Uncle Ruckus on Tiger Woods

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Linda Harrison

Linda Harrison (1945- ) is an American actress. She is world-famous, though not by name, for one part in one film where she spoke no lines at all: she played Nova, Charlton Heston’s girlfriend in “Planet of the Apes” (1968). She was also in “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” (1970) where she said just one word: “Taylor!”, the name of Heston’s character.

I think she is one of the most beautiful white women ever. I was reminded of her when I was on Zaius Nation the other day.

She grew up in Berlin, Maryland on the Delmarva Peninsula. In the early 1960s she won a string of beauty contests in Maryland, becoming Miss Maryland in 1965 – and coming close to winning Miss USA.

In 1965 she came to New York to become a model and maybe an actress. She did a screen test for 20th Century Fox and landed a seven-year contract!

In 1966 she played a cheerleader twice on the television show “Batman” and was in a Jerry Lewis film, “Way… Way Out”.

In 1967 she was in “A Guide for the Married Man”: she appears for five minutes with blonde hair but says no lines. She also became the first woman ever to play Wonder Woman for television (the show failed).

In 1968 she was in “Planet of the Apes”. Again no lines, but this time there was a good reason: her character lives in a world where apes talk and humans do not!

About playing Nova she says:

I felt very intuitive that my particular personality and nature were like Nova. Automatically, I’d say that’s about 80% of the part. The director, the producer and the writer talked with me about her, and they described her as “sub-human.” We hadn’t really had an actress play “sub-human” before. Nova’s not like Raquel Welch’s character in “One Million Years B.C.” (1966). She was more primitive because of the apes’ suppression. We played it by ear and experimented. It was really a moment-to-moment thing.

The trope is Nubile Savage, kissing cousin of the Jungle Princess.

In 1969 she played a regular character on the television show “Bracken’s World”, which was cancelled in the second season. About this time she made the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine and became friends with editor Helen Gurley Brown.

Also in 1969 she married Richard Zanuck, a producer whose father ran Fox. After “Bracken’s World” Harrison dropped out of sight to become a mother to two sons, Harrison and Dean. She divorced in 1978.

She later appeared in some other films, like “Airport 1975″ (1974) and “Cocoon” (1985), but nothing to top Nova.

She almost played Roy Scheider’s wife in “Jaws” (1975). Her husband produced “Jaws” and wanted her for the part, but unfortunately he was overruled by the head of Universal who put in his own wife instead.

Harrison appeared briefly in Tim Burton’s 2001 remake of “Planet of the Apes” as Woman In Cart.

These days you can still see her at science fiction conventions!

See also:

• Zaius Nation
• TV Tropes: Nubile Savage
  
• The most beautiful white women
• Lela Rochon
• Megan Fox
• Naomi Sims

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Megan Fox

Megan Fox (1986- ) is an American actress. She is best known for playing the female lead in “Transformers” (2007), a part she will play again in “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”, which comes out on June 24th 2009. She also played Sydney Shanowski on the television show “Hope & Faith” from 2004 to 2006.

Her hotness: If Google Images is anything to go by, she is one of the hottest girls on the planet right now in 2009 along with Vida Guerra, Tera Patrick and Beyonce. In 2008 she topped FHM Online’s list of the world’s sexiest women, pushing aside Jessica Alba. (Fox herself was pushed aside in 2009 by British singer Cheryl Cole.) Maxim had her at #16 in 2008.

Her  beauty: She has black hair against white skin, blue eyes and high cheekbones. Her eyes are a light blue and sometimes they look washed out and strange, almost not human, but at other times it is like they go right through you like an electric current. She also does not seem like an airhead, like maybe she is capable of deep thought and feeling. I vastly prefer her to the yellow-haired brainless beauties that Hollywood keeps pushing at us.

She is 5 foot 6 (1.67 m) and 114 pounds (52 kg). Her measurements are 34C-26- 34 (86-66-86 cm), giving her a waist-to-hip ratio of  0.77.  Very thin.

I would not go to see a film just because she is in it, but it would be in its favour: “Oh good, Megan Fox”. Meaning: if it turns out to be a bad film I can ride it out by just looking at her. She is a passable actress who makes up for it on looks. Like Jessica Alba.

What is not natural:

• The bridge of her nose was straightened out in 2007;
• Her breasts are much larger than they used to be;
• Her lips are fuller than they used to be.

