# Pin-Up GRRRLS
Author:: Maria Elena Buszek
## Highlights
> The pin-up continues to impress young feminists with her aggressive sexuality, imperious attitude, and frightening physique—an ideal that Joanna Frueh has appropriately dubbed “monster/beauty”: “Monster/beauty is a condition, and it can also describe an individual. Because extremity is immoderation—deviation from convention in behavior, appearance, or representation—and starkly different from standard cultural expectations for particular groups of people, monster/beauty departs radically from normative, ideal representations of beauty…. Monster/beauty is artifice, pleasure/discipline, cultural invention, and it is extravagant and generous.” ([Location 127](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=127))
> When feminist history is viewed through the lens of the popular pin-up, what emerges is a picture of the myriad ways in which women have defined, politicized, and represented their own sexuality in the public eye. ([Location 180](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=180))
> Frueh has articulated this desire succinctly in her writing on the relevance of sexuality to the feminist movement: “As long as I am an erotic subject, I am not averse to being an erotic object.”5 The problem with this conflation of subject/object is in constructing and representing a feminist identity that is both subversive and alluring (as well as accommodating to what is by nature the highly individualized yet powerful realm of sexual pleasure). ([Location 198](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=198))
> On the one hand, the (not entirely correct) assumption that the genre exists as a catalyst for heterosexual male desire has made it a kind of visual shorthand for the desirable female. On the other, the genre also has a history of representing and accepting seemingly contradictory elements—traditional as well as transgressive female sexualities—by imaging ordinarily taboo behaviors in a fashion acceptable to mass cultural consumption and display. While many pin-ups are indeed silly caricatures of women that mean to construct their humiliation and passivity as turnons, the genre has also represented the sexualized woman as self-aware, assertive, strong, and independent. ([Location 217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=217))
> Pin-up connoisseur Mark Gabor locates the genre’s origins alongside the development of Western print media in the fifteenth century. The circulation of print imagery allowed for the creation of images that could be mass-produced, distributed, and displayed among publics larger than those with the means to afford singular imagery, such as sculpture or painting, for display and perusal. ([Location 233](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=233))
> they also reflected a new spectrum of sexual moralities between earlier binaries as well as the establishment of a “fully evolved commodity culture” that often blurred the lines between the classes. ([Location 260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=260))
> Let us not confuse the pin-up girl with the pornographic or erotic imagery that dates from the dark backward and abysm of time. The pin-up girl is a specific erotic phenomenon, both as to form and function. —Andre Bazin ([Location 272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=272))
> From its birth as a representational genre, the pin-up has served as an image that pointedly eliminates the explicit representation of a sexual act by both eliminating the presence of men (and, generally, other women) and strategically covering the genital area of the female subject.16 With its high-minded, art-historical precedents, general focus upon the lone female figure, and allusion to (as opposed to demonstration of) sexual activity, the self-consciously controlled pinup differs greatly from the pointedly explicit and transgressive representation of sexual organs and sexual acts that comprise the basic elements of legal definitions of pornographic imagery since the nineteenth century. ([Location 276](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=276))
> Thus, what Finch calls the pin-up’s “double movement” between the intellectual/contemplative and the physical/active allows the genre to negotiate a space that oscillates between portraiture and pornography. ([Location 283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=283))
> However, the pin-up’s historical association with the representation of women alone, its implicit nature through an insistence on the strategic selection of physical exposure, and the performative quality that results from such artificial constructions of sexual display make it a more subtle and publicly visible statement of female sexuality than legally defined pornographic imagery.25 It should be unsurprising, then, that though the pinup is, in creation and consumption, often assumed as a privileged image for men, it also has a history of consumption, interpretation, and appropriation by women. ([Location 309](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=309))
> The leg show offered a space in which women were not only the visual draw, but frequently the sole actors, comedians, and writers of the material, and soon evolved into the theatrical staging of a Victorian world upside-down, raising what historian Robert C. Allen calls “troubling questions about how a woman should be ‘allowed’ to act on stage, about how femininity should and could be represented, and about the relationship of women onstage to women in the outside, ‘real’ world.” ([Location 681](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=681))
> when in 1850 former slave Sojourner Truth drew crowds to a series of lectures in Indiana, the force of her rhetoric and personality led an incredulous audience there to demand she prove that she was not a man—culminating in her famously revealing her breast to the audience as indisputable proof of her sex.30 So suspicious was the public woman of the period that it was argued that a woman simply presenting herself in a public forum like the meetinghouse or polling booth would compromise her femininity. ([Location 724](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=724))
