What Goes Up: I've always wanted a pin-up girl tattoo: part two

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

I've always wanted a pin-up girl tattoo: part two

In.. I think 7th grade, I did a whole paper on Clara Bow, a notable pin-up girl.

In the late nineteenth century, burlesque performers and actresses used photographic advertisement as business cards to promote themselves. These adverts and business cards could often been found in almost every green room, pinned-up or stuck into “frames of the looking-glasses, in the joints of the gas-burners, and sometimes lying on-top of the sacred cast-case itself.” Understanding the power of photographic advertisements to promote their shows, burlesque women self-constructed their identity to make themselves visible. Being recognized not only within the theater itself but also outside challenged the conventions of women’s place and women’s potential in the public sphere. “To understand both the complicated identity and the subversive nature of the nineteenth-century actress, one must also understand that the era’s views on women’s potential were inextricably tied to their sexuality, which in turn was tied to their level of visibility in the public sphere: regardless of race, class or background, it was generally assumed that the more public the woman, the more “public,” or available, her sexuality"

These were the 20's we were talking about. Women didn't go around showing they're higher thighs. Pin-up girls were about embracing women's sexuality; the first sex symbols. They were the beginning to a new era.

Plus, these women we're what we consider "beautiful" now. They weren't fat, but they surely weren't skin and bones. Here's a few pictures of the original people vs. the old pin-up girl photos.