Tattoos:

• right arm: Marilyn Monroe’s face
• upper thigh: pink flamingo
• back: “We will all laugh at gilded butterflies” (from Shakespeare, “King Lear”, v.iii)
• left side: “There once was a little girl who never knew love until a boy broke her HEART”

She has at least five others.

Born in Tennessee, near Oak Ridge, she is a mix of American Indian (Cherokee), French and dark Irish. She said that growing up she was something of a tomboy and a dork: she loved comic books, video games and “Lord of the Rings”.

At age five she started taking acting and dancing lessons. When she was ten her family moved to St Petersburg, Florida. At 16 she got into modelling and won awards. From there she got into acting. The first film she appeared in was one by the Olsen twins, “Holiday in the Sun” (2001).

She has been going with Brian Austin Green since 2004. Green played David Silver on “Beverly Hills, 90210” in the 1990s. He is 13 years older than her. They hope to marry in 2010.

Fox is her family name, not  just a stage name. Her grandfather wrote it as “Foxx”. No relation of Redd or Jamie (for whom Foxx is just a stage name).

See also:

• The best-looking white chicks
• Maxim magazine
• WHR: waist-to-hip ratio
• Vida Guerra
• Beyonce

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Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962), the stage name of Norma Jeane Baker, was an American beauty and Hollywood actress. She appeared in the first issue of Playboy magazine and in dozens of largely forgettable films in the 1950s. What she is most remembered for is her beauty and a life cut short.

The best-selling song of the 1900s was written by Elton John about her: “Candle in the Wind”. Andy Warhol’s most famous painting is of her. She is far more famous now than she ever was in life.

Her best-remembered films are “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953) and “Some Like it Hot” (1959). She wanted to be a serious actress, not just a blonde beauty. She modelled herself on Jean Harlow and Lana Turner.

The daughter of a Hollywood film cutter, she grew up in Los Angeles never knowing her father and barely seeing her mother, who was in a rest home. In 1942 she married at age 16. Two years later her husband went off to war. While he was gone, she worked at a parachute factory and started modelling.

In 1946 she signed with Twentieth Century Fox as an actress, making $125 (150 crowns) a week. She coloured her hair, took the stage name of Marilyn Monroe and divorced her husband. “Monroe” was her grandmother’s name.

On May 27th 1949, short on money, she posed naked for some pictures for Tom Kelley for $50 (70 crowns). Four years later in 1953 those same pictures would appear across the country in the first issue of Playboy magazine. It made her famous.

She was different than most Hollywood beauties that came before her. In the 1940s they tended to be thin with dark hair and great legs. But Monroe had light hair (coloured, not natural), large breasts and an hourglass figure. She acted innocent and brainless, not worldly.

She shaped white American ideas of beauty and its effects can still be seen today more than 50 years later. The hourglass figure is out, but the blonde hair and large breasts are still in. Madonna in the 1980s and Anna Nicole Smith in the 1990s both modelled their look directly on hers.

Monroe was briefly married to baseball great Joe DiMaggio in 1954. Then she went to New York to study acting and there she had an affair with writer Arthur Miller. They were married from 1956 to 1961. He wrote “The Misfits” (1961), the last film she appeared in. He wrote her part especially for her.

Some say she slept with President John Kennedy in 1961 and maybe his brother Robert Kennedy. She certainly knew them.

She was found dead on August 5th 1962 at age 36 of a drug overdose. The police called it a “probable suicide”, but some suspect murder, perhaps at the hands of the Kennedys. The police said “probable” not because they thought it might be murder but because it is unclear if she meant to kill herself.

Her body is in a crypt in Los Angeles. Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy, owns the place next to hers.

In 1986 feminist Gloria Steinem wrote a book about her life.

See also:

• Hollywood
• white beauty: a brief history
• Playboy
• film
• Elizabeth Taylor
• Dorothy Dandridge
• Anna Nicole Smith

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Cindy McCain

Cindy Lou McCain (1954- ) is the wife of John McCain, the American senator from Arizona who is running for president in 2008.

John McCain met her in 1979 at a party in Hawaii. He was 42 and married, she was 24 and the daughter of one of the richest men in Arizona. They had an affair. A year later he left his wife: “he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona”, as Ross Perot put it. Cindy used her fortune – she is worth about $100 million (8 million crowns) – to help John run for Congress.

Her father was the country’s third largest beer distributor for Anheuser-Busch. Cindy McCain is now the head of his company, Hensley & Co, employing about 650 people. She does not run the company day-to-day, leaving that to others.

She keeps her money separate from her husband’s. She is far richer than he is.