> This theatrical style of “clothed nudity” that Menken helped usher into the show—be it Mazeppa’s flesh-colored tights (fig. 6) or, later, form-fitting male drag—would soon become a staple of the burlesque spectacle, as would the audacious star image that she built for herself.34 ([Location 764](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=764))
> what Thompson herself referred to as modern women very much aware of their “own awarishness.”40 ([Location 809](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=809))
> Menken’s negotiation of a space between virtue and vice in her acknowledgment and representation of a self-aware feminine sexuality—as well as her fluctuations between races, religions, sexual preferences and political associations—would come to fascinate the period’s permissive bourgeois theatergoers. Menken’s precedent also set the standard for many female performers who came after her, as the word Mazeppa became synonymous with the wild behavior and unstable identity of contemporary actresses. ([Location 845](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=845))
> Good women are rarely clever, and clever women are rarely good wives. ([Location 883](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=883))
> Blurring the line between life and performance, Menken circulated imagery of herself in both stage and street clothes, performing her “real” identities with the same dramatic flourish and plurality as her theatrical characters. ([Location 888](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=888))
> Thompson and her Blondes, it seemed, were the very epitome of the “unshrinking” and irreverent modern woman whose existence, influence, and thrill-seeking pleasures were feared by critics like Linton and James. Not surprisingly, it was in this very character’s onstage monologue that Thompson coined the term awarishness to celebrate the social and sexual audacity in modern young women that Linton denounced. ([Location 979](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=979))
> femme honnête and fille publique ([Location 1082](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=1082))
> The carte-de-visite pin-up threatened to break down yet further not just this distinction between the “proper” and the “public” woman, but also the literal containment of the transgressive female within the walls of the theatrical space. ([Location 1098](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=1098))
> In the end, the very cross-class, cross-gender appeal that led to the rise of the burlesque would eventually contribute to its demise. As its star waned with bourgeois audiences in the 1880s, maintaining only its lower-class audiences, burlesque would come to merge with vaudeville and carnival circuits and become relegated to its own theatrical venues. With the exception of burlesque performers like Mae West—who wrote and performed most of her suggestive stage and screenplays in the original tradition of the genre—the female performer was during this time reduced to nothing but physicality.78 Satirical performances would be relegated to men, and dancing and striptease to women—all but obliterating the subversive voice and influence of the original burlesque woman. ([Location 1125](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=1125))
> Representing its beautiful/beautified subjects as not only self-aware sexual and professional beings, but beings whose identities were self-constructed, self-controlled, and ever-changing, the pin-up both represented and marked as desirable a spectrum of female identities possible between the period’s established poles of acceptably “feminine” behav ior. ([Location 1140](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=1140))
### 2 NEW WOMEN FOR THE NEW CENTURY Feminism and the Pin-Up at the Fin de Siècle
> In 1886 the magazine began publishing Charles Dana Gibson’s illustrations of fictional women based on this new type being lampooned in the popular press. However, unlike many of his contemporaries, Gibson depicted the New Woman as a romantic ideal: so lovely and prevalent that the artist once marveled, “Wherever I looked I saw those beautiful girls, and who was I to resist.”44 Gibson’s character studies presented her as neither an oversexed nor an undersexed creature, but a healthy balance of “natural” passions tempered by an understanding of bourgeois manners. The Gibson Girls—as they would come to be known—went on to become a staple of Life for twenty years, where they served as the feminine embodiment of Life magazine’s progressive American spirit, and as icons of the lifestyles to which its readers aspired. ([Location 1462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=1462))
> The Gibson Girl’s contribution to the continuum of the feminist pin-up is the fact that her subversive behavior is made appealing by its appearance in the figure of an otherwise ordinary bourgeois young woman. In this way, the Gibson Girl was an interesting and unique new image of the sexualized woman. The contradictory traits of the New Woman that caused anxiety when presented in real women—signifiers of both masculinity and femininity, the working and upper classes, conventionality and unconventionality—were in the Gibson Girl presented in a positive light. ([Location 1591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=1591))
> Gibson addressed his women as modern romantic figures and was personally unsympathetic to issues of women’s rights and suffrage—indeed, in the rare illustration where he directly addressed suffrage, the cause was represented as either the pure folly of women or dangerously emasculating for men. ([Location 1605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=1605))
> Bicycling, for example, was a loaded activity clearly associated with feminism at the turn of the century: from the unfussy dress that the sport required—often including the “split skirts” and bloomers that still scandalized the public at the turn of the century—to the sexual connotations of the machine itself, young women riders were seen as advertising their progressivism. ([Location 1724](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=1724))
---
Title: Pin-Up GRRRLS
Author: Maria Elena Buszek
Tags: readwise, books
