The Almost Woman: Female Double Standards in Print Media in the Sexual Revolution
Who would have ever imagined that the leading factor in the feminist movement, a sexual liberation in the 1950s and the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s would be World War I? As amusing as the concept may initially seem, World War I generated a prevalent shift in the way society was formed and generated in mid-century America. With women being encouraged to join the workforce during the War, and immediately being ushered back into the household once soldiers began returning, the government and mass culture were sending two very diverse messages to women. It is only in the 1950s that both come together to present a unified front on the portrayal of women: the happy housewife. Generally known as a decade of cookie-cutter houses, conservative values, and severe morality, the 1950s appear flat and monotonous on paper. Yet, it is within this subverted culture that a sexual liberation occurs, one that was fundamentally necessary for the emergence of the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s. Though, as it becomes apparent by the imagery of the mid-1950s, mass media attempts to destabilize this sexual liberation � especially a woman�s sexual liberation � by generating perpetual imagery of the atomic family and the desexualized mother and wife.
In 1953, two works of literature rocked the very foundation of American suburbia and began picking at America�s tightly woven moral stitching. Published with complete autonomy from each other, both works of literature would unknowingly deal with the exact same topic: sex � yet, most importantly � who was having sex. With the onslaught of Alfred Kinsey�s Sexual Behavior in the Human Female and Hugh Hefner�s extremely controversial Playboy magazine, a sexual revolution crept in like a skilled predator and ravished the unsuspecting United States. The aftermath left the States so fundamentally altered that every facet of American life was affected. During the 1950s, the once taboo subject of sex becomes a marketed commodity within American culture (Cocks and Houlbrook 47). With the onset of the Sexual Revolution, women again broke the oppressive shackles that had previously bound them to the kitchen and began questioning their place in mainstream society. By focusing on female sexuality, American culture provided both a newfound sense of freedom as well as a new form of oppression: the taking away of female subjectivity. This sexual liberation was not about equality, but became a new way that men (and women) were now allowed to view or talk about and treat other women - as sexual objects opposed to desexualized subjects. While Playboy and Kinsey may have opened up American culture to view women as sexual beings instead of wives and mothers, it was, in essence, a shift from viewing women as non-sexual subjects to sexualized objects (Cocks and Houlbrook 48). With women being ushered back into the household after the war, a means of subduing the budding need for feminist revolt became necessary in order to maintain the patriarchy. Men returning from the War expected to come back to the exact household they left. Thought, it quickly becomes apparent that the women are no longer satisfied with the role they were typically assigned (i.e. child rearing and housework). This tension created a need to re-indoctrinate women to the household, and what better way to accomplish this task than a continual bombardment of images, targeted exclusively toward women.
To begin, there is a strict uniformity as to how women are represented in images in the 1950s. The females splashed over the covers of and throughout the pages of magazines are always smiling and conservatively dressed; their hair is flawlessly coiffed and their makeup is impeccable. For instance, in an addition of My Home magazine, the females are always, if only, cleaning and preparing meals for their families, all while smiling and looking immaculate (1955). The common theme in all media representations of housewives is a simple, if not neutered, one. The woman is merely the picture perfect imitation of what the stereotypical housewife should look like, thus propelling the notion that other wives and mothers should be emulating said image.
With this in mind, representation of females during the 1950s became hyper-clich�d and candy-coated. Known for their recipes and household appliance advertisements, women�s magazines like Good Housekeeping and My Home acted like soundboards for housewives everywhere. When flipping through the pages, one finds the magazines are riddled with advertisements and articles that read �how to avoid being a wet blanket for your hubby� or �how to be a wise mummy� (My Home, 1955). Seeing as how no woman�s magazine possessed a female editor, the marketing in the magazines were, essentially, offshoots of an oppressive patriarchy that tried to keep women indoctrinated and in line (Friedan 196). In her breakthrough, The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan argues that women�s magazines of the 1950s contributed to a, �crisis in women�s identity� (95). Friedan�s book became one of, if not the, defining text of second-wave feminism, acting as a uniting cry for the women�s liberation movement. Published in 1963, The Feminine Mystique denounced the notion that women were merely housekeepers and mothers, and strongly encouraged women to participate in activities that did not, in any way, shape, or form, relate back to the household (68). Moreover, Friedan argued that the images portrayed in women�s magazines of the 1950s were stellar indicators of a historically suppressive relationship toward women (201). Furthermore, Friedan argues that American consumer culture of the 1950s was directly marketed to women and created an epidemic of unhappiness amongst the women of the middle-class (216). Calling it, �the problem that had no name�, Friedan continues to discuss the resonating dissonance between a women�s sense of fulfillment to her growing sense of guilt and failure (230). Friedman�s study focused on the portrayal of women under a suppressive and superfluous male gaze.
