From Reddit's 100 Years Ago today sub.
Last edition:
Showing posts with label Women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Women. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 27, 2025
Saturday, May 24, 2025
The Best Post of the Week of May 18, 2025.
It was quite a week.
We started the week off with a look at the Vietnamese Diaspora
A Sunday Morning look at the Vietnamese Diaspora.
And we delved into local politicians betraying local values.
The occupant of the Oval Office was on display again.
I posed a query to our readers, but received no response.
We noted a momentous anniversary for Christianity.
Republicans were all atwitter about alleged coverups of Joe Biden's decline, while they're covering up Donald Trump's.
Some depressing news in the age of science denialism.
Women were on the blog a lot.
We considered authenticity.
The U.S. took a giant step towards economic disaster.
Governor Gordon called Chuck Gray out on the carpet.
Appearance. Shape and being in shape and women (men will come next).
Donna Reed as a Yank centerfold. Reed was well known actress by this time, and is perhaps best known for her role in The Best Years Of Our Lives. Her actual last name was Mullenger but as she started acting during World War Two, her studio changed it to Reed over her objection. She became a peace activist during the Vietnam War.
Some time ago we received a comment here from a reader, and the reader emailed me after the recent item on fashion, and reminded me that I said I'd do a threat on the topic.
So here it is.
The threads were these ones:
The comment was this one:
I read this, and your other post on Fran Camuglia. Wow, what a sad life.
I have an observation that I wonder if you would comment on that your post seems to illustrate. The pretty girls of the 50s and 60s looked different than they do now. They were beautiful, but softer, and more natural looking. Even the real dolls like Camuglia, with their exaggerated features, were softer and prettier. Think Marilyn Monroe.
I don't know what's changed it, but maybe the emphasis on "working out" has. Seems like you have really fit girls, and then really out of shape girls, and not much in between.
My replies were:
Thanks for your comment. Her life was tragic.
On your observation, people do indeed look different at different ages in the past, but I haven't really thought of it in this context. Having thought of it now, a little, I think there's something to your observation. As a minor personal observation, "working out" was not really a thing, as you note, in the 70s when I was growing up. Thinking back to high school I can't really think of any overweight kids at all. I'm sure there were some, but it must have been really rare. It seems to me that high schoolers now look older than we did when we were there, but oddly kids of my fathers vintage, who graduated high school in the 40s, looked much more mature. Nobody looked bulked up, or "ripped", or whatever.
This might be worth a post on the site, after I ponder it a bit.By the way, while I've already noted it in these posts, her life being tragic isn't unique in terms of Playboy centerfolds. Quite a few of their stories are pretty grim, and Playboy contributed to that. In this case, quite frankly, she was off to a really bad start as it was, as she was married absurdly young, divorced very rapidly, and objectified forever when still in her teens.
I noted that it might be worth a post at the time, and then I went on to other things. The email reminded me of it.
Well, in thinking about it, and I have no real scientific way to discuss this, my observational comment is, on this question, while I think there are some morphological changes we can observe in women, there aren't really that many.
That's probably surprising.
Let's start off with a couple of things, the first being that the first part of our discussion necessarily references young women. That's important, I think, for reasons that will become clear.
The second observation is that time period and method of illustration matters. We're not really going to get, for example, very accurate depictions of women, or men, at a certain point in our past.
Let's start with that.
A lot of comments like this, and I've seen them before, are based on photographs. I.e., in this case, somebody is looking at a photograph of a Playboy model from 1967 and drawing conclusions from that. But can we?
Probably not.
Most early photography was in the category of portraiture. Old portraits give us a much more realistic idea of what people looked like than "published" photographs do. And certainly better than pornography does. Indeed, that's one of the fundamental destructive aspects of pornography, which we'll get into later.
Anyhow, cameras had to develop for quite some time before snapshots or the like appeared. In the meantime, illustration really developed and that gives us a pretty good idea of what standards of beauty were up to at least 1920. Illustration made use of models, who were chosen for their physical appearance, but they rarely strayed massively from the mean. The first real "standard" was Florence Evelyn Nesbit, who became the Gibson Girl. She was pretty, to be sure, but didn't depart from the mean in a massive fashion
This was equally true of lesser known models, and indeed, it was mostly true for early movie stars as well.
Movies began to take over from illustrations as the bearers of standards in the 1920s and certainly had by the 1930s. Female movie stars began to be more and more chosen for their beauty as well as their acting talents by the late 1930ss, which did result in an exaggerated standard in the sense that not every woman you meet is going to look like a movie start.
