Amazon eBay: The flapper’s hair was worn freely, and was thus attacked as a promiscuous affront to domesticity. The clothing that accompanied such a hairstyle, considered equally appalling, did not help matters much. For starters, there wasn’t much of it; the petticoat, along with the garter, waist, and corset, were tossed aside in favor of the short skirt and pair of sheer silk stockings -- both of which often showed quite a bit of the new woman’s leg. Yet it was her face that was perhaps the most shocking of all; much of the general population directly associated cosmetics with prostitution. Lipstick, rouge, and powder, combined with shortened skirts, bobbed hairdos, and “loose” morals, resulted in a complete upheaval of traditional notions of femininity. Maintaining such a scandalous appearance was not an easy task. It not only necessitated keeping abreast of the latest fashions and hairstyles, but the self-infliction of physical harm. A return to the psychological serves to shed further light on both the motivation for such an attitude and it’s ultimate effects. As illustrated earlier, the flapper was, in many respects, childlike. Wilhelm Stekel, in Patterns of Psychosexual Infantilism, describes infantile individuals as being - without exception - “passive sexual partners” who are “frigid and limp” during intercourse, “as though they were paralyzed.” Stekel also notes that the infantile, like a baby “in the arms of a nurse,” ultimately wants protection and thrives off a feeling of “inferiority.“27 Such an individual would seem the antithesis of the flapper; as illustrated above, the new woman was more in command of the sexual than ever before. The flapper, then, was a contradiction in terms; though “infantile,” her sexuality was by no means repressed. Such a fact was problematic not only on its face, with respect to a break with popular notions of femininity, but on a deeper level.

Tue Feb 9 04:48:19 2010