Sometimes a Garden Implement is the Best Accessory

In her new series of anonymously-framed and frocked women, artist Kelly Reemtsen reminds us that you don't have to wear pants to wear the pants.

Nice Stems

Shall we start placing bets on how long before we see these pieces in a Gaga video?

Training the 1950s Tween in the Ways of Erotic Objectification

We don't recall ever having a 'training bra,' or a 'psychological need' that went unsatisfied for one, but then again, we never enjoyed cinematic, half-clothed embraces near the window with our mother as 'beTweenagers,' either. In spite of this, we somehow learned the importance of eroticizing our breasts by pushing them up into perfectly rotund and symmetrical masses on our chest. And THANK GOD, too, because otherwise we might look like the unfortunate slob pictured below sans Titzling.

Swimsuit Contests Then And Now

Then:

Now:

Then:

Now:

Then:

Now:

(And here we thought Ludacris preferred 'a lady in the streets...')

The Midi Skirt: Birth Of A Bad Idea

Above: (Top) Today show host Barbara Walters advocates on behalf of the midi while a mini-skirted midi detractor and James Brady of Women's Wear Daily look on. (Bottom Left) A soap star issues her silent protest against the new skirt length sweeping the nation--and her wardrobe department (Bottom Reft) A woman in the formerly fashionable mini holds up a midi-length skirt in the mirror. (via Life, 1970)

1970 was a big year. Angela Davis was fired from UCLA for being a communist, bicycles were finally permitted to cross the Golden Gate Bridge, and the mini skirt was declared totally and utterly dead by the editors of Women's Wear Daily. In its place emerged what would become known as the 'midi' (or, as many would have it, 'the worst thing to happen to women's legs since the Birkenstock'). Despite the appearance of such anti-midi groups as GAMS (Girls/Guys Against More Skirt) and FADD (Fight Against Dictating Designers), designers and department stores pushed forward with the trend, secure (apparently) in the knowledge that desperately fashionable women would help them weather the storm of resentment. As Marshall Field President Charles W. Folds condescendingly put it in a 1970 Life interview, "There'll always be that strange woman, God bless her, who wants to be the first out of the hen coop with the latest oddity. She'll go to any length to be au courant and we make a lot of money because of her."

(Kinda makes you crave a Virginia Slim, don't it?)

She'll Get You There

Delighted, I suppose, not to live in a time when airlines draft beguiling women to convince a primarily male clientele of the safety and comfort of their flying death tubes. Not naive enough, however, to think that the image of 'woman as vessel (of sexual pleasure for men and maternal containment for mankind)' has lost--or will lose--its symbolic currency.

Case in point:

When Your "Personal Massager" Was Your Doctor

We read hundreds of books during graduate school, but none stuck with us quite as much as Rachel Maines' The Technology of Orgasm: 'Hysteria,' the Vibrator and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (2001). We recently flipped through it again, and had a nice chuckle at the thought of 'hysterical' (read: sexually unsatisfied) women achieving great 'relief' from physician-administered 'vibration treatment.' As Maines details, physicians didn't particularly like to offer this very popular therapy (knowing, presumably, the very carnal source of their patients' relief), so it was with much joy that they began recommending handheld 'personal massagers' upon their appearance in the early 1910s. Below are two images and an excerpt from a 1908 physician's manual on vibration therapy, or what Maines cheekily calls 'the job nobody wanted.'

Open Letter to SPIKE TV

Pictured Above: Single scariest shot in all of American cinematic history (courtesy of Deliverance)

25 January 2010

To Whom It May Concern:

I might have respected your decision to edit out the notorious and narratively integral rape scene in last night's cable broadcast of John Boorman's classic 1972 story of white bourgeois masculinity in crisis were it not for the fact that you are the same network that brought the world a little "show" called Manswers and a little segment on said show that culminates in a man firing a gun at a breast implant in the name of answering the daft question: How much force is required to burst a fake boob? Obviously taste is not among your channel's top priorities, so why julienne a perfectly excellent film?

If I have overstepped my boundaries in issuing this letter because I am a woman viewing "TV for men," then I sincerely apologize.

Respectfully,

Distracted Academic