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| Me, posing with one of the cars at Viva Las Vegas 18. Yes, those are vintage silver lame booty shorts. |
Over the course of the past few years, I've found myself getting more and more deeply entrenched in the Pin-up, Rockabilly and Vintage communities here in New York City - communities for whom a large part of life revolves around a fascination with the style, culture and music of of the past century. In the Rockabilly scene the focus is usually on the midcentury period - meaning 1940's, 1950's and 1960's. In the wider vintage community, the fascination generally extends as far back as the 1920's, but rarely farther than that.
However the fact remains that these time periods were certainly not known for being fantastic for women and women's rights, just as they were obviously an embattled time for people of color and the gay community. And pin-up culture certainly objectifies and sexualizes women in ways that can sometimes be extremely problematic. So how can I, as a modern, liberal, third-wave feminist (and Buddhist - more on that later!), participate in subcultures that glorify these time periods without getting mired in a vast conflict of interest?
This blog will explore that conflict, and additionally be a place for me to share my thoughts, as a modern, liberal, third-wave Buddhist-feminist, on topics that relate to pin-up, vintage, and rockabilly culture and lifestyle, third-wave feminism, Buddhism, and the ways that, for me, these seemingly disparate topics frequently intersect.
