Where Victoria’s Secret differed from its forebears was its models. While most lingerie models—like those in the Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue—seemed fresh off hardcore pornography film sets, Victoria’s Secret instead cast sexy girls-next-door. Their wholesome appeal suggested that you could achieve their look if you simply shelled out for a bra or a teddy. Victoria’s Secret catalogue models in the 90s weren’t the fembot blondes covering Playboy, like Anna Nicole Smith and Pamela Anderson (who modeled for Frederick’s), but “good girls, well brought up, slightly nymphomaniacal, but only behind closed doors and only when they’re in love,” explained journalist Holly Brubach in the New York Times Magazine in 1993.
At the same time, Victoria’s Secret’s brand pushed the shopping experience as a sisterhood, “unquestionably a female enclave, like a beauty salon or a harem—a place to which women retreat to make themselves more attractive,” Brubach wrote. The prime Victoria’s Secret patron was the “Cosmopolitan Girl,” a single, career-oriented woman who had sex for pleasure. She could deploy disposable income to perfect the garments beneath her power suit. The creation of the fashion lingerie market, spearheaded by Victoria’s Secret, was a natural extension of women remaining single longer and creating their own wealth. The message in the selection, attitude, and staging of Victoria’s models told women that purchasing a push-up bra could actualize their own fantasies alongside men’s, securing not just desirability, but love, as well. This seemed like new power.
The brand exploded because it succeeded in marketing to women what men wanted. The authority of male desire is coded in the lingerie giant’s DNA. Victoria’s Secret attracted male customers by prioritizing their need to feel comfortable with underwire, and giving them permission to direct the sexual experience as Raymond had hoped. At Victoria’s Secret shops and in catalogues, men’s “presence and power . . . are implied in the women’s diligent efforts to please them,” Brubach wrote. By 1993, Victoria’s Secret had reached $1 billion in revenue.
THAT THONG TH-THONG THONG THONG
One particular cut of underwear propelled lingerie sales in the 90s. The thong became so popular that one report likened its gain on the panty to the unseating of ketchup by salsa as America’s favorite condiment.
Some say thong fever began with Monica Lewinsky. After she lured the president by flashing hers—earning her the sobriquet “thong snapper”—the undergarment took on a cultural life of its own. When news of Lewinsky’s thong incident broke in 1998, the undies were no longer a marker of sleaze, relegated to strip clubs and Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogues. By 1998, fourteen million thongs were sold, representing some 40 percent of total panty sales. Thongs became “the fastest growing segment of the $2 billion a year women’s panty business,” reported the Wall Street Journal in 1999.
“You lifted the back of your jacket and showed the president of the United States your thong underwear,” Barbara Walters chided in an interview with the disgraced intern. “Where did you get the nerve? I mean, who does that?” Lewinsky laughed to defuse the slight. “That was how our flirtation relationship was progressing,” she answered. “It was a very—I know that it sort of has been highlighted. I’m not going to demonstrate for you. But if you take my word for it, it was a small, subtle flirtatious gesture. And that’s me,” Lewinsky said.
“Was it saying, ‘I’m available’?” Walters followed up.
“Well, I think it was saying, ‘I’m interested, too. I’ll play,’” Lewinsky said. The message was received. She was invited to see the president in private for the first time that night. The thong became “the garment that shook a presidency.”
Female sexual ability was telegraphed by the thong’s presence alone. The humble underwear had gone from functional to powerful. What was designed to be hidden suddenly demanded to be seen. Thongs, looking like “whale tails,” began to peek out of low-rise pants. Celebrities from Halle Berry to Christina Aguilera displayed their G-strings. This was popular not only on red carpets and in clubs, but also in high school hallways. Clothing became tighter and sheerer to contend with the popularity of wearing thongs. Women claimed to purge their closets of traditional panties to make room for thongs and thong-based wardrobes. Suddenly, it wasn’t just about wearing a thong, but about letting it be known you were wearing one, too. Underwear as outerwear projected sexual availability and prowess.
While Victoria’s Secret profited from the thong trend it abetted, legions of girls who came of age during the 90s were sold a bill of goods. We were taught that sexual fulfillment and love are derived from consumerism—stringy, lacy purchases wrapped in pink heart paper. But thongs, of course, are not a particularly effective means of achieving self-worth. And more worryingly, their proliferation in 90s culture normalized a male-engineered brand of performative sexuality that didn’t necessarily translate into happiness or satisfaction for women. In fact, it reinforced the fallacy, pervasive in 90s media and marketing, that women should design their appearance and conform the expression of their sexuality to fulfill male desire.
BIONIC, BREASTY, AND BLONDE
The model body type that sold thongs and fashion lingerie was mainstreamed by a cadre of entertainers, most notable among them Pamela Anderson and Anna Nicole Smith. With their perfectly spherical breasts, hairless limbs, fat-lipped pouts, and eyebrows that looked drawn with a protractor, Anderson and Smith appeared in television, film, and print as glistening envoys of sex. Their look signaled a new normal that women were encouraged to emulate—the “human Barbie doll.”
