Arrrrgggh...while surfing for an appropriate icon for this week's COTV's I came across this from an uber-asshat. Which forces me to wade into the turgid waters of feminism...to brave the Rocks Wandering of Liberal thought.
"the shape is female, which is why the nothingness is taken to have meaning; the meaning is masturbatory"
"In Varga Girl gatefold publshed in the November 1943 Esquire the she-thing has no underarm hair"
Then there's this paragraph describing the Vargas pin-up I selected as the weekly mask icon, which is quaintly modest by today's standards.
"Vargas' notion of sophistication is not benign. In the January 1941 gatefold, breasts are dead center and covered by what appear to be bird wings. This suggests the post-war O who in Story of 0 is led to an orgy dressed as an owl, tethered through her vagina. Zoo drawings-women as quasi-animals-appear to be the single conception Vargas had of adult, as opposed to infantalized, women: sculpted but black eyebrows, dashes of red lipstick, one visible arm holding a green mask covered in a translucent (or not) black glove. The hair on her head is a dark blonde."
Jeebus...I am almost positive that Dad wasn't thinking about the zoo when he whistled at a Vargas or Betty Grable pin-up poster during WWII.
We are constantly scorned and belittled by the illuminati for our lack of European sexual sophiscation...that as a nation we are too up tight about sex. We need to get over it...liberate and celebrate our bodies. To free the sexual Pilgrims that lurk in our genes and the dark recesses of the DOJ. However another message is also sent. That we're too obsessed with sex...that looking at artistic images of either sex, or enjoying the pleasure derived therein oppresses that sex and is therefore a societal evil that must be purged in all it's forms.
Excuse me, which is it?
UPDATE: As one is often wont to do, I thought about this posting while going about my day. What if Dworkin was right about Vargases motives. I realized I knew little about the man behind the pin-ups, his politics. A Peruvian, who studied in pre-WWI Paris before coming to New York, he could be a socialist embedding a message, a misogynist cashing in on American sexual naivete.
As in most overblown critiques of art by those with agenda, the truth is none of the above...Vargas loved women. As an excerpt from an article, Latin Obsession : The Tragic Tale of a Pin-Up Artist, by Jorge Chino, in Al Andar demonstrates:
"The American women Alberto fell in love with in New York were very different from the ones he had seen in Europe or in Peru. American women of the time were independent and athletic, slender with an unsophisticated beauty. They were the same kind of women that Ayn Rand, the famous author and philosopher, saw upon her arrival from Soviet Union in the 1930s. Rand, author of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” created characters who were strong women with expressions of confidence and determination. "
Stephan Goddard, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas also seems to hold a more benign view of Vargas. An interesting footnote is that Goddard curated the Vargas exhibit critiqued by Dworkin.
Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder.
Dworkin's merely jealous. Do
a google search on images of
Dworkin. Hooah, that woman's
been whupped with two ugly
sticks, and needs NutriSystem
the rest of her life.
;)
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