The pinup is a contested object in cultural circles both for its artistic form and its social content. The pinup may actually be the root of modern women’s body image problems. Before the pinup, most representations of the feminine form were contained in either high art or pornography. In either case, these representations were removed from the experience of most women, either by allegorical distance as representations of a goddess or nymph, or by simply being a private object for men’s consumption only. However, the pinup deviates from both these traditions, and moves into the real world, thrusting its idealized forms via magazines, posters, and prints into the everyday lives of women everywhere. Once injected into normal experience, these artificial, impossible forms with narrow waists, slender legs, and heart-shaped faces became objects of desire for men, emulation for women, and, unachievable by either, have contributed to considerable emotional strife on both sides.
Or so the story goes. And it is somewhat true.
But there is another truth, a truth that is important for both pin-ups as cultural icons and cosmetic surgery as social practice. Pinups are, in the words of scholar Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “an image type predicated on the relative isolation of its feminine motif through the reduction or outright elimination of narrative, literary, or mythological allusion [and a] decontextualization, reduction, or distillation of the image of femininity to a subject in and of itself,” i.e. a representation of pure femininity. While this means that they do pose an impossible standard
for flesh-and-blood women, who can never be so purely feminine, imbued with such voluptuous, seductive power, it also means that they are a “performative source of female power” (Maria Elena Buszek, 1998). In other words, as pinups moved from being passive objects of the male gaze (as in the Gil Elvgren painting “Ankles Aweigh” above left) into more active advocates of the war effort, such as the Alberto Vargas painting to the right, then in special issues of the magazines printed without advertisements and shipped to the front and as nose art on the bombers(below) that first carried the war to the enemy, they empowered women to take up a larger role in society. In a similar fashion, cosmetic surgery has the ability to empower women, to free them from the trap of one or two things they do not like about their bodies to allow their exterior to become a true expression of their interior selves.
Pinups have many of the features of the classical norm, although they often emphasize larger breasts, narrower waists, and have impossibly long legs.But what makes pinups enduring icons of femininity is not their body, but their spirit, a freedom from the mother-whore dichotomy of Victorian womanhood into the modern ideal of a woman who is able to be sexual without being simply a sexual object.
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