Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?

In the film Will Success Spoil gemstone hunting watch (1957), Rock Hunters fianc, Jenny Wells (Betsy Drake), realizes that attending college to just germinate her mind was a serious mistake. Fearing that Rock will leave her for the buxom and vapid Hollywood star, Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield), Jenny initiates an rehearse regime designed to develop her modest bust line.Upon visiting her apartment after work, Rock discovers his fianc comatose on the ground and frigid in a perpetual push-up. When Rock informs her doctor that the malady was caused by too much exercise specifically push-ups the doctor nods knowingly. Push-ups are a waste of time, the physician tells the advertising executive. Its really break dance for women to just go to a store, if you know what I mean. When Rock Hunter returns to his own apartment that darkness and checks in on his teenage daughter, he finds her sleeping in bed, her arms above the covers in a frozen push-up.Prescriptive literature, Hollywood films, and popular culture in general created and perpetuated the postwar feminine specimen of the Sweater Girl a busty, curvaceous figure more sexual than maternal. Yet, this ideal gave way in little more than a decade. One of my earliest childhood and most lasting memories of my mother is honoring her inspect herself in the full-length mirror of our family bathroom.She would stand, twisting and turning, her eyes intensely scrutinizing the curves of her body. Then she would turn to me and barely sigh, We were born in the wrong decade. Those same eyes that had just previously scrutinized her own shape would inspect on me as if to say that I was destined (doomed?) to follow in her footsteps. I would file aside her beauty tips and hints and embarrassingly chant, I must, I must, I must increase my bust with my middle-school friends, thanks to the enamor of young-adult author, Judy Blume, a woman who experienced her own teen years in the 1950s.My mother, neither unattractive no r big(a) was born in 1960. Like many women of her generation, she clung to the urban legend that the Hollywood sex symbol of the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe, wore a size 12 dress. She came of age during an era where youth culture placed a cult-like status on Twiggy, a model with a 31-inch bust and 32-inch hips. How had the ideal female body type changed so promptly and so drastically?How did we go from a society that worshiped full, buxom blondes to child-like waifs in just over a decade? Previous scholars have not recognized how malleable these ideals were and how susceptible the female figure is when on the face of it disparate factors like consumerism, fashion trends, foreign policy, medical opinion, and mortality collide. While many women conformed to the Hollywood pinny model and then later looked to Twiggy as the fashionable ideal, most did not exhaust themselves in efforts to remold their bodies to replicate these unique body types.This dissertation explores and analyzed how wo men of different ages, races, and sexual orientations imagined and actively change their own bodies in their efforts to mimic or reject this body ideal from 1945 to 1970. At least in one case scholar has argued that women face more pressure to conform to an ideal standard of beauty than men because women film early on that their future economic, companionable, and reproductive opportunities hinges on their personal appearance.Moreover, as historian Kathy Peiss notes, Beauty signifies residuum making distinctions between high and low, normal and abnormal, virtue and vice. In so doing, beauty helps to define morality, social status, class, gender, race, and ethnicity. Womens bodies are constantly under surveillance. Borrowing Foucauldian language, Dina Giovanelli and Stephan Ostertag refer to the media as a cosmetic panopticon which dictates womens clothing, hairstyle, body size, and shape. By violating expectations such as being fat and female, women are subjected to discrimin ation. And even though we are mostly cognitive of the images and messages thrown at us in the mass media today, some are harder to reject than others.Read More Horace Miner Body Ritual among the Nacirema by Horace Miner