It’s important to remember when considering how Crumb represents these women that he is a cartoonist, and his comics are looking to amuse as much as arouse. They do not conform to a prescribed body type, but rather via his pencil, these women are transformed into Crumb’s ideal. He intentionally sexualizes his muses-from his wife Aline, to famous athletes like Serena Williams and Tonja Buford-Bailey. Looking at the works of “Art & Beauty,” there’s no doubt that, for Crumb, drawing women is still a turn-on. In this context, Crumb’s obsessive drawings of women hardly seem perverse. Every image we encounter of a woman’s body, it seems, has a currency in the current cultural condition. The consumer-based economy we live in, which depends so heavily on the pressure to conform to beauty standards (no matter what they are), has hardly improved since 1990-the year author Naomi Wolf pointed out this correlation in her seminal work The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. This month alone, debates have raged over portrayals of female celebrities in the media-from Amy Schumer’s rebuttal to Glamour’s “plus size” issue to Kerry Washington’s distaste for her airbrushed AdWeek cover and Jennifer Lawrence’s Harper’s interview in which she called out the film industry for its view on body types. In the two decades that have passed since Crumb started Art & Beauty, the canons of female beauty have diversified, but now perhaps more than ever, our society is obsessed with policing, controlling, defining, and subduing women’s bodies.
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