No Timeless Beauty To Conform To

Years from now, people will see this photo and know 'what vintage' it is.


While I cannot say what form 'beauty' and 'the erotic female' will take for future pleasure seekers, the perky breasts with tan lines, the complete 'Brazilian', the pose, and the incomplete headless female form will speak of our times just as natural pubic hair speaks, mainly, of earlier times.


(Viewers of my collection who frown &/or are repulsed by my magazines featuring women with natural body hair mistakenly guess these are hirsute publications because of our current dislike of women with pubic hair. It takes some explaining to get them to understand that while razors were around, bush was as exciting in sight and texture as the complete removal of it supposedly is today. It wasn't until bikinis and other fashions became the norm that trimming was even a 'grooming' issue -- for women.)

Preachings of feminism and body hair aside -- and even discussion of standards of beauty and desire being not just a social construct but a cultural response to economics left for another time -- the point I'm getting to is that there are markers & clues to the periods of time from which objects come. Clothing, hairstyle, makeup, the cars on which bodies sprawl, other objects can offer clues; but so do body types themselves.


While fashions themselves come and go, so do the standards of beauty rise and fall like the heaving breasts of an excited woman. Learning to see the beauty, or at least acknowledging another form of beauty, is often a struggle for some collectors of nudes and erotic art works.

Interestingly, at least to me, is the notion that for most of history (being just that, his-story), the idealized standard of beauty is not only recorded, but that the recordings show woman's willingness to conform to it.

Before you think I'm going all patriarchal on your ass, let me remind you of the fact: This is a patriarchal time.

In fact, for most of recorded history, it has been. (I'll refer you to Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture for more information.)

I'm not going to argue this fact, nor complain about it (at this time), or even justify it (I do have my theories, after all). But for now, I merely want to point out the dearth of documentation which shows the female desire to be desirable.

The defense of this, as much required for my own sanity as any other feminist reading this, will likely be a plethora of postings. But as unsettling as this is -- and it is -- at this point it would be incredibly silly of me not to note it.

Photo credits: Top nude, ~pinuplover at deviantART; middle, my own pc stash; last, LLAPA.