date: 2024-01-30
---
# Pin-Up GRRRLS
Author:: Maria Elena Buszek
## AI-Generated Summary
None
## Highlights
> The pin-up continues to impress young feminists with her aggressive sexuality, imperious attitude, and frightening physique—an ideal that Joanna Frueh has appropriately dubbed “monster/beauty”: “Monster/beauty is a condition, and it can also describe an individual. Because extremity is immoderation—deviation from convention in behavior, appearance, or representation—and starkly different from standard cultural expectations for particular groups of people, monster/beauty departs radically from normative, ideal representations of beauty…. Monster/beauty is artifice, pleasure/discipline, cultural invention, and it is extravagant and generous.” ([Location 127](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=127))
> When feminist history is viewed through the lens of the popular pin-up, what emerges is a picture of the myriad ways in which women have defined, politicized, and represented their own sexuality in the public eye. ([Location 180](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=180))
> Frueh has articulated this desire succinctly in her writing on the relevance of sexuality to the feminist movement: “As long as I am an erotic subject, I am not averse to being an erotic object.”5 The problem with this conflation of subject/object is in constructing and representing a feminist identity that is both subversive and alluring (as well as accommodating to what is by nature the highly individualized yet powerful realm of sexual pleasure). ([Location 198](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=198))
> On the one hand, the (not entirely correct) assumption that the genre exists as a catalyst for heterosexual male desire has made it a kind of visual shorthand for the desirable female. On the other, the genre also has a history of representing and accepting seemingly contradictory elements—traditional as well as transgressive female sexualities—by imaging ordinarily taboo behaviors in a fashion acceptable to mass cultural consumption and display. While many pin-ups are indeed silly caricatures of women that mean to construct their humiliation and passivity as turnons, the genre has also represented the sexualized woman as self-aware, assertive, strong, and independent. ([Location 217](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=217))
> Pin-up connoisseur Mark Gabor locates the genre’s origins alongside the development of Western print media in the fifteenth century. The circulation of print imagery allowed for the creation of images that could be mass-produced, distributed, and displayed among publics larger than those with the means to afford singular imagery, such as sculpture or painting, for display and perusal. ([Location 233](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=233))
> they also reflected a new spectrum of sexual moralities between earlier binaries as well as the establishment of a “fully evolved commodity culture” that often blurred the lines between the classes. ([Location 260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=260))
> Let us not confuse the pin-up girl with the pornographic or erotic imagery that dates from the dark backward and abysm of time. The pin-up girl is a specific erotic phenomenon, both as to form and function. —Andre Bazin ([Location 272](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=272))
> From its birth as a representational genre, the pin-up has served as an image that pointedly eliminates the explicit representation of a sexual act by both eliminating the presence of men (and, generally, other women) and strategically covering the genital area of the female subject.16 With its high-minded, art-historical precedents, general focus upon the lone female figure, and allusion to (as opposed to demonstration of) sexual activity, the self-consciously controlled pinup differs greatly from the pointedly explicit and transgressive representation of sexual organs and sexual acts that comprise the basic elements of legal definitions of pornographic imagery since the nineteenth century. ([Location 276](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=276))
> Thus, what Finch calls the pin-up’s “double movement” between the intellectual/contemplative and the physical/active allows the genre to negotiate a space that oscillates between portraiture and pornography. ([Location 283](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=283))
> However, the pin-up’s historical association with the representation of women alone, its implicit nature through an insistence on the strategic selection of physical exposure, and the performative quality that results from such artificial constructions of sexual display make it a more subtle and publicly visible statement of female sexuality than legally defined pornographic imagery.25 It should be unsurprising, then, that though the pinup is, in creation and consumption, often assumed as a privileged image for men, it also has a history of consumption, interpretation, and appropriation by women. ([Location 309](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=309))
> The leg show offered a space in which women were not only the visual draw, but frequently the sole actors, comedians, and writers of the material, and soon evolved into the theatrical staging of a Victorian world upside-down, raising what historian Robert C. Allen calls “troubling questions about how a woman should be ‘allowed’ to act on stage, about how femininity should and could be represented, and about the relationship of women onstage to women in the outside, ‘real’ world.” ([Location 681](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=681))
> when in 1850 former slave Sojourner Truth drew crowds to a series of lectures in Indiana, the force of her rhetoric and personality led an incredulous audience there to demand she prove that she was not a man—culminating in her famously revealing her breast to the audience as indisputable proof of her sex.30 So suspicious was the public woman of the period that it was argued that a woman simply presenting herself in a public forum like the meetinghouse or polling booth would compromise her femininity. ([Location 724](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=724))
