or distillation of the image of femininity to a subject in and of itself," i.e. a representation of pure femininity. While this means that they do pose an impossible standard for flesh-and-blood women, who can never be so purely feminine, imbued with such voluptuous, seductive power, it also means that they are a "performative source of female power" (Maria Elena Buszek, 1998). In other words, as pinups moved from being passive objects of the male gaze (as in the Gil Elvgren painting "Ankles Aweigh" above left) into more active advocates of the war effort, such as the Alberto Vargas painting to the right, then in special issues of the magazines printed without advertisements and shipped to the front and as nose art on the bombers(below) that first carried the war to the enemy, they empowered women to take up a larger role in society. In a similar fashion, cosmetic surgery has the ability to empower women, to free them from the trap of one or two things they do not like about their bodies to allow their exterior to become a true expression of their interior selves.

Pinups have many of the features of the classical norm, although they often emphasize larger breasts, narrower waists, and have impossibly long legs. But what makes pinups enduring icons of femininity is not their body, but their spirit, a freedom from the mother-whore dichotomy of Victorian womanhood into the modern ideal of a woman who is able to be sexual without being simply a sexual object.

Labels: art, body image, pinup

The Greek and Romans gave us so many of our cultural foundations in terms of law, government, philosophy, literature, and architecture that it should not be surprising that they also established many of our norms in terms of our concepts of feminine beauty. It is easy to see the influence of classical statuary such as this Roman copy of a Greek original representation of Diana, found at Gabii in Italy. The original sculptor was Praxitilies, and the original sculpture was made in the 4^th century BCE, although this copy was not sculpted until the 1^st Century CE. The way her draperies conceal her form is very much like Parrish's use, however, she has, overall, a softer body. Note how the fleshiness we saw in the legs of Waterhouse's women is here also evident in Diana's arms, so, although this figure is largely concealed (appropriate for one of the three virgin goddesses of classical mythology), we have a sense that this figure has more fat than those in Waterhouse's paintings. Look at the face, too, and there is more evidence. Although this statue has a strong, straight nose, the chin and cheeks are very curved, perhaps even sagging slightly from the weight of fat in the neck.

A clearer idea of the classical ideals of feminine beauty might be gained from statuary focusing on a less chaste goddess: Aphrodite. In this case, the Aphrodite of Cnidus, another copy of Praxiteles. We should ignore the head and arms in this sculpture, since they are all restorations, but the torso and thighs give us plenty of information. The body is soft, with a relatively narrow waist, but wide hips. The figure has a slight paunch, and the thick thighs touch. The latter is a common source of anxiety among women, who have seen magazine of swimsuit models whose thighs are so slender that they do not touch when the woman stands.

If we consider the rear of a different copy of the Praxiteles statue, we can see that the derriere has a similar corpulence. Venus' butt is relatively large, round, and thick. There are folds at the top of the thighs, indicating again that this woman has fat, although she has no cellulite. The back also shows a significant amount of fat, as the ribs are completely concealed, and the shoulder blades are only vaguely hinted beneath the smoothness of the skin.

Then, if we consider the most famous classical statue of all, the Venus de Milo, which maintains most of the ideals of the other statues. A corpulent body, although in this case with some abdominal definition, the soft chin, and, as we have not mentioned, the small breasts. Small breasts were common in classical statuary, contributing to the charge that modern Western society has fetishized the breast as an erogenous object. Although it is true that modern Western society idealizes larger breasts than the classical period, it is not true that breasts are not considered erotic in other cultures. Evidence of this can be seen in the Song of Songs, and I will discuss it more when we turn to non-Western representations of beauty.

Labels: art, beauty, body image, breast augmentation, Classical Greek and Roman