In addition to beer, she founded the American Voluntary Medical Team (AVMT) in 1988, which helps to get doctors, nurses and medicine to parts of the world struck by war and disaster, places like Bangladesh and Vietnam.

Although AVMT came to an end in 1995, she still continues doing that sort of work, frequently going overseas to see how her money is spent to help the poor and the suffering.

She sits on the board of CARE.

Her children:

• 1984: Meghan, news reporter
• 1986: Jack, in the Navy
• 1988: Jimmy, in the Marines
• 1991: Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh

In the 2000 election John McCain’s enemies spread a lie that he had Bridget by a black woman out of wedlock.

Cindy McCain’s sufferings:

• 1980s: several miscarriages
• 1989: slipped disc (twice)
• 1989: became hooked on the painkillers Percocet and Vicodin
• 1993: hysterectomy
• 2004: stroke, short-term memory loss
• 2000s: carpal tunnel syndrome

She suffered back pains from at least 1989 to 1993. That was when she became hooked on painkillers. She got a doctor who worked for her as part of the AVMT to prescribe them.

In 1993 Tom Gosinski, who also worked for the AVMT, told the government about what was going on. That brought the DEA down on her. If it was one of us, we would be in prison.

A year before Gosinski wrote this in his journal:

In reality, I am working for a very sad, lonely woman whose marriage of convenience to a U.S. Senator has driven her to: distance herself from friends; cover feelings of despair with drugs; and replace lonely moments with self-indulgences.

That same year John McCain called her a “cunt” in public: she said his hair was getting thin and he said, “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.”

She lives in Arizona, seeing her husband mainly on weekends.

When she was younger she worked with children with Down syndrome, like what Sarah Palin’s youngest child has.

In the 2008 election she informed us:

I have and always will be proud of my country.

This was in answer to Michelle Obama’s comment about being really proud of America for the first time in her adult life.

See also:

• Cindy McCain: always proud of her country
• John McCain
• 2008 election
• Michelle Obama
  • In defence of Michelle Obama
  • James Baldwin on deluded white people
• white patriotism

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Caroline Kennedy

Caroline Kennedy (1957- ) is the daughter of President John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy Onassis. When her brother John died in a plane crash in 1999, she became their only living child, the last child of Camelot.  Senator Ted Kennedy is her uncle, Maria Shriver is her cousin.

In January 2008 she came out in support of Barack Obama, saying that he would be a president like her father. She became part of the committee to choose a vice president for Obama. She said that Joe Biden was by far the best choice. Obama has faith in her wisdom.

Up until then she led a largely private life, avoiding the public eye, bringing up her three children. But now with her mother and brother gone and her children almost grown – the youngest is 15 – some say she is entering a new stage in her life. She does have that Kennedy thing of wanting to make the world a better place and a deep respect for civic courage.

There was even talk that maybe Obama should choose her as a vice president. She certainly has the name but not the experience. She could certainly become a senator if she wanted to and so maybe even president in time.

In 2004 she did campaign for John Kerry but she did not come out in support for him till after the party convention.

She was a Hillary Clinton supporter, giving her money in 2006 and 2007, but by September 2007 she was giving money to Obama instead. It was her children who got her to take a serious look at Obama.

Neil Diamond came up with the song “Sweet Caroline” (1969) after seeing a picture of Caroline on her pony, Macaroni, which she brought to the White House.

Her father was shot dead five days before her sixth birthday. A year later her mother moved the family to New York where she grew up at 1040 Fifth Avenue, just a block from the Metropolitan Museum of Art – where she would one day work and meet her future husband. She studied at Harvard and got her law degree at Columbia.

In 1986 she married Edwin Schlossberg but kept her last name. Schlossberg is an artist and display designer. They have three children:

• 1988: Rose
• 1990: Tatiana
• 1993: John, named after her father

She wrote two books with Ellen Alderman, a schoolmate from Columbia:

• 1990: In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights
• 1995: The Right to Privacy

Both explain the law to the general public. She has also edited some books, something her mother used to do when she was growing up.

She is the head of the Kennedy Library in Boston and takes part in the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

She helped to raise $350 million for public schools in New York.

She owns the Red Gate Farm on Martha’s Vineyard, something she got from her mother.

She has lived most of her life in New York and still does, on Park Avenue.