Teenage girls with cameras in the 1930s.
Actress Susan Hayword as a Yank centerfold.
But, nonetheless, while they were pretty, only in very rare instances were they somebody whom you might not meet, appearance wise, at the Piggly Wiggly.
Lauren Bacall as a teenager.
It wasn't until the 1950s that this really began to change.
Starting in the 1950s, and I'll place the date as 1953 when the first issue of Playboy came out, the beauty standard became emphasized and highly exaggerated in terms of physical features. The first Playboy centerfold was Marilyn Monroe, against her will, and her features in some ways became the standard.
Or rather her imagined features.
Playboy emphaszied the supposed "girl next store" with teh concept htat she'd lost her moral compass, was sterile, stupid, and very top heavy. Marilyn Monroe's early movies, indeed the bulk of them, portrayed characters just like that. The funny thing is that Monroe's own early modeling photographs didn't depict her in taht fashion at all
The photos above, from the 1940s, show a young Monroe as an actual sort of girl next door. Her physical features were no doubt the same as they were in her earliest movies, but they weren't being emphasized. Soon after these photographs they would be, and in movies like Gentlemen Prefer Blonds, they were on display.
Playboy,. as noted, arrived in 1953. The 1950s gave us a host of actress that were Monroe knockoffs, some with even more exaggerated features. By the early 1960s a wave of Italian and other European actresses hit, all of whom were very topheavy, although they weren't portrayed as dumb. Playboy and its followers kept on keeping on and if anything exaggerated things more. Camuglia comes from that era.
Indeed, it was so notable, it made up one of the comedic lines in 1963's It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World:
J. Algernon Hawthorne: I must say, if I had the grievous misfortune to be a citizen of this benighted country, I should be the most hesitant at offering any criticism whatever of any other.J. Russell Finch: Wait a minute, are you knocking this country? Are you saying something against America?J. Algernon Hawthorne: Against it? I should be positively astounded to hear of anything that could be said FOR it. Why, the whole bloody place is the most unspeakable matriarchy in the whole history of civilization! Look at yourself, and the way your wife and her strumpet of a mother push you through the hoop! As far as I can see, American men have been totally emasculated. They're like slaves! They die like flies from coronary thrombosis, while their women sit under hairdryers, eating chocolates and arranging for every second Tuesday to be some sort of Mother's Day! And this positively infantile preoccupation with bosoms. In all my time in this wretched, godforsaken country, the one thing that has appalled me most of all is this preposterous preoccupation with bosoms. Don't you realize they have become the dominant theme in American culture: in literature, advertising and all fields of entertainment and everything. I'll wager you anything you like: if American women stopped wearing brassieres, your whole national economy would collapse overnight.
In a lot of ways, we're still in it. It's what's given us plastic surgery and a host of other horrors.
So, overall, what I'm saying is that actual physical appearance didn't change that much, but rather the publicized standards did, to women's detriment.
So what about the gym?
When Camuglia appeared in Playboy in the early 1960s "working out" wasn't a term. Indeed, gymnasiums were around, but their atmosphere wasn't quite what it is today. In a lot of places the gym was the YMCA. Indeed, in this locality, it was for years, before, some time in the 1970s, private gyms began to appear.
Early gyms really had all the features of moder nones, they were just less used and sort of used by a clas sof urban people who was unusually into physical fitness, save for weight lifters, who are a different class entirely.
Having said all of that, women have been involved in athletics, if not working out per se, for decades.
Australian female Olympic swimmers, 1932. These women look pretty darned fit.
Girls basketball team, 1907. Playing basketball while dressed like this must have been a huge pain.
Indeed, nobody was "working out", really, until the 1960s. There wasn't much of a need to.
That doesn't mean that people weren't physically active, however. Women were involved in Olympic sports right from the onset, for example. And as late as the 1970s, at least, an incredible number of women engaged in some sports, such as tennis and golf. My mother, who grew up in the 1930s and 40s, was an avid golfer at one time, and a real fan of tennis. She also constantly rode a bicycle, and she swam nearly daily up until her final decline. Yes, she's an unusual example, but not that unusual.
Her mother, I'd note, was also a tennis player.
There's sports, of course, but there's physical work. And everyone engaged in a lot more physical activity by necessity.
Which catches us back up, sort of, to the 1950s. As we've discussed here before, domestic machinery really came in after World War Two, and with that, a decline in physical activity. This meant more women went into office work.
