Oh Betty! More on Nostalgia: Betty Brosmer

In a related query to my earlier I Choose Nostalgia post, I present you this:

I thought women could only look like this in cartoons

 Who is this iconic figure with the dazzling figure?
This is none other than the "original" super model Betty Brosmer.

My eighty year old father tells me things were oh so much better back in his days. He says a kid like me would have gotten out of high school knowing how to work with his hands (because of woodshop, welding classes and what not) and could have found a decent job at a factory. I like to believe him sometimes.

But my father is no doubt guilty of seeing the past through the lenses of today. I tell him things were just as bad for poor people and just as good for rich people. My father tells me to not say such silly things. Despite the obvious shortcomings of the past (you know, that thing about if you weren't white you were sort of missing out on a lot of things), his past and all of our collective idea of the past, there is some truth regarding the state of American manufacturing and the consequent role of American education. My father tells me the women were also something else; I can't argue with him after seeing these pics (see http://www.bettybrosmer.com for more)

I now know where those old cartoons I watched as a kid (Loony Tunes anybody?) got their inspiration for how an alluring women should look like. That hourglass figure, those hips, the tiny waist.

It's not easy to fend off nostalgia. This may be a bad thing. Trying to claw our way back to time that may or may have never been seems like a silly way to spend our energy. When I hear politicians say that they want to make America like it once was, I sense their non-speak, but I am not too dismisivve of the emotion that underpins such nonsense. I get it, now that I am getting older.

Nostalgia is a quick way our minds can reassure us. It doesn't take too much rational thinking, you just have to believe a common consensus and have some vague idea of what this is--the gaps, which there will always be, are filled in by your special brand of desire and dreams and wishes. Nostalgia makes it so that the whole can be reduced to a single benefital part. It works so easily and we apply it so often because much of our thought processes function in this "down to the basics" style.

Take Betty. How many women are born with a body like that? Is she representative of the way women looked like circa 1950's? How many people even bother to think that the photo shoots back then no doubt were just as intrusive and mechanical as they are today, that being a super model was just as sterile and entrapping as it is today. But don't think about this, oh please don't. Just look at her 381/4 - 181/2 - 351/4 figure!