See also:

• Bobby Kennedy – uncle
  
• Maria Shriver – cousin
• New York
  • 1040 Fifth Avenue: Where Jackie O. lived – where she grew up
• Barack Obama
• Caroline Kennedy: A President Like My Father

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Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin (1964- ) is the governor of the state of Alaska and John McCain’s pick for Republican vice president for 2008. She is part of the Christian right and once supported Pat Buchanan on the far right.

McCain’s choice was so surprising that some wonder about his judgement. It seems like a cheap, desperate move. It is either that or a bold and brave master stroke. Only time will tell.

The choice is not quite as desperate as it might seem at first sight. Of all the Republican governors she is the most beloved by her citizens: she cuts taxes and cleans up government. She stands up to the bad apples even in her own party and gets them kicked out.

She has courage and faith in God. Instead of working all the angles and playing the game, like a Hillary Clinton, she looks at it this way:

I believe everything happens for a purpose. In my own personal life, if I dedicated back to my Creator what I’m trying to create for the good . . . everything will turn out fine.

Like most Republican voters she is a regular church-going Christian who believs in old-time Christian morals. She is a Pentecostal Christian (Assemblies of God) who is against same-sex marriage and abortion. She has said  creationism should be taught in schools.

If the 2008 election comes down to voter turn-out, as it looks like it will, then McCain needs a vice president that the Christian right can go wild for.

Palin’s main drawback is her lack of experience. She has even less of it than Obama. Which seems to destroy McCain’s main argument against him.

She grew up in Alaska hunting moose with her father and used to work with her husband in his fishing boat. As a hunter she is a strong supporter of gun rights.

Her husband has worked for BP, one of the three big oil companies in Alaska. She is for pumping all the oil out of ANWR, the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, a vast untouched piece of wilderness in Alaska.

She has five children:

• 1989: Track, joined the army on September 11th 2007. He will soon be in Iraq.
• 1990: Bristol, pregnant but intends to marry the father.
• 1995: Willow, a girl
• 2001: Piper Indy, a girl
• 2008: Trig, a boy. When Palin was four-months pregnant she knew he would be born with Down syndrome.

The daughter of schoolteachers, she is from Wasilla, a town north of Anchorage:

• In high school she led its basketball team to state-wide victory, getting the name Sarah Barracuda.
• In 1984 she was crowned the town’s beauty queen, and almost became Miss Alaska (she came in second).
• In 1996 she became its mayor.

After her two terms as mayor, ending in 2002, she went on to become the state’s regulator of the oil and gas industry and then, in December 2006, the governor, defeating men with bigger names and bigger money.

Of past presidents she seems most like Harry Truman.

See also:

• John McCain
• Republican
• political left and right
• 2008 election
• Barack Obama
• Joe Biden
• Hillary Clinton
  • Why I hate Hillary Clinton

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The eyes of black women and white women

Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical. – Sophia Loren

I like black women way more than white women. For a long time – like till last Saturday – I thought it was because they have better bodies. They do, in general, but more important than that are their eyes. At least among American women.

Sometimes when I look into the eyes of a black woman and she looks back something inside me melts. It is an experience that I have had with black women over and over again, like just this morning. I wound up marrying one, one of those black women with the eyes that make me melt.

These days, now that I am married, I look away: no good can come of it. But even when I look away her face is burned into my mind. I cannot stop thinking about her. If she is sitting across from me on the subway train, it takes everything in me not to look back at her again. I try to read my book but I keep reading the same words over and over because they no longer make sense. My mind becomes a thousand knots.

But with white American women this sort of thing is rare – even with those who seem to like me. I can only remember one time, though there may be others that I forget. It is nowhere near as common as with black women.

With black women it is like their eyes go all the way down to their souls, down to their hearts. Not all of them, but some of them, enough of them. I know that may surprise those who think black women are hard as nails, the Sapphire stereotype.

With white women their eyes do not seem to go so deep, it seems to stop somewhere just behind their eyes. Sometimes their eyes even look empty, soulless.

I do not think it was always like that with white women, not at least if you go by Hollywood films. Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn in the 1950s all had beautiful, amazing eyes. I could look at them forever.

But these days most white actresses in Hollywood either have this empty look in their eyes, like Lindsay Lohan, or this brightness to them that does not seem to run very deep, like the Olsen twins – they have beautiful eyes but there does not seem to be much behind them. Almost like doll eyes.

The eyes of white women have grown cold of any true feeling – not all of them, of course, but too many of them. That is how it seems. Like their smiles, the look in their eyes does not seem to be in touch with their hearts.

In old books you read about white men falling in love with white women when their eyes meet: time stands still and all that. That is the sort of thing I am talking about. Do white men still fall in love that way? Or, for that matter, does anyone?

