Sex Sells: Women in Photography and Film
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About this ebook
What is one thing the print media, stage, and screen have in common?
They all have, and still do, used sexual suggestion and the nude or scantily clad female body to sell their products.
From the birth of photography, the camera and other media have been used to capture the essence of men’s sexual fantasies. Women indecently dressed have been a constant source of fascination for men from the beginning of time, as witnessed by the wall paintings of Pompeii or in the Egyptian tombs. In capturing these images in relatively modern times, many interesting techniques have been used, from the bizarre to the elegant. Many of the early portraits have a sweet kind of innocence to them, despite the fact that the photographers and the models were blatantly breaking the law. Legendary photographers created works that are now considered masterpieces of the art but which were considered scandalous in their time.
In addition, many richly bawdy and fascinating characters have been displayed on film and stage in various stages of dress or undress. This book is about those images and those characters, and the people who created them.
You will not find descriptions or depictions of the actual sexual act in this book; it is the use of the body and sexual suggestion that I am interested in documenting,
and not the necessarily straight-forward, no-nonsense reality of the act itself.
Rhetta Akamatsu
Rhetta is a journalist and author who writes about social history, blues music and the paranormal. She also writes online about Atlanta historic places, steampunk, and business and technology. Yes, Rhetta has very diverse interests. She lives in Marietta with her husband and cat.
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Sex Sells - Rhetta Akamatsu
Part 6: A Word or Two about Censorship
Part 7: Sex Sells Today
Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
What is one thing the print media, stage, and screen have in common?
They all have, and still do, used sexual suggestion and the nude or scantily clad female body to sell their products.
From the birth of photography, the camera and other media have been used to capture the essence of men’s sexual fantasies. Women indecently dressed have been a constant source of fascination for men from the beginning of time, as witnessed by the wall paintings of Pompeii or in the Egyptian tombs. In capturing these images in relatively modern times, many interesting techniques have been used, from the bizarre to the elegant. Many of the early portraits have a sweet kind of innocence to them, despite the fact that the photographers and the models were blatantly breaking the law. Legendary photographers created works that are now considered masterpieces of the art but which were considered scandalous in their time.
In addition, many richly bawdy and fascinating characters have been displayed on film and stage in various stages of dress or undress. This book is about those images and those characters, and the people who created them.
You will not find descriptions or depictions of the actual sexual act in this book; it is the use of the body and sexual suggestion that I am interested in documenting,
and not the necessarily straight-forward, no-nonsense reality of the act itself.
Rhetta Akamatsu
June 2011
PART I: EARLY PHOTOGRAPHY
NAUGHTY PICTURES
From the beginning of recorded history, man has been fascinated with the female body. The great art of the world is full of nude or scantily clad females, often made less sensually explicit by religious or mythical contexts. With the beginning of photography in the mid 1800's, however, these religious and mythological themes no longer came between the viewer and the blatant sensuality of the women. Sometimes the photographers used props or copied the themes of artwork, but the knowledge that the women in the picture were real and chose to pose in little or no clothing was inescapable.
Steps were taken early to try and stop the flow of pornographic
or erotic
pictures. It was illegal to send them in the mail, and dangerous to pose for them. Most photographers tried to get around the laws in a number of ways. They positioned the models so that some body parts were always hidden. They often chose models who had a certain androgynous quality: small breasts or rather masculine features. They never portrayed males in the pictures with the females if the women were nude, or so much as suggested any relationship with a male other than a mildly flirtatious one in which the woman was the aggressor. Except
in the separate genre of male nude photography, which I will not cover here, men were never seen nude. Scenes ranged from the ever-popular dressing room to the wildly improbable nude romp through nature and every variation in between (including a whole realm of nude sports, such as fishing or bicycling.) The absence of males in the pictures, of course, backfired as censorship usually does, only heightening the appeal to the male viewer, who was free to picture himself in the scenes in any way he chose.
Another way of attempting to make the pictures more acceptable
was to present them in some exotic land or location, as an educational study of places where the women wore little or no clothing. The natives in many countries quickly discovered that the photographers would pay them to pose for them, and, since they had no moral restrictions to get in the way, saw no reason not to do so. Many a young man was suddenly intensely interested in magazines that centered on such cultural
studies.
Of course, for early photos to qualify as shocking and profoundly sexual in nature, it was not at all necessary for the women to be nude, or to be displaying anything more than a great deal of arm and leg or a fair amount of bosom. There are many amusing photos from the early 1900’s in which the ladies are seen in their underwear, which covers a great deal more than many of our street clothes today. Often, the ladies are wearing a wildly improbable mix of clothing, such as lingerie and a huge hat, or