Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture

The book is a really exciting, amazingly thorough history of the pin-up genre from the feminist point-of-view. Both as a feminist philosopher and model photographer I found it and extraorinarily useful. Of course, if you decide to read this book, you have to prepare yourself for a vast intellectual challenge. It is a complex weave of very different thoughts; the chapters are regulary cross-references so you have to keep many things is mind. It could have been made a bit even more enjoyable with two things. First of all, there are several dozens of pages at the end of the book -- at this quantity, these would have been much more useful as footnotes. Secondly, much more pictures would have been much better. Parargraph-long description of pin-up pictures would be unnecessary if the reader could see the pictures itself.

OK, technical this is a book of feminism, starting in the 19th Century and following the history all the way up to the 21st Century. What do Pin-Ups have to do with it? Well, Pin-Ups were created about the time women's rights started to become an issue. In other words Pin-Ups and suffrage developed side by side. And Pin-Ups became a mirror to reflect America's, and the world's, ideas and images of women. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, Pin-Ups became a way to measure how far women had come. Or how far they still had to go. Maria Elena Buszek has made a book that is a must for anybody interested in history, culture, or Pin-Ups.

For anyone who doubts what a study of pin-ups might have to offer, prepare to be convinced otherwise! Buszek has composed a rich analysis of her subject, which while full of original ideas on the topic never loses sight of the fact that it's a book about pin-ups, images created to titilate and delight. The author's subtlety in interpreting the history of the pin-up, which turns out to be much longer than we might have thought, enables her to extract a number of fascinating threads which connect the genre to contemporary feminist art. It is a compelling and novel approach on a fascinating, under-researched topic. Buszek leaves her reader with a deeper understanding of the pin-up as a genre and of the feminist movement overall. A must-read for anyone interested in either topic, not to mention pop culture in general.