The 1950s also brought the country the "cheap food" policy, and we still live in that era, and that's where things really begin to change. This was noted the other day on Twitter in a post by O.W. Root
O.W. Root@NecktieSalvageCurrently there are two extremes that didn't really exist en masse before.1 - Extreme obesity2 - Extreme gym cultureMaybe one day those extremes will fade and a more traditional historic norm will replace them.
That pretty much nails it in a way, other than to say lots of people are neither part of a gym culture or obese.
A lot of people are taller, however. That's been well noted. It's a nutritional thing, but here's one area where people, including women, have a different morphology than they once typically did. Contrary to what people tend to think, however, its flatted out since the late 1970s after having really gotten ramped up, around the globe, in the 1890s.
Now, here's one more thing that's changed. Women in particular used to at one time very much "age" once they hit their 40s.
Contrary to what people think, people don't "live longer" than they once did. Rather, premature mortality has dropped way off. But people did "age" more quickly. If you look at photographs of married couples the appearance of women over 40 is often shocking in comparison to now. Now, for various reasons, women in their 40s are not regarded as old or even middle aged, but often if you go back to mid century they'll have a much older appearance. I"ve seen photographs of women in their 40s whom you would easily guess were in their 60s.
That's probably all due to the stress of life and hard work.
So, all in all, I don't think the evidence supports the assertion there's been much of a change at all. I do think that an emphasis on a certain look, or a series of appearances, has changed over time, but more recently its broadened back out, which is a good thing.
Iceland girl delivering milk.
Mexican women in festive dress
Wednesday, May 21, 2025
Mid Week At Work
"Palmer, Alfred T.,, photographer. Learning how to determine latitude by using a sextant is Senta Osoling, student at Polytechnic High School, Los Angeles, Calif. Navigation classes are part of the school's program for training its students for specific contributions to the war effort 1942 Sept. 1 transparency : color. Notes: Title from FSA or OWI agency caption. Transfer from U.S. Office of War Information, 1944. Subjects: Los Angeles Polytechnic High School Schools Vocational education Navigation World War, 1939-1945 United States--California--Los Angeles Format: Transparencies--Color Rights Info: No known restrictions on publication. Repository: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print Part Of: Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Collection 12002-40 (DLC) 93845501 General information about the FSA/OWI Color Photographs is available at hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.fsac Higher resolution image is available (Persistent URL): hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsac.1a35363 Call Number: LC-USW36-282"
Tuesday, May 20, 2025
Tuesday, May 20, 1975. Seas of blood.
The Khmer Rouge began to purge Cambodians associated with the former government, a move that would feature mass execution.
This is commonly viewed as the beginning of the Cambodian Genocide.
The House of Representatives voted 303-96 to admit women to the previously all-male service academies. The move was quite controversial at the time.
The Senate would follow suit, with the first women entering the academies in the summer of 1976.
The final episode of the police series Adam-12 was broadcast.
Last episode.
Monday, May 19, 1975. Executive Order 11860—Establishing the President's Advisory Committee on Refugees.
Saturday, May 17, 2025
Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist 84th Edition. The uncomfortably agreeing with the far right edition (on some things). Hegseth orders transgenderism out and a bill to outlaw pornography.
"Transgendered" troops to depart.
I'll be frank, I don't think transgenderism exists at all.
Gender dysphoria, however, certainly does. It's a psychological condition, and indeed, a mental illness, often a temporary one.
Moreover, "transitioning from a man to a woman", or vice versa, is impossible.
Whether or not that fiction should be allowed to medically occur for adults (for anyone not in their majority, it's child abuse), is another thing. I basically don't feel that it should be allowed, as its a manifestation of a mental illness that isn't served by being medically and surgically coddled, but I'll also fully admit there's more than one allowable medical procedure I don't think should be legal either. Plastic surgery, for example, for mere cosmetic reason for uninjured and the morphologically normal people is also wrong, in my view, and that's not the only such thing.
Nonetheless, the sudden, and it was sudden, post Obergefell societal trend towards treating this mental delusion as something that should be fully supported is not only stunning, but it's flat out wrong. It may be the only mental illness which has rising to be not only culturally tolerated, but for which the left makes cultural demands. As I predicated at the time of the Obergefell, making such demands would have a societal ripple that would be devastating, and it has been. There's a straight path from Obergefell to Donald Trump, as what it brought in was just a bridge too far.
So, here, I find myself agreeing with Secretary Hegseth's action, even though I'm not a fan of Secretary Hegseth.