Yet not all members in the American mass media were willing to submit to the idealized notion of femininity. Interestingly enough, it is Alfred Kinsey who sets the stage for the revamped feminine image. Being mass culture�s most notorious sexologist, Kinsey�s reports on sexuality created a frenzy of publicity and media attention (Cocks and Houlbrook 41). When Kinsey published the first half of his outrageous and renowned Kinsey Report, the tightly guarded taboo that was sex, was proverbially blown out of the water and into the public sphere (Cocks and Houlbrook 48). With Kinsey�s exceptionally detailed reports, he proved that thousands of Americans, all across the country, actually enjoyed a variety of sexual practices (Cocks and Houlbrook 48). Ranging from sadomasochism to pre-marital sex to sexual orientation, Kinsey�s books (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female) did what no other books had ever done � they propelled people to talk about sex (Cocks and Houlbrook 48). Suddenly, with meticulously documented statistics from a variety of different people, began open discourses on sex. Even the media picks up on this trend, seeing as how taglines in the newspapers from different states read, �Study Reveals Many Popular Ideas Are Wrong� (New York Times). Kinsey proved there were fundamental errors in the mass public�s interpretations of sex and rectified them with his studies. Kinsey �gathered data on the sex lives of 2,200 American women, which revealed � high rates of masturbation and the use of contraceptive� (McLaren 146). Moreover, Kinsey�s study �rediscover[ed] of the importance of the clitoris for female pleasure� (McLaren 146). Kinsey confirmed to the general public that more that women are not �slower to respond sexually� and that �girls develop sexually earlier than boys� and most importantly �that there are � differences in the nature of sexual satisfaction in men and women� (Kinsey 154). With �25 per cent of American women had intercourse at least once before marriage� Kinsey united in a nation under the notion that everyone enjoyed sex � even more shockingly � with the second half of his Kinsey Report, that women enjoyed sex (McLaren 146). Sadly, after Kinsey, a more troubling image of females will be exploited on the pages of men�s magazines, most notably, Playboy.
Hugh Hefner is famously quoted for saying, �Playboy was founded on the notion that nice girls like sex too�. Playboy has the biggest social impact on the benign culture of the 1950s. Using Marilyn Monroe as the first centerfold, Playboy effectively subverted a system of oppression that had been in power since the Hays Production Code of 1934 (McLaren 164). Curvaceous and gorgeous, Monroe was not new to the concept of being a sex symbol. Yet, when Hefner published nude pictures of Monroe in the first issue of Playboy, Monroe�s celebrity skyrocketed. For the first time, female sexuality is not punished like in the movies of the film noir era. Instead of Monroe�s celebrity instantly fading, the nude pictures propelled her career into mega stardom. Playboy became an instant success, selling more issues every month than any male oriented magazine in history. Though, what is interesting lies not within the nude pictures themselves, but within society�s voracious appetite for the nude pictures. This hunger for sex becomes the foundation work for the sexual revolution of 1950. As McLaren states, �Hefner, exploiting the pin-up genre popularized during the war, offered the bachelor readership an escape at home or in the penthouse via a fantasy of sexual consumerism. With a particular American earnestness, he produced a philosophy to dignify his undertakings. Critics regarded him as simply the producer of masturbatory pornography seeking, by a compulsive harping on the female form� (156). By emphasizing Monroe�s nakedness, Hefner re-sexualized a woman�s body (Playboy Dec. 1953). On the flip side, by re-sexualizing the female body, Hefner instituted the shift from viewing females as de-sexualized humans to objectified objects. While seemingly imbuing women with a sense of pride and power in their naked physique, Hefner unwittingly managed to subvert and entire culture of females by turning them into lust objects for the male gaze in an era of staunch sexlessness.