See also:

• white beauty: a brief history
• race and beauty
  • race and beauty for me
• How a man looks at a woman
  • On the C train
  • Getting off the W train at 42nd Street
• Sex clouds my mind
• white women
  • Elizabeth Taylor
  • Sophia Loren
• black women
  • The Sapphire stereotype
  • black women are beautiful
• politically correct beauty

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Race and beauty for me

In general I like women in this order in terms of physical beauty:

1. Black
2. Latin American
3. South Asian
4. East Asian
5. Polynesian
6. White

I determined this by looking at pictures of models at modelcoast.com. The models are mostly Americans in their 20s, but they each say whether they are black, white or whatever.

I am only talking in general. There are white women, for example, who are better looking than most black women. And so on.

Some things I learned from this exercise:

• I like black women way more than other women. It is not even close. I like them twice as much as Latin women and seven times more than white women. It is that sharp of a difference.
• The thing that I like most in black women is not what I thought: black hair, high cheekbones and their figure. It is, in fact, their eyes. I have no idea what it is, but there is just something about their eyes that gets to me, that makes all the difference. It could be how the eyes look, it could be some inner quality that shows through them. Since no one talks about the eyes of black women, unlike their hair and their figure, it is hard to know what that something is. That will be for another post. Now I know why I hate it when black women wear sunglasses.
• After eyes, figure matters the most: thick thighs and a big bottom or at least an hourglass figure. No figure at all, like most thin women have, just does not do it for me. That is why Latin women did so much better than white women: they have better figures, more of a black woman’s body. In general.
• Next comes skin colour. It does not have to be dark, but it has to be at least light brown, maybe olive is enough. Something. Pale skin, like the English and Japanese have, just does not do it for me. That is why South Asian women did so well.
• As much as I love thick lips and high cheekbones, they are not enough by themselves. That is why Polynesian women did not do as well as I thought they would – second to last!
• In hair thickness matters most, darkness second. Length matters but only in that it makes hair seem thicker. Short and thick is better than long and thin.

What I do not like in the white idea of beauty that the American film and fashion industry push:

• The eyes to the degree that they are round and empty looking
• Being so thin they lose their figure
• Paleness of skin

Empty might be the wrong word for the eyes, but there is something like that about the eyes.

I do not know where all this comes from. Certainly not from American society. It seems to be inborn. When I watch an old show on television that I last saw when I was 13, I find myself liking the very same women for the very same reasons.

See also:

• race and beauty
• politically correct beauty
• Black women are beautiful
• The eyes of black women and white women
• How a man looks at a woman

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The pure white woman stereotype

The pure white woman stereotype was a picture that white Americans had in their heads about white women. It pictured them as being pure in terms of both sex and race. It was the main excuse given for Jim Crow, the laws and customs that kept down black people for a hundred years after they were freed as slaves.

Even today the stereotype lives on in a weakened form, making white Americans uncomfortable when they see a black man with a white woman.

The pure white woman determined how whites looked at blacks. If white women were pure, then black men were the threat. Thus the black brute stereotype, which saw black men as savages. And if white women were pure, then black women were not. Thus the Jezebel stereotype, which saw black women as easy and loose.

This picture of white women had such force that a black man could be killed just for being too friendly with a white woman. Thus the lynchings, where black men hung dead from trees.

At the heart of all this was the raw fear in the hearts of white men that black men would take all of “their” women – meaning the white women. They thought black men were better at pleasing women in bed. So they had to be stopped.

They were stopped in three ways:

1. White men kept the races apart with Jim Crow laws, laws backed up by lynchings.
2. White men made sure that most black men were kept poor, making them undesirable to white women as husbands.
3. The One Drop Rule meant that any children a white woman had by a black man would be black too.

Black men were kept from white women, but white men continued to rape black women without consequence.

So, in the name of keeping white women pure, to keep them up on that pedestal, blacks were kept down.

But white women were kept in their place too, even if it was up on a pedestal somewhere closer to the angels.

The American magazines and religious books of the 1800s told white women that to be good and pure they should leave the dirty business of running the world to their husbands. So no need to vote. They were told that making beds was much better for them than reading books, which would only fill their heads with the wrong ideas. And so on.

The Jim Crow laws came down in the 1950s and 1960s. By 1967 black men could marry white women anywhere in the country.