> This theatrical style of “clothed nudity” that Menken helped usher into the show—be it Mazeppa’s flesh-colored tights (fig. 6) or, later, form-fitting male drag—would soon become a staple of the burlesque spectacle, as would the audacious star image that she built for herself.34 ([Location 764](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=764))
> what Thompson herself referred to as modern women very much aware of their “own awarishness.”40 ([Location 809](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=809))
> Menken’s negotiation of a space between virtue and vice in her acknowledgment and representation of a self-aware feminine sexuality—as well as her fluctuations between races, religions, sexual preferences and political associations—would come to fascinate the period’s permissive bourgeois theatergoers. Menken’s precedent also set the standard for many female performers who came after her, as the word Mazeppa became synonymous with the wild behavior and unstable identity of contemporary actresses. ([Location 845](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=845))
> Good women are rarely clever, and clever women are rarely good wives. ([Location 883](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=883))
> Blurring the line between life and performance, Menken circulated imagery of herself in both stage and street clothes, performing her “real” identities with the same dramatic flourish and plurality as her theatrical characters. ([Location 888](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=888))
> Thompson and her Blondes, it seemed, were the very epitome of the “unshrinking” and irreverent modern woman whose existence, influence, and thrill-seeking pleasures were feared by critics like Linton and James. Not surprisingly, it was in this very character’s onstage monologue that Thompson coined the term awarishness to celebrate the social and sexual audacity in modern young women that Linton denounced. ([Location 979](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=979))
> femme honnête and fille publique ([Location 1082](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=1082))
> The carte-de-visite pin-up threatened to break down yet further not just this distinction between the “proper” and the “public” woman, but also the literal containment of the transgressive female within the walls of the theatrical space. ([Location 1098](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=1098))
> In the end, the very cross-class, cross-gender appeal that led to the rise of the burlesque would eventually contribute to its demise. As its star waned with bourgeois audiences in the 1880s, maintaining only its lower-class audiences, burlesque would come to merge with vaudeville and carnival circuits and become relegated to its own theatrical venues. With the exception of burlesque performers like Mae West—who wrote and performed most of her suggestive stage and screenplays in the original tradition of the genre—the female performer was during this time reduced to nothing but physicality.78 Satirical performances would be relegated to men, and dancing and striptease to women—all but obliterating the subversive voice and influence of the original burlesque woman. ([Location 1125](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=1125))
> Representing its beautiful/beautified subjects as not only self-aware sexual and professional beings, but beings whose identities were self-constructed, self-controlled, and ever-changing, the pin-up both represented and marked as desirable a spectrum of female identities possible between the period’s established poles of acceptably “feminine” behav ior. ([Location 1140](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=1140))
### 2 NEW WOMEN FOR THE NEW CENTURY Feminism and the Pin-Up at the Fin de Siècle
> In 1886 the magazine began publishing Charles Dana Gibson’s illustrations of fictional women based on this new type being lampooned in the popular press. However, unlike many of his contemporaries, Gibson depicted the New Woman as a romantic ideal: so lovely and prevalent that the artist once marveled, “Wherever I looked I saw those beautiful girls, and who was I to resist.”44 Gibson’s character studies presented her as neither an oversexed nor an undersexed creature, but a healthy balance of “natural” passions tempered by an understanding of bourgeois manners. The Gibson Girls—as they would come to be known—went on to become a staple of Life for twenty years, where they served as the feminine embodiment of Life magazine’s progressive American spirit, and as icons of the lifestyles to which its readers aspired. ([Location 1462](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=1462))
> The Gibson Girl’s contribution to the continuum of the feminist pin-up is the fact that her subversive behavior is made appealing by its appearance in the figure of an otherwise ordinary bourgeois young woman. In this way, the Gibson Girl was an interesting and unique new image of the sexualized woman. The contradictory traits of the New Woman that caused anxiety when presented in real women—signifiers of both masculinity and femininity, the working and upper classes, conventionality and unconventionality—were in the Gibson Girl presented in a positive light. ([Location 1591](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=1591))
> Gibson addressed his women as modern romantic figures and was personally unsympathetic to issues of women’s rights and suffrage—indeed, in the rare illustration where he directly addressed suffrage, the cause was represented as either the pure folly of women or dangerously emasculating for men. ([Location 1605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=1605))
> Bicycling, for example, was a loaded activity clearly associated with feminism at the turn of the century: from the unfussy dress that the sport required—often including the “split skirts” and bloomers that still scandalized the public at the turn of the century—to the sexual connotations of the machine itself, young women riders were seen as advertising their progressivism. ([Location 1724](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00EHNZ060&location=1724))