Thursday, July 22, 2010

Swimsuit Season


Mandy, originally uploaded by Derek Wood Photography.
An excerpt from Laurie Penny's article "Bikini body, anyone?":

When it finally became popular in the 1960s, the bikini was a symbol of physical liberation, of beautiful women reacting to the stern sexual prudery of previous decades by exposing as much skin to the sun as they pleased. Today, as with many iterations of the sexual emancipation rhetoric of the 1960s, wearing a bikini is no longer associated with pleasure and daring, but with anxiety, dieting rituals and joyless physical performance...The bikini body has become cultural shorthand for a moral standard of female perfection whereby any physical flaw should be regarded as a source of shame, an obstacle to collective fantasies of glamour and happiness.

1 comment:

.hillsy.heart. said...

I know I didn't post a picture of a bikini along with the article, but I really like that particular photo.

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