But even now some white people are still not comfortable seeing a black man with a white woman. White women are still held up as more beautiful than anyone and more morally upright, despite “Girls Gone Wild” and other things. And when a white woman is missing it can be on the news for days and days, while missing black women never seem to make the news for some reason.

See also:

• stereotype
• Race in America
• white women
• Jim Crow
• The black brute stereotype
• The Jezebel stereotype
• One Drop Rule
• The Missing White Woman Syndrome

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white beauty: a brief history

White ideas of female beauty have had a strange history over the past hundred years, at least in North America.

Speaking in general, here is what white people in North America in 2008 seem to think is beautiful in a woman (and when each element seemed to take root):

• long hair that is yellow, almost white (1950s)
• blue, empty eyes (2000s)
• a thin body even to the point of being stick thin and not having much of female figure (1970s)
• large breasts (1950s) – even on a thin body (1990s), but not for fashion models (1960s)
• white, tanned skin (1950s)

This look is now everywhere, yet it is new. God – or Evolution – did not wire it into the brains of white people. You do not see it in the Italian paintings of the 1400s. You do not see it in the old American films of the 1940s. It is as strange, in its way, as Chinese foot binding or African lip plates.

Yet because of the powerful position that white North Americans have in world fashion, film and television it affects everyone. So black men in North America and the Caribbean prefer light-skinned women, while the Chinese increasingly prefer thin women.

Looking back there are five women who stand as signposts along the way to this idea of beauty:

1953: Marilyn Monroe

Before Marilyn Monroe the beauties of Hollywood tended to be thin with dark hair and beautiful legs. After her they become increasing light-haired with large breasts and an hourglass figure. Monroe appeared in the first issue of Playboy. In the 1950s and 1960s Playboy only showed naked breasts for the most part. That helped to make breasts, especially large ones, the thing that white men desired most.

1967: Twiggy

She was stick thin and had no female figure to speak of. White people of the time were shocked, but Vogue loved her look and so did fashion designers: she was a walking coat hanger. Thin became in and by the 1970s anorexia began to appear among girls in increasing numbers.

1979: Bo Derek

She starred in the film “10” where a middle-aged man pursues her as the perfect beauty. What makes this surprising is how thin she was for the time. It marked the death of the hourglass figure.

1992: Anna Nicole Smith

When one of the richest men in Texas fell in love with her she could become anything money could buy. And she did: she made her hair yellow and her breasts huge. They were out of proportion to her body but her breasts-on-a-stick look would become so common that it no longer looked strange.

2004: Lindsay Lohan

Lindsay Lohan has the makings of a true beauty, but it is undermined by her empty eyes: there does not seem to be anything serious behind them. That has become common now. It used to be that a woman’s eyes were the most beautiful thing about her. Look at Botticelli’s paintings or Elizabeth Taylor. Not any more.

See also:

• anorexia
• WHR: waist to hip ratio
• white women
  • Twiggy
  • Anna Nicole Smith
  • Elizabeth Taylor
  • Simonetta Vespucci
• Hollywood
• Barbie
• Playboy
• The most beautiful white women
  
• race and beauty
  • politically correct beauty

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Twiggy

Twiggy (1949- ) was a British supermodel famous in the 1960s. Back then she seemed shockingly thin and boy-like, even to white people, but now most high fashion models are like that. Current ideas of thin as beautiful start with her.

Marshall McLuhan said, “Twiggy is an X-ray, not a picture.”

Diana Vreeland, the head of Vogue magazine in the 1960s said she was perfect: “the straightest legs, knees like little peaches, tiny narrow supple feet, rounded arms, and beautiful wrists and throat. She was both modern and romantic.”

When asked about her figure Twiggy said, “It’s not really what you call a figure, is it?”

But what mattered most was not what McLuhan, Twiggy or even Vreeland thought, but what the fashion designers thought. They loved her figure, or the lack of it: she made their clothes look so wonderful.

Her height was 1.69 metres (5 foot 6.5 inches), her weight, 41 kg (90 pounds) and her measurements, 81-58-81 cm (32AA-23-32). She barely had any breasts. She was anorexic-thin without being anorexic: she ate like a horse.

Growing up, Twiggy hated her figure: “You were supposed to look like Brenda Lee, very curvy and round, pointed breasts and pointed-toe shoes,” she said. She only started to like her figure once it made her rich and famous.

She was so thin that the other children called her “Twigs”. No matter how much she ate she did not gain much weight. Her mother took her to the doctor to see what was wrong. Nothing was wrong: it was just the way she was.