They both shot to stardom through the Playboy Mansion. Smith became Playboy magazine’s Playmate of the Year in 1993, and Anderson would cover fourteen editions, including the magazine’s final nude issue in 2016. Their roles on television and in film were limited to variations of sexpot. Anderson, wearing tiny shorts, trotted out power drills and water heaters as Tim Allen’s handy assistant on Home Improvement. She graduated to the perfect slow-motion jiggle on the beaches of Baywatch. The show’s reach at its peak was staggering—more than two billion people each week in 104 countries and on every continent save Antarctica watched Pam run.
Throughout the 90s, these entertainers starred in marketing campaigns that sold sex alongside products. Anna Nicole Smith became the face (and ass) of Guess Jeans, and later the diet supplement TrimSpa. Anderson appeared in beer campaigns, but her DIY sex tape, shot on her honeymoon with Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, was her most marketable moment of the 90s. The tape was reportedly not intended for public consumption, but rather stolen by an electrician from their home in 1995 and later shared online. It furthered Anderson’s reputation as both “sizzling sweet eye candy” and an “out-there sex weirdo.” Not long after the tape’s release, its content was available on skin channels at nice hotels for around ten dollars.
There’s something campy and charming about it, as if for a moment you could imagine that they are not celebrities, but just regular folks doing it on a johnboat. Anderson even asks Lee on the tape, “When are you going to get me prego?” But they were freakishly beautiful and on a yacht. It was the first celebrity sex tape occurring at the nexus of tabloid culture and the internet. The tape birthed a genre that would later anoint stars like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian.
Throughout the 90s, Anderson and Smith were ogled by interviewers and queried about their breasts, which they paraded in small outfits. Anderson referred to hers as “props,” assisting the creation of her character. The Chicago Tribune called them “erotic cartoons.” Smith’s breasts—which the Los Angeles Times dubbed “freakish mammary glands”—were a primary subject of her 1992 interview with Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee Gifford. Newsman Larry King badgered Smith about her rumored enhancements on his news show. “Did you have breast augmentation?” he asked. “Up or down?” By the time Smith was famous and widowed from a wealthy geriatric oil tycoon, it was perhaps no surprise that she credited her breasts. “Everything I have is because of them,” she said.
N
ot unlike Victoria’s Secret models, Smith and Anderson titillated men and sold women a quixotic yardstick to measure themselves against. The popularity of these entertainers signaled to women that achieving a similar body type could bestow real power. Young women, already down on their figures thanks to the media and popular culture, wanted to fit this new definition of perfection. Many took to extreme dieting and surgery to achieve it. From 1990 to 1999, cosmetic plastic surgery procedures hit record numbers, topping one million each year. Anderson’s body was the most desired by nonbombshells seeking surgical enhancement and by 1997 was “the number one requested body image in L.A.,” according to a prominent plastic surgeon. Women begged to be cut up and reassembled to look like Pam.
Anna Nicole Smith, meanwhile, was the apotheosis of the image that marketers had so successfully peddled. Smith’s rise suggested to many American women that becoming a sex object was their only path to power. But Smith’s own pursuit of this path would come to a dark end.
Vickie Lynn Hogan of Mexia, Texas, wanted to be in Playboy so badly that she sent the magazine nude photographs of herself. Married with a son by the time she was eighteen, Hogan idolized Marilyn Monroe. After jobs at a fried chicken restaurant, Walmart, and a strip club, she was named Playmate of the Year in 1993. That was when America came to know her as Anna Nicole Smith.
Smith’s voluptuous, unsculpted body was central to her appeal. Fans liked that she looked like she ate, especially in an age when beauty was often defined by emaciated models. Smith loved pizza and fried chicken. She confessed to never exercising and eating Godiva chocolates at every photo shoot. Her notoriety made curvy desirable again.
Smith resurrected an old body type and made it de rigueur: the buxom blonde. She supplanted the lithe Claudia Schiffer as the face of Guess Jeans, proving that excess flesh was the desired tool to market the country’s most popular denim. Smith’s curvy, five-foot-eleven, 155-pound, 36-DD frame was “uncontainable by ordinary clothes,” opined the Washington Post. “She brings back visions of Hollywood glamour. We haven’t seen that kind of charisma since Marilyn,” said a Guess photographer.
But Smith’s body would swell and then shrink over the years, making her a target. That she ate and didn’t exercise first endeared Smith to America, but once she became overweight, she was mocked and shunned. The Marilyn comparisons ceased. Critics taunted her for not fulfilling the sexual fantasy that she had promised. She became a cautionary tale to young women that corpulence was undesirable, that they should nix the fried chicken if they wanted love.
Smith’s pursuit of an unrealistic beauty ideal turned her into a carnival sideshow. “She spilled out of her tops, she spilled into the tabloids, she was a mess,” the Post continued. She wasn’t just mocked for her breasts; she was reduced to them. In The Economist: “There were only two of them, but they made a whole frontage: huge, compelling, pneumatic. They burst out of tight red dresses . . . or teased among feather boas, or flanked a dizzying cleavage that plunged to tantalizing depths. With them, a girl from nowhere . . . could do anything.”
