"I didn’t realize that my, that I was movin’, my body was movin’. It was a natural thing to me."
The Sweatermeat Boob Monsters versus the Cold War Ice Princesses…or, That Wonderful Decade of Dissociative Identity Disorder
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the winter of our discontent—or was it was summertime, and the living was easy? It was milk and cookies. It was the dawning of Playboy and Grease was the word. After the Second World War, America desperately attempted to turn back the clock to a kinder, gentler era. (Where’s Cher when you need her?) With the wave of a mighty magic conservative wand—Poof!—many found that in order to be counted as productive members of society, the sexual and cultural awakening they’d garnered by dint of courageous effort and bittersweet experience during the war years needs must be wrapped carefully in tissue paper, tied with a satin ribbon, and laid carefully back into the black hole of a time-warped wedding chest labeled denial.
While the post-WWII era in America eventually became synonymous with garish spectacles of conspicuous consumption culminating in a voracious appetite for block-long cars and fixations with mega-boobed vixens, ironically, less than a decade earlier, displays of material excess in the form of the singularly flamboyant nonconformist fashions that celebrated the raw passions of youth and were popularized by nonwhites and non-Americans were cause for anarchy. In 1940s Los Angeles, besotted by wholesale violence based on ethnic fear and loathing, white members of the U.S. military forces—chiefly marines and sailors—took to the streets, pounding and pummeling Latinos, Mexicans and blacks in a clothing-incited Krystalnacht that came to be known as the Zoot Suit Riots.
While the press and much of the public toed the “White is right” and “They had it coming” line, Eleanor Roosevelt called it like she saw it: The First Lady labeled the disgraceful conduct a “race riot.” Her views didn’t win her any points in the popularity polls, but they focused a spotlight on a weak point in the great divide that separated the races. The fashions that had touched off the pivotal incident were just the tip of an unseen iceberg.
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere, The ceremony of innocence is drowned, The best lack all conviction, while the worst, Are full of passionate intensity,” wrote William Butler Yeats in requiem to the first War to End all Wars, but the classic riff could have just as easily been written about the days following WWII. Sure, the view was 99.44 percent pure vanilla, and black & white was a color line that was rarely crossed—at least not without dangerous repercussions—but it was a façade, shiny and shallow, whose days were numbered. Locked away beneath the virtual chastity belts of white-cotton-panty virginity, the whispering susurration of crinolines against the flesh of yearning thighs and supple buttocks telegraphed covert, cryptic messages of desire that, soon, would gain enough momentum to topple the status quo.
While the post-WWII era in America eventually became synonymous with garish spectacles of conspicuous consumption culminating in a voracious appetite for block-long cars and fixations with mega-boobed vixens, ironically, less than a decade earlier, displays of material excess in the form of the singularly flamboyant nonconformist fashions that celebrated the raw passions of youth and were popularized by nonwhites and non-Americans were cause for anarchy. In 1940s Los Angeles, besotted by wholesale violence based on ethnic fear and loathing, white members of the U.S. military forces—chiefly marines and sailors—took to the streets, pounding and pummeling Latinos, Mexicans and blacks in a clothing-incited Krystalnacht that came to be known as the Zoot Suit Riots.
While the press and much of the public toed the “White is right” and “They had it coming” line, Eleanor Roosevelt called it like she saw it: The First Lady labeled the disgraceful conduct a “race riot.” Her views didn’t win her any points in the popularity polls, but they focused a spotlight on a weak point in the great divide that separated the races. The fashions that had touched off the pivotal incident were just the tip of an unseen iceberg.
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere, The ceremony of innocence is drowned, The best lack all conviction, while the worst, Are full of passionate intensity,” wrote William Butler Yeats in requiem to the first War to End all Wars, but the classic riff could have just as easily been written about the days following WWII. Sure, the view was 99.44 percent pure vanilla, and black & white was a color line that was rarely crossed—at least not without dangerous repercussions—but it was a façade, shiny and shallow, whose days were numbered. Locked away beneath the virtual chastity belts of white-cotton-panty virginity, the whispering susurration of crinolines against the flesh of yearning thighs and supple buttocks telegraphed covert, cryptic messages of desire that, soon, would gain enough momentum to topple the status quo.
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