Born Lesley Hornby, she grew up in north London. By age 15 she had dropped out of school and worked for a hairdresser. Against her mother’s wishes she took up with a man ten years older than her, Nigel Davies.

But Davies was no ordinary man: against all common sense of the time, he thought she could become a model. He had her hair cut short and put her picture in shop windows. Her look caught on. By 1966 the Daily Express called her “The Face of 66”. In 1967 she came to America and was famous overnight.

She spoke English not in the RP of the Queen and the rich, but in the Cockney of the ordinary people of London. She wore the new mod fashions of Mary Quant, who wanted to bring high fashion to the masses.

In 1970 Twiggy left modelling to sing and act. Most of her stuff is forgettable, but she was good in “My One and Only” with Tommy Tune on Broadway in the 1980s and in the film “The Boy Friend” (1971). One of her songs reached number 1 in Japan and another reached number 35 in Britain in 1977.

In the 2000s she was a judge on Tyra Banks’s television show “America’s Next Top Model”. She also modelled for Marks & Spencer, the British department store.

See also:

• fashion model
• anorexia
• WHR: waist to hip ratio
• white women
• McLuhan
• white beauty: a brief history
• Tyra Banks
• RP

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Kim Kardashian

Kim Kardashian (1980- ) is a rich party girl from Los Angeles, California. Till 2007 she was mainly known as a friend of Paris Hilton, but then a sex video of her and her boyfriend, the singer Ray J, made the rounds on the Internet. After that she made the cover of Complex, King, Playboy and other magazines.

According to this blog she is the fifth most beautiful woman in the world. She has big, beautiful eyes, a beautiful face, long, thick black hair and a great figure. Her measurements are 35D-26-40 (89-66-102 cm). She is 5 foot 3 (1.60 metres).

When Paris Hilton was asked if she wanted a big bottom like Kardashian, she said, “.. it’s gross! It reminds me of cottage cheese inside a big trash bag.”

In reply Kardashian said, “If Paris Hilton thinks my butt looks gross, I don’t really care. At least I have a butt.”

Even though Kardashian is white, black men seem to like her more than white men. She was the first white woman to make the cover of King magazine yet she barely made white American Maxim’s Hot 100.

Since she herself seems to prefer black men, did she use her family’s money to give herself a black woman’s body?

She says no: all the women in her family have her sort of figure. But there is at least one picture of her where her legs seem too thin compared to the rest of her body and another one where her bottom was clearly smaller than it is now.

She said that Jennifer Lopez’s pride in her figure gave her the courage to show off hers. And that she did, naked, in Playboy in December 2007 in what she calls “tastefully done” pictures.

She said she appeared in Playboy at the urging of her mother (yes) and “because I’m not one of those stick skinny girls you see. I felt like girls today need to see a normal body.”

When Vivid Video put out her sex video in 2007 she took them to court. How could she face her grandmother? But later that same year Kardashian herself put out a much longer sex video.

Many think she masterminded the whole sex video thing from beginning to end: it was all a bit too much like what her friend Paris Hilton did a few years before. And the video is too well done to seem like something private that suddenly saw the light of day.

If the name Kardashian seems somehow familiar you are probably thinking of her father: he helped to defend OJ Simpson at his murder trial in 1995. He came out of retirement to do it: he and Simpson were friends.

In 1989 when she was little her parents divorced. Her mother married Olympic gold-medal winner Bruce Jenner.

She was married to R & B producer Damon Thomas from 2000 to 2004. A mistake, she says.

She and Paris Hilton have known each other since they were little girls: their mothers were friends.

See also:

• The ten most beautiful women in the world
• white women
• Paris Hilton
• Cher
• California
• King magazine
• big bottom girls
• Playboy

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Simonetta Vespucci

Simonetta Vespucci (1453-1476), “la bella Simonetta”, was the most beautiful woman in Florence, Italy in her day. She was so beautiful that men were still painting her more than 20 years after her death. She is the woman you keep seeing over and over again in Botticelli’s paintings, like the “Birth of Venus”.

Botticelli painted her as the Virgin Mary, Venus and Athena. Piero di Cosimo painted her as Cleopatra and Procris. Poliziano and Lorenzo the Magnificent wrote about her in verse – as did Gabriele d’Annunzio in our own age. Many other poets and painters honoured her as well with their works. You can see her today on some of the money in Europe.

She had brown eyes, white skin and long, flowing dark yellow hair. She had what in those days was considered to be a perfect figure.