It is only in the 1960s, with the onset of the Sexual Revolution, do women begin to openly embrace their sexuality and appetite for sex (Stoehr 68). With, �the advent of the contraceptive pill at long last promised to make penetrative sex worry free� (McLaren 166). Birth control assisted in making sex a universal topic of discussion and women suddenly began to reclaim and operate their sexuality freely (Stoehr 95). Most importantly, �youth was, as ever, eager to distance itself from its elders but they were initially inspired by women and men � who had already been actively involved in the sex debate for decades� (McLaren 167). Although Kinsey�s reports previously generated talk on the subject of sex, the sexual revolution was what brought the counterculture of the 1960s to the forefront. �Free love� became one of the unofficial mottos of the Sexual Revolution (Stoehr 118). By practicing free love, men � and especially women � began to openly experiment with their sexuality (Stoehr 118-119). As McLaren states, �the baby-boomers � were able to give fee vent to their appetites for sex � Especially sex� (166). With sexual morality officially changing, women begin looking toward sources of information to appease their knowledge for sexual information.
Models soon become a way in which women�s sexualities are displayed. Skirts and low-cut, tightly fitted clothing were only the beginning of the sexual revolution�s hold on the fashion world. Mini-skirts and bikini�s encouraged women to bare their legs and arms. Using these new, scandalous and hugely popular clothing fads, for the first time, images revealed that women possessed hips and breasts. Loose flowing and empire-cinched dresses were created to highlight the curves of a woman�s body instead of covering them. Form fitting blouses and shirts stressed a woman�s waist and hips and the large, while colorful prints and patterns drew attention to the entire body. While the concept may sound foreign, compared to the staunch and sexless clothing models had previously been dressed in, the sexual revolution proved to be a tremendously liberating time for the fashion world � and popular culture. Combined with big hair and chunky accessories, women begin using their bodies as canvases in which they paint their personal style and sexuality. This woman became known as the Cosmo Girl (McLaren 166).
Moreover, by using celebrities and models on the cover and in the editorials, magazines like Cosmopolitan successfully managed to mingle and interconnect the glamorous Hollywood lifestyle with its pages of mainstream fashion. This synchronicity led to a whirlwind of young women suddenly clamoring to malls to purchase clothing and especially, makeup (Bazaar's Beauty Annual). Women everywhere were emulating the bold, dark lipstick used to accentuate the mouths of the models (Bazaar's Beauty Annual). To add, models begin to smirk, smile, and pout, emanating a playful and flirty vibe to the general public that makes their lifestyle � and subsequently, their fashion � seem attainable and desirable (Bazaar's Beauty Annual). Heavy eyeliner and mascara were combined to elongate the women�s eyelashes and give them an alluring, mysterious yet approachable appearance (Bazaar's Beauty Annual). Now, a woman�s face now becomes an important part of her sexuality, instead of just her body. By forcing attention to and on the face, magazines were able to subvert the notion that a sexy, sexual woman�s power laid strictly within the clothing she kept on � a notion that Playboy managed to spread for years.
In the end, the representation of women has been a tumultuous and eclectic one. Between being pushed into the workforce in the 1940s, back into the household in the 1950s, only to break free of sexless conservatism in the 1960s, imagery has been there to either capture of enforce every little detail. With Playboy and Kinsey�s Report creating a fracture in societal norms in the mid-1950s, women are suddenly seen as sexual objects by the male gaze, irradiating a culturally maintained image of the bland, happy, desexualized housewife. With the Sexual Revolution shaping the ways in which sex was discussed in America, images began portraying women as they truly were in society � sexual, beautiful and forever changing.
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