lurkette

I don't remember when Playboy started, exactly, but I do know that when my mom was in gym class as a young teenager (so, early 60s) they did calisthenics to the chant "we must/we must/we must increase the bust/the bigger the better the tighter the sweater/the boys will stare at us." (Try getting away with that today!)

It hasn't always been this way (the big boob craze in culture). There was an interesting article about how cultural beauty norms for women have changed with ideas about how women should behave. Just looking at the 20th century, when women started getting more rights (entering the "man's world"), you had the flapper look that was very flat chested, slim-hipped, short-haired. In the 40s, when the men were at war and the women went to work, you had a very mannish look with big shoulder pads and wasp waists. When the men came back and women needed to be women again, you had the "breeder" hourglass figure with big boobs and big hips and a little bitty waist, very feminine. In the 60s, when the women's lib movement started, you went back to the skinny "Twiggy" look with smaller boobs and hips. And so it goes. The theory about the current beauty standards is that women are stuck in the middle - expected to inhabit both masculine (small hips and butt) and feminine (big boobs) cultural ideals - the supermom, the woman who has it all. It's an interesting theory. Funny though how no matter what the ideal it's always women's bodies that are getting pushed and pulled and molded into shapes that fit cultural ideals.

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"If ten million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."

- Anatole France