93 Comments
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Mark Scanlon's avatar

I followed your account as I saw this picture on Substack. To call it porn is nonsense it’s tasteful erotica to me - which is why I followed you.

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Douglas Drake's avatar

The puritan ism in North America gives an air of respect ability to the patriarchal power structure. Advertising firms use sex, or the hint of sex, to sell all manner of products. Yet the site of flesh, especially female, is offensive.

Thank you for your work.

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Chris Foreman's avatar

I love the photo. It conjures a story of the homemaker waiting for her hubby to get home. It’s her life, their lives. She has ideas, hopes. Maybe she wants to become pregnant or maybe just have a good time. Nothing pornographic. Just erotica.

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Levi Ouwendijk's avatar

Margaret needed a minute to think it over, and cycled back to the same conclusion—(with the vigor of outrage then slightly worn off).

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David Gosnell's avatar

1. Not porn, except in the mind or eyes of the beholder as viewed by them. Or as a supreme court justice remarked: I can't define it, but I know it when I see it.( oliver wendell holmes perhaps). If one looks at the window, there is no outside view. My grandparents had frosted glass in the bathroom windows and looked the same when the sun shined on them.

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Elliot's avatar

Justice Potter Stewart

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Gary Trujillo's avatar

if that photo offends you you're probably not as sophisticated as you think you are. touch some grass....read a fckn book... go to a museum. Jesus Christ.

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Burogracinha's avatar

Funny thing to think that someone could even get to the thought that all this curated, sensible, well written job could've been done by a male.

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Paul Prothero's avatar

I love what you’re doing; the photo in question is tasteful and beautiful, but I thought the same about the ones that are more explicit (whatever THAT means). Feel free to ignore the haters, though I’m sure they’ll block this ‘stack anyway.

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G Lega's avatar

Zzz I love it

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Tom Maier's avatar

Great photo! Very tasteful.

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M Sarki's avatar

We need more posts like this one. We’re trying but it isn’t easy. Can’t understand the revulsion to a beautiful woman’s naked body. Or the ideas that come into their heads.

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Waylon S Kohler's avatar

I see someone with 11 milkmen locked in the basement, and she’s trying for an even dozen.

I love these older photos. I imagine what things smell like, and what’s going on. Maybe the house smells like Pall Malls or her husband’s Phillies cigar from last night. She has to put a casserole in the oven, and she’s wondering when to start it. She’s waiting for Frank, but sees Helen and Mary driving by, probably to gossip about her at the bridge game that no longer invites her.

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Dom De Luca's avatar

I see a photo of a beautiful woman. It's a delight. 🙂

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Robert Phelps's avatar

I can’t see anything remotely pornographic about this. Slightly erotic maybe but I like erotica.

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Ayan Booyens's avatar

I just always feel <unkown> seeing young photos of old people. like the hair being so granny ish is such a stark contrast to the obvious youth of her body. like as a tubby near 40 year old on some level i might be envious of the youth that i no longer have whilst also being significantly younger than the woman in the photo. Like its a strange dichotomy and i don’t know which side of the young old binary to identify with if that makes any sense. Also is she this perfect stepford wife anxiously (dutifully?) waiting to surprise her husband or is she some kind of wild free and fun woman who’s behaviour would have made her a social outcast? Maybe we’re all just something in between

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Francesca Brzezicki's avatar

Love this. This is a totally half-baked thought, but I wonder if the popularity and strong reactions to this image are partially because it's a photo from the 1950s? In the popular imagination, we don't associate women in the 1950s (and of course, particularly white women) with being in pornography or being overtly sexual. I wonder if nostalgia for this ideal of the 1950s woman, contrasted with the nudity and expression of sexuality, creates cognitive dissonance?

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geoduck's avatar

I think an opposite reading is available. Women were indeed highly sexualized in that era; this woman could have been portrayed on the nose of a bomber, or on the wall of a mechanic's shop. She also appears to be at home, in broad daylight, waiting on somebody; being confined to a domestic cage is strongly associated with women of the 1950s, and I think it's reinforced by her sexualized pose and apparent availability.

As a minor detail her garter looks uncomfortably tight, like bondage gear. I think people might be picking up on this, consciously or otherwise.

(Full disclosure that my own initial reaction was a kind of dim-witted "huhuhuhuh", totally apart from any aesthetic or problematic aspects. People disapprove of that reaction, and anything that might provoke it!)

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