In Botticelli’s paintings she looks a bit sad, but also like she is in a dream.

Lorenzo the Magnificent read her look differently: that she was not just beautiful on the outside but had a beautiful soul too: she was serious, never had an unjust feeling, was not proud or stuck on herself and had an excellent mind. She walked and danced with grace, a sign of the inner balance of her soul.

She was the perfect Renaissance woman.

She was born in either Genoa or Portovenere, the place where they say Venus arrived in Italy. At 15 she married a cousin of Amerigo Vespucci, after whom America is named. Her husband brought her to Florence, the city ruled by the Medicis. Because her father-in-law was an important man there, the Medicis soon came to know her.

Two Medici brothers, Lorenzo and Giuliano, fell in love with her. Lorenzo was too busy with affairs of state, but Giuliano pursued her.

At the La Giostra games in 1475 Giuliano rode into battle under a flag with her picture on it and the French words “La Sans Pareille” – the woman without parallel. Botticelli had made the flag. At the games she was named the “Queen of Beauty”.

Some say that Giuliano won her heart that day and they became lovers. Others say that she refused him.

A year later, at the age of 23, she became very sick and was coughing up blood: she had tuberculosis.

There is a strange story that Giuliano tried to keep her alive as a vampire: better that than to see her die. In that story she becomes a vampire and hides in the tower overlooking the main square. When she is cornered she jumps to her death.

In any case she died that spring. At her funeral thousands followed her body to its grave.

It seems that Botticelli had fallen in love with her too: after he first saw her, she was the only woman he ever painted, even after her death. He never married and was laid to rest at her feet.

– Abagond, 2007.

See also:

• Botticelli
• Amerigo Vespucci

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The most beautiful white Brazilian women

Here are the ten most beautiful white Brazilian women that I know of who are famous enough to have their own article in the Portuguese Wikipedia. Merely my opinion, of course. This is very much a work in progress.

Note that most whites in Brazil are at least one tenth African by blood and many have native Indian blood as well. It is hard to know where to draw the line between whites and everyone else.

1. Maria Fernanda Cândido (1974- ) is a television actress from Londrina, a city far to the south. She modelled in Europe and was on MTV, but made her name on “Terra Nostra” in 1999. That year she was voted the most beautiful woman of the century on the television show “Fantástico”

2. Raica Oliveira (1984- ) is a model from Niteroi, near Rio. She now lives in New York with her mother. She has been on the runway in Paris and Milan and in many fashion magazines and makeup ads. She is friends with fellow Brazilian models Adriana Lima and Ana Beatriz Barros.

3. Valéria Monteiro (1965- ) is a radio and television news presenter who comes from Belo Horizonte. She has been on both Brazilian and American television (Discovery, Bloomberg, NBC).

4. Scheila Carvalho (1973- ) is a dancer from Minas Gerais. She was once part of the band É o Tchan!. She has been on television and in films. She was on the cover of Brazilian Playboy and was voted three times as the most physically desirable woman in the world by VIP magazine. She looks like she is part native Indian.

5. Carol Castro (1984- ) is a television actress from Rio. She was Ruth in “O Profeta”.

6. Camila Rodrigues (1983- ) is a television actress from Sao Paulo state. She was Mari in “America”.

7. Fernanda Tavares (1980- ) is a supermodel from Natal.

8. Isadora Ribeiro (1965- ) is a television actress from Curitiba. She has been on television for most of the past 20 years, mainly on Globo. She is part native Indian. When she appeared on the cover of Brazilian Playboy in 1989 and 1991. Her father stopped talking to her for a while after that.

9. Juliana Paes (1979- ) is a Brazilian actress who grew up in Niteroi. In most of her pictures she is just pretty, not beautiful, but sometimes she can be very beautiful. She has been considered as a possible Bond girl for the next James Bond film.

10. Camila Finn (1991- ) became the first Brazilian ever to place first worldwide in the Ford Supermodel of the World. Adriana Lima came in second in the same contest eight years before.

Whites in Brazil come mainly from Portugal and Italy, though some come from Spain, Lebanon, Germany and Poland too. So you see Nordic women there, like Xuxa and Gisele Bundchen. You do not see them in this list because I prefer Mediterranean and black women.

See also:

• The 25 most famous Brazilian models – in Portuguese, but the pictures speak for themselves.
• Adriana Lima
• The most beautiful Brazilian women
• The most beautiful black Brazilian women
• The most beautiful white women
• The ten most beautiful women in the world
• Brazil
• Race in Brazil

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