Images and Illustrations for the Lecture on Pornography

"It is the created image that has the hold on our most vibrant, immediate sense of what is, of what matters, of what we must pursue for ourselves." (Bordo, p. 104)

The "sensuous" language of Haagen Dazs has not changed since Bordo's book. Notice "perfection" as a promise; compare to what you have read in Bordo about anorexics.

Haagen Dazs promises great pleasure, but the pleasure is limited: a brief escape, a small daydream. Weight Watchers discovers (see the bottom of the page) the futilty of the bad food - good food religion.

An anorexic's web site. This testimonial confirms some of Bordo's portrait of the anorexic. Has the authro read Bordo and similar work?

Same throughout the ages: A few images from the history of the classic female body image

Notice that ALL of what follows shows essentially the same body type: compared to our "beauty ideal" today, the women have smaller breasts, wider hips, and a certain amount of body fat, especially in the abdominal area. I shall call this the classic body type.
The women depicted in Western painting throughout the ages are, for the most part, not really plump. It appears that there have been two exceptional periods in the depiction of the female body: the baroque period when women were shown truly plump (imitated more recently in some of Renoir's work), and several periods in the twentieth century, when they have been pictured as very skinny.
However, note that even in the twentieth century the "skinny" women have appeared in film but especially in ads, and commercials - rarely in gallery art - and not very often in pornography.
Gallery art is mostly the product of the male imagination, as is most pornography. Perhaps more importantly, images of the female body in gallery art and pornography are directed primarily at men. In commercial art (including ads and commercials) that features ultra-thin women, the targeted consumer is a woman, even though the artist and especially the producer is still most often male. (The skinny model appears most often in fashion and make-up ads.) The purpose of the skinny woman image is, therefore, not to depict beauty as such but to hold out a goal for women to emulate. Her role as an image appears to be to teach women to restrain their bodies, more than to express an ideal of sensuous beauty.

The Venus of Milo is a Hellenistic work found in 1820, now in the Louvre. It is perhaps the most famous Venus. It was not known to Renaissance artists, but other examples were widely admired then and influenced the image of the Nude. We don't know to what extent Renaissance artists imitated antiquity and to what extent they were expressing some beauty ideal independent of the ancient model.
This erotic image of a couple found at Pompeii (the ancient site preserved by the lava from Mt. Vesuvius near Naples, Italy) shows a female with the classic body features. Please do not follow this link if you do not wish to view explicit images of sex or sex organs. Image Source: d'Georges Kayser Altertumsfuerscher
Venus by Lucas Cranach (German, fifteenth century) is still quite Gothic in style. The nudity and antique subject, however, betray a Renaissance influence. Medieval art seldom depicted nudes, and indulged in elaborate depictions of garments and othe fabrics.
The main figure from Boticelli's Birth of Venus, the famous Renaissance work, once again shows the classic body type - not "plump" at all, but neither is she free of body fat.
Rembrandt, Bathsheba at Her Bath (Bathsheba with King David's Letter), 1654; Oil on canvas, Musee du Louvre, Paris. The baroque period saw an increase in the amount of body fat shown on nudes. This period is often misrepresented as typical for all art before the twentieth century. The "plump" body type depicted by Rembrandt was in reality only popular during the baroque. Image Source: Web Museum, Paris
Boucher, Nude on a Sofa (Reclining Girl), 1752, oil on canvas, Pinakothek at Munich (fragment) The late baroque or rococco art of Francois Boucher still represented the fleshy female figure as ideal. Image Source: CGFA
Ingres, The Source. The classicist style of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century returned to a much trimmer version of the classic body type.
In spite of Bordo's reference to Bougereau's "plump women," neither this Venus nor the next picture, "Spring" show a particularly heavy woman. In fact this late nineteenth century academic painter was faithful to the "ageless" body type we are illustrating here.
Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People - canvas, 1830, Eugène Delacroix (Louvre, Paris). The famous personification of the July Revolution has the classic "small breasts and wide waist" body type.
Georges Seurat, The Models (Large version), 1887-1888, oil on canvas, The Barnes Foundation, Merion, PA, USA. The contrast between the models and the woman in Seurat's famous "Sunday Afternoon at La Grande Jette" hanging in the background is a commentary on the contrast between nature and artifice in the female body image. The models have the classic body build, but the strolling lady features the oversized derriere that was popular for about fifteen years at the close of the nineteenth century, and which had to be maintained by wearing an elaborate combination of skirt, support, and undergarments. Image Source: Mark Harden
Gustav Klimt, Nuda Veritas, 1899. The classic body type once again. ("Nuda veritas" means the naked truth, but it could also mean "The nude woman is truth," cf. the saying, "In vino veritas" - "In wine is truth." Klimt's work provides a visual commentary on the kind of mental world in which Freud's thinking on women was possible.) Image Source: Gustav Klimt Gallery
Marilyn Monroe represented the classic body type plus large breasts. (Another shot of M.M.) Image Source: Spyder's Empire
The Sunshine Girl, Toronto Sun, March 18, 1998. The Sunshine Girls tend to vary from the classic figure to the more fashionable, big-breasts, small-waist type.

Skinny Women: The Exception

The goddess Hathor and King Seti I - from the tomb of Seti I, Valley of the Kings, circa 1301-1290 BC. (Louvre , Paris) The goddess is positively hyper-skinny. However, this may be due more to the lack of plasticity in ancient Egyptian painting, as opposed to three-dimensional art. Sarcophagi housing female mummies, for example, depict a female of the classic Venus of Milo type. The following love poem illustrates that the body type the poet was enamoured with was not necessarily that light:
Bikini-clad ball players, third century A.D., Sicily. The women playing ball have relatively masculine, muscular bodies, with little body fat and almost no breasts. It is not clear how such art was read in its time. It may have represented an ideal type, or a caricature of the female athlete. Without a better understanding of the historical context, it is impossible to speculate if we have here an example of the thin body type reflecting some improvement in women's status in society. Image Source: d'Georges Kayser Altertumsfuerscher
An ancient Egyptian love poem "Long neck, white breasts, heavy buttocks." (Source: RIGBY'S WORLD OF EGYPT)
Picasso, Harem, Oil on canvas, 1906, Cleveland Museum of Art. These slim figures are considered the point of departure for Picasso's famous "Demoiselles d'Avignon," where the women, though slightly heavier, are still rather low on body fat. The harem mates have the classic body type, but narrower wastes. The strong, large male in the Harem contrasts with the frail females, justfying perhaps the view that the slim woman is a weak woman and therefore a sign of male power over herself. Picasso might have been depicting as much his view of gender relations as his ideal of female beauty here. He has painted some rather heavy women, too. Image Source: África Silvelo
A gallery of silent movie stars from the twenties and thirties shows the very skinny, small-breasted body type then in fashion. The style is said to have been a reaction to the increasing participation of women in the work force and other advances in women's position in society. Go to the mage Source: Avid Collector Posters
Salvador Dali, One Second Before Awakening from a Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate, 1944. The female figure here is lean and muscular, with a narrow waist and broader shoulder, and so quite masculine. The image can provide support for the view that the skinny female figure is a masculinized one, and a reflection of women's rejection of traditional female roles. (Looked at strictly in terms of this particular painting, the woman's physical strength increases the sense of violent confrontation with the tigers and the weapon.) Image Source: Marcelo Jara's Dali site

Kate Moss

The Sailor Scouts from the Japanese TV and print cartoon (these are from TV). These juvenile, anorexic-looking characters are meant to depict teenage girls.