By the way, there's a transitioned high school softball picture who has been blowing the doors off of her opponents with her pitches. Well, she's genetically a guy.
This is just wrong, and shouldn't be allowed to happen.
I'll also note that I may be one of the view Wyomingites in my region to have encountered a guy pretending to be a gal and seeking medical assistance for the delusion, with that person in uniform. Some time back I had some email correspondence with a full time National Guardsman on something, although I don't recall what. What I do recall is that he was "transgendered". Like a lot, but not all, "transgendered" men affecting the appearance of a woman, he looked very much like a guy, which of course what he genetically and morphologically is.
Gender studies also out.
In something that is sort of related, and sort of not, UW is eliminating its Gender Studies degree.
I've posted on the topic of pornography here from time to time.
UW looks to end embattled gender studies degree
I don't know much about gender studies other than its one of those host of degrees that came in during the 1970s and 1980s in the liberal arts that have always baffled me a bit. What do you do with it?
Having said that, I'm not as condescending towards the degree as I once was. I do, however, think that what US is doing makes sense. Folding the program into some other sort of sociology degree strikes me as making sense, rather than having it stand alone.
Sorority transgender pleading allowed.
In something else sort of related, and sort of not, the Federal Court has allowed for an amended complaint to be filed in a suit in which it seeks to address a man identifying as a woman being admitted to its house at UW as a sorority "sister".
Banning pornography.
And here's another item that come from the far right, and indeed from Project 2025, which generally scares me overall, but whose goal I find myself in agreement with:
I've posted on the topic of pornography here from time to time.
Pornography is a devastating scourge. It's wholly destructive, and about that there's no doubt
This bill will be interesting to watch. I suspect it will get no traction I don't know, for one thing, that Donald Trump cares one whit about pornography. After all, his wife became famous as a model for posing in a manner that I'd regard as pornographic. And a guy who rode the Lolita Express to Epstein's jail bait fantasy island doesn't strike me as a man of deep moral principles. And hte pron industry is powerful and will take this on in the guise of free speech.
It may ironically prove to be the case that deporting people to foreign concentration camps is something most Americans are willing to tolerate, but stopping young women from prostituting their images is not.
It may ironically prove to be the case that deporting people to foreign concentration camps is something most Americans are willing to tolerate, but stopping young women from prostituting their images is not.
Related posts:
Topic One.
Normalizing Mental Illness isn't helping to address it.
Topic Four
The life of Fran Gerard/Francis Anna Camuglia. Was Francis Anna Camuglia and Cynthia Blanton.
Secrets of Playboy
Lex Anteinternet: De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh. Throwing rocks at Hugh Hefner . . . I'm not alone in that.
De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. M'eh
Last edition:
Labels: 2020s, Baby Boom Generation, Generation Jones, Growing up in the 1970s, law, mehr Mensch sein, Military, Old Age, The Practice of Law, The Second Trump Administration, Vietnam War, Zeitgeist
Thursday, May 15, 2025
Wednesday, May 14, 2025
Love ‘Em Before You Date ‘Em
Love ‘Em Before You Date ‘Em: The dating culture today has many ebs and flows that are hard for every man. This can all change if our aim is simply love. Hear the testimony of a seminarian and his former dating relationship on this topic.
Sunday, May 11, 2025
Mother
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I'm going to comment on Mother's Day for a couple of odd reasons, even thought I didn't originally intend to.
The first is this comment by Robert Reich for the day:
Robert Reich@RBReich·14h
Your Mother’s Day weekend reminder that the so-called “party of family values” has historically blocked:
-Paid family & medical leave
-Universal childcare
-Universal pre-K
-Expanded Child Tax Credit
-Programs to support reproductive health
Doesn’t sound very pro-family to me.
First I'll note that I have sort of a love/hate relationship with Reich. Reich is very far left, but his economic commentary, in my view, is generally pretty good. And like him, I'm greatly distressed over what Donald Trump is doing to the country.
Secondly, I really hate the writing convention of saying "this is your reminder". Did I ask for a reminder? If I didn't, that's really annoying. Reich also likes to state "I don't know who needs to know this" which suggest that nobody needs to know whatever he's going to tell us.
He should quit using both of those writing conventions.
Anyhow, like a far lefty, he's bought into the seas of blood position of the Democratic Party. "Programs to support reproductive health" is Orwellian speech for infanticide.
