It's kind of scary to think back on old porn from the 60's and 70's were the people were just like average then you get to the 80's, the time of hypercapitalism, and suddenly everyone's all plastic.
The porn fairy of the woods used to leave out magazines for boob men and the implants some of those women had were ludicrous. Not to mention every guy was roided out.
Glad there's been a push in society to be accepting again of people and their body types. Even if porn today still falls into the same tropes of the 80's and 90's.
i remember my grandma showing me a film she liked from the sixties. it was a noir thing that included a scene in a seedy club. teenage me was astounded to see that the strippers were bigger than me. they had double hips and wide thighs and looked like people i'd seen in real life - and yet they were painted as desirable. i wasn't even larger than average, but i'd just never seen anyone that looked remotely like me in films/tv aside from as a joke.
the degree to which conventional beauty standards (despite often being considered objective) have changed is wild, and how much my reaction saddened my grandma is why i started trying to be nicer about myself. women like us have existed forever and always will
That’s been the beauty standard in Latin America for a very long time. We’ve managed to avoid the hyper-skinny look, at least Central America has.
It’s weird looking back at the early 2000s when Shakira in her “hips don’t lie” music video was one of the first examples of a curvy woman to really gain mainstream popularity.
It's not even just plastic, the type of gear a lot of guys get on to get bodies like The Rock is coming home to roost in terms of the damage it does to the body. There's this older sci-fi film called You Hunter from the Future released in '83, right at the tail end of what you're talking about. B-movie. Not worth watching unless you like so bad it's good stuff. But you can see in the promotional photos what was "big" and muscular looked like during that time:
Not to brag, but I have comparable measurements from about a decade of program lifting. I still have people regularly surprised I've been lifting as long as I have because I don't look like a professional wrestler. I look like Yor. Because I'm natty and mostly lifting for fun and health. And now I see teenagers getting on chemicals while their bodies are still developing because they want to look like what they see in Marvel films and it's really sad.
The Marvel movie note cannot be overstated. Just look at Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in The Wolverine (2013) vs X-Men (2000). Being yoked is the prerequisite for superheroes now
Jackman is especially interesting because when he had that body in The Wolverine, I remember reading articles about how he was happy he got into the 1,000 lbs Club while training for that film. It's powerlifting term for when your one rep max on your bench, squat and deadlift all add up to over 1,000 lbs. I remember that being my lifting goal when I read about that and when I hit it, I looked a lot more like X-Men Wolverine for sure haha It is surprisingly easy to hit the 1,000 lbs club and still look like a pretty normal guy.
Just goes to show how practical strength and Marvel looks don't always have a lot of overlap. Those lats, traps and low body fat do most of the work for The Wolverine Jackman, rather than the quads, posterior chain and chest that do most of the work on powerlifting moves.
Yeah, it's easy to see how these 17 year olds that love going to see the latest blockbuster with their buddies and then think that's what strong looks like and try to be Chris Hemsworth or something and when a half year or lifting doesn't give it to them, they start juicing or something.
It’s even infested amateur porn. Onlyfans now has everyday people pumping themselves with roids and plastic. It used to be the place you could look for more authentic porn that wasn’t made in a sketchy studio.
My area has a local toyshop like that, having an emphasis for women and the queer community. Being a bit of a kinkster is suddenly more safe and friendly once you excise the patriarchal elements prominent in so many shops. Hell, we had two, but some protesters were outside one that was basically for married vanilla couples. Same energy as Christians ignoring all the devil shit in Yu Gi Oh because they blew their load on Pokemon.
I don't mean to come off as disrespectful towards trans comrades, I'm just commenting on how fucked up it was at the time. If you think I'm being transphobic I'll delete the thread.
I don't think it's transphobic at all, but it does make me feel a little bad about the top surgery I'm going to be getting here in the next few months. I wasn't aware people weren't exactly welcoming of implants.
It's about how beauty standards in porn tend to err towards ridiculous over time and how it hurts sex worker's bodies and viewers self perceptions, not how plastic surgery is inherently bad. Plastic surgery is not bad and is in fact cool as hell.