{"id":26726,"date":"2010-08-24T10:08:57","date_gmt":"2010-08-24T15:08:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=26726"},"modified":"2013-12-05T04:02:58","modified_gmt":"2013-12-05T09:02:58","slug":"ankle-porn-and-knee-gasms-making-sewing-sexy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2010\/08\/24\/ankle-porn-and-knee-gasms-making-sewing-sexy\/","title":{"rendered":"Ankle Porn and Knee-gasms: Making Sewing Sexy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kate W. sent us a link to a discussion of historical portrayals of mending and darning (i.e., repairing clothes with a needle and a thread) by American Literature professor Kate Davies<\/a>.\u00a0 According to Davies, this image from 1904 is a postcard designed to titillate male viewers:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Davies writes:<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve found lots of these mildly racy, early twentieth-century images of mending, and it isn\u2019t that surprising. Associations between mending and s*x are conventional and familiar from centuries of genre painting and portraiture: a woman looking at the work in her lap gives a man an opportunity to look at her<\/em>; a female servant bent over her darning displays her hands or chest; an idle stitcher clearly has her mind on other things<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In another example, “Chicago\u2019s top models for 1922” display their ankles while ripping seams with Rip-Easy seam rippers:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If you’re not convinced, consider this example from 1907:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

These are neat examples of how what is sexy, who is sexy, and what can be sexualized changes over time.<\/p>\n

See Prof. Davies’ entire post at her blog, Neeedled<\/a>.<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kate W. sent us a link to a discussion of historical portrayals of mending and darning (i.e., repairing clothes with a needle and a thread) by American Literature professor Kate Davies.\u00a0 According to Davies, this image from 1904 is a postcard designed to titillate male viewers: Davies writes: I\u2019ve found lots of these mildly racy, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[218,225,55,2103,2102,253,23703,1047],"class_list":["post-26726","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bodies","tag-clothesfashion","tag-gender","tag-gender-bodies","tag-gender-history","tag-history","tag-marketing","tag-pornography"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26726"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59815,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26726\/revisions\/59815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}