On Wed, 9 Dec 1998, Rob Schaap wrote:
> Never met a bloke who didn't think Marilyn Monroe cut the mustard (although
> I'm a devoted Emma Peel man meself).
>From Susan Bordo, *Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the
Body* (University of California Press, 1993)
So, too, we need to explore the fact that it is women who are most
oppressed by what Kim Chernin calls "the tyranny of slenderness," and that
this particluar oppression is a post 1960s, post-feminist phenomenon. In
the fifties, by contrast, with middle-class women once again out of the
factories and safely immured in the home, the dominant ideal of female
beauty was exemplified by Marilyn Monroe--hardly your androgynous,
athletic, adolescent body type At the peak of her popularity, Monroe was
often described as "femininity incarnate," "femaleness embodied"; last
term, a sudent of mine described her as "a cow." Is this merely a change
in what size hips, waist and breasts are considered attractive, or has
the very idea of incarnate femaleness come to have a different meaning,
different associations, the capacity to stir up different fantasies and
images, for the culture of the eighties? (p. 141)
>
> Yet, I respectfully submit, no one man's visage has so filled the lonely
> nights of three generations of women.
>
> Is this
> (a) wrong
> (b) natural
> (c) cultural
> (d) other?
>
> I've always wondered ...
> Rob.
>
I think it is (a) wrong --as in incorrect, and (c) cultural. I think the idea of the "sexy woman's body" has changed, at least in the US. Thinner, tighter, more muscular, is in (and so is anorexia and bulimia). There is a discourse of "controlling" one's body that is specific to contemporary life. I would go on regarding this at greater length, but I'm going to La Tropicana Cafe for Cuban toast and cafe con leche.
frances