Reich is Jewish, which always makes me wonder how he can support a thesis that holds that infants in the womb, earlier than a certain number of weeks, aren't people. It's the exact same argument that resulted in the Holocaust. It's the exact same argument that expanded into eugenics based homicide in Nazi Germany, and which has advanced murder in the guise of "assisted suicide" in various Western Nations.
I'll be frank that I've never been a huge fan of Mothers Day or Father's Day which remind me, in some ways of the Alcohol and Old Lace episode of the Andy Griffith Show in which two elderly sisters were distilling moonshine for "holidays", of which there were an insane number of manufactured ones. But I really shouldn't be that way for Mother's Day. There are real reasons to honor motherhood and what it entails. But murdering infants isn't a good way to do it.
And there's no reason to pretend, no matter how much the left would like to, that the "my body, my choice" argument is a good one, or even a valid one. A fetus in the womb has a body and its choice i not likely to be murdered. And that body, genetically, is made up of the DNA of two people, not one. You don't get ot be a mother through a unilateral act of self will. Motherhood in some instances wasn't planned, of course, but then much of life is not and a massive murderous do over isn't every justified.
The other reason I chose to post is that somebody I know had been at a Vigil Mass in which the attending celebrant mentioned mothers, but largely, apparently, in the context how mother's support their men, which was pretty much apparently it. The celebrant was Indian (from India). I'm only noting this as its so easy to forgot for Americans, and probably Europeans, how we are actually a minority of the globes' population, and the culture view of other people may be very much not the one we hold.
That oddly enough occured on the same day, yesterday, in which I listed to a Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World episode on 1 Esdras, which is in some (all?) Orthodox Bibles, but not the Catholic Bible, which is itself larger than most Protestant Biles. In it, there's a debate between three Guards about what is the most powerful thing in the world. One Guard presents this, which references the prior two arguments that came before his.:
Then the third, who had spoken of women and truth (and this was Zerubbabel), began to speak: “Gentlemen, is not the king great, and are not men many, and is not wine strong? Who is it, then, who rules them or has the mastery over them? Is it not women? Women gave birth to the king and to every people that rules over sea and land. From women they came, and women brought up the very men who plant the vineyards from which comes wine. Women make men’s clothes; they bring men glory; men cannot exist without women. If men gather gold and silver or any other beautiful thing and then see a woman lovely in appearance and beauty, they let all those things go and gape at her and with open mouths stare at her, and all prefer her to gold or silver or any other beautiful thing. A man leaves his own father, who brought him up, and his own region and clings to his wife. With his wife he ends his days, with no thought of his father or his mother or his region. Therefore you must realize that women rule over you!
“Do you not labor and toil and bring everything and give it to women? A man takes his sword and goes out to travel and rob and steal and to sail the sea and rivers; he faces lions, and he walks in darkness, and when he steals and robs and plunders, he brings it back to the woman he loves. A man loves his wife more than his father or his mother. Many men have lost their minds because of women and have become slaves because of them. Many have perished or stumbled or sinned because of women. And now do you not believe me?
“Is not the king great in his authority? Do not all lands fear to touch him? Yet I have seen him with Apame, the king’s concubine, the daughter of the illustrious Bartacus; she would sit at the king’s right hand and take the crown from the king’s head and put it on her own and slap the king with her left hand. At this the king would gaze at her with mouth agape. If she smiles at him, he laughs; if she loses her temper with him, he flatters her, so that she may be reconciled to him. Gentlemen, why are not women strong, since they do such things?”
It is profound, and note how it came in an ear in which women, in most of the world, would have been regarded as second class citizens. I should note, however, that he went on to then discuss Truth, with that being the most powerful thing in the World.
While it likely shouldn't, that reminded me of Kipling's great poem, The Ballad of the King's Jest, which has this line:
Four things greater than all things are,—
Women and Horses and Power and War.
We spake of them all, but the last the most,
For I sought a word of a Russian post,
Of a shifty promise, an unsheathed sword
And a gray-coat guard on the Helmund ford.
Then Mahbub Ali lowered his eyes
In the fashion of one who is weaving lies.
Quoth he: “Of the Russians who can say?
“When the night is gathering all is gray.
“But we look that the gloom of the night shall die
“In the morning flush of a blood-red sky.
“Friend of my heart, is it meet or wise
“To warn a King of his enemies?
“We know what Heaven or Hell may bring,
“But no man knoweth the mind of the King.
“That unsought counsel is cursed of God
“Attesteth the story of Wali Dad.
It's interesting how Kipling put it, "Four things greater than all things are--Women and Horses and Power and War".
Well, have a Happy Mother's Day.
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