Our conceptions of beauty in the west have changed throughout our history. The changes have been driven by many social and cultural parameters, but in great part, they've been ushered by the greater autonomy that women have achieved, particularly when it comes to their sexuality.
Sex is a hot topic. There is no end to those who want to control sex for their own purposes by restricting the what, when, how, where, and why of it. Usually these are men, but there are plenty of women too who love nothing better than to control sexual behavior and expression.
In North America, the changes in sexual mores have been partly accelerated by mass media. Every teenage boy of the 20th century knew about the luscious pages of fashion magazines or the abstract thrills of Picasso porn. It has even been observed that women's skirts rose or declined based on the ups and downs of the financial markets (though I cannot provide a source for this intriguing observation). Without question, one of the most enduring symbols of female sexuality was Marilyn Monroe. Here was the female in control of reproductive units, titillating her audience with naughty innuendos and creamy skin. Some conservative prudes and some humorless liberals disapproved of this suddenly libertarian attitude towards sex, in which sensual power was concentrated in the individual and not their favorite bureaucracy. How dare a woman used her sensuality to create her own reality? This was an outrage! It was a losing battle. For good or ill, Marlyn and her flower-scented body won the day and heralded an era of sexual liberation unlike any thing we had seen up to date in North America.
One of the most famous scenes, and perhaps the defining scene of her career, took place in one of her films that was provocatively called The Seven Year Itch. In this scene, Marilyn is walking by an air vent wearing a dress, when suddenly she stands over it and lets the air blow up her dress, and the minds of every male with eyes glued to the screen.
In an era when porn and pseudo-porn is easily available at our fingertips, Marilyn playful hijinks don't seem that big of a deal, but back then near the middle of the twentieth century, this film raised more than a few eyebrows. Deconstructing this particular scene, one sees the female in charge. Her male companion didn't force her do it, she stood over that vent of her own accord, knowing full well the effect it would have on him while at the same time daring him to react. What did he do? Did he lose his marbles and told her to get back in the kitchen? No he didn't. He put his hands in his pockets and enjoyed the show.
I tried to recreate the scene using Stable Diffusion, and I got a lot of bizarre creations. Most of them I didn't like because they were distorted or did not truly capture her beauty.
I used both text to image prompts and then updated the output using the image to image of function in SD to remove some artifacts. I hope you enjoyed the show.
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