For Smith, marketing her sexually desirable body was an escape hatch from addiction, depression, and poverty. But eventually, the hatch slammed back on top of her. By the early 2000s, Smith had become so subsumed by prescription drugs, alcohol, and diet pills that a PR guru told Adweek she was a “walking catastrophe.” Beginning in 2002, she starred in a reality television show about her varying attempts to maintain her body. Slate called The Anna Nicole Show a “druggy, delirious debut,” and wondered if the channel was enabling an obviously intoxicated Smith, who could barely walk or speak coherently.
The deeper she plunged into addiction, the more she was mocked for being a pathetic floozy. Introducing Kanye West at the 2004 American Music Awards, a drugged-up Smith skims her silhouette with her hands, then asks the audience, “Do you like my body?” She seems vanquished after years of ricocheting between fame and antipathy. But she is still lucid enough to focus on the asset that had garnered her love and a career.
Critical response to the moment took two forms: it celebrated her newly slender physique obtained while consuming and endorsing a line of diet pills, or maligned her for being wasted. Gawker joked that a Mexican pharmacy association should commission Smith to open a drug store in her cleavage. People said she was “looking svelte.” Entertainment Tonight reporter Kevin Frazier interviewed Smith before she took the stage. Afterward, he wondered on air if her behavior was a scheme to hawk her diet pills. “Something is going on. But at the same time, I wonder . . . is she crazy like a fox? Because is there any better self-promotion?”
Smith died three years later with eight prescription drugs and a heavy sedative in her system. After Smith’s death, she was ceaselessly mocked for pursuing love and self-esteem from the outside in, even though it was exactly what society had instructed her to do. She saw no other option.
SEXY VILLAINESSES
There was only one type of woman routinely permitted to exercise power and show negative emotions in the 90s, and she wasn’t even real. The sexy villainess was a regular on 90s television shows, adored for the havoc she wreaked and the cleavage she revealed. She undermined other women, poached their mates, and exacted revenge. Her real power only existed in her ability to conform to male desire.
Melrose Place perfected this villainess and her hobby, the catfight. What began as a “soft romance with girlfriends and boyfriends in the same courtyard” became an entirely new animal once Heather Locklear joined the cast, according to show writer James Kahn. Producers “thought they would shake things up and throw a bitch in the middle of this otherwise complacent thing we’d seen before,” Kahn told me. Once the show swapped “bothersome Issues and Morals for infinitely more palatable Sex and Villains,” as Rolling Stone put it, Melrose climbed to the top of Monday nights. Heather Locklear’s cocky, sassy, self-made Amanda led the charge. Reviewers noted her “Barbie doll” figure and “scratch-your-eyes-out attitude.”
The seductress was the only type of woman on the show. She came in three varieties: blonde, brunette, and ginger. Creators wouldn’t allow anything to stand in the way of this model, even the law. Actress Hunter Tylo sued producer Aaron Spelling after he fired her from the Melrose cast because she was pregnant. Spelling’s lawyers argued in court that Tylo’s pregnancy would render her too fat to play a husband-stealing vixen, so she had to go. A jury awarded Tylo close to $5 million in damages. (Lisa Rinna, the actress who replaced her, announced her own pregnancy and continued working.)
Locklear’s character, the temptress Amanda Woodward, ruled the show from the first episode she appeared in. She seemed to echo the kind of woman 90210’s Brenda Walsh might become, but more boldly sexual, powerful, and blonde. Amanda was older, more promiscuous, and financially independent. She ran her own advertising agency and took any man she wanted, even if he was tied down. Amanda bought the apartment complex where the show’s characters lived as a ploy to attract one of its residents. Then she demoted his ex-girlfriend, whom she happened to employ.
Stealing boyfriends and impeding female colleagues was only the beginning. “Evil Amanda” set temperatures boiling. One of the show’s most infamous promotion posters simply read, “Mondays are a Bitch” over a closeup of Locklear’s face. “She’s not that bad. Her heart does beat on occasion, but then it just stops,” Locklear once joked about Amanda. The Los Angeles Times classified her as a “stop-at-nothing female character who uses sex and smarts to neutralize men.” Women viewers and other characters envied her. Men wanted to sleep with her and, at the same time, feared for their lives.
Journalists writing about Locklear contrasted how nice the actress was with the evil bitch she played on TV. Locklear knew how to schmooze reporters and score fawning news coverage. “The awful truth” about her is that “she is really very nice, the kind of woman who never speaks ill of her colleagues and refuses to trash her ex-husband,” a New York Times profile explained. “It’s fun to play things that you’re n
ot,” the actress insisted. Still, Locklear tried to create distance from Amanda. “I love it. As long as they don’t call me a bitch,” she told Entertainment Weekly.
Melrose’s Amanda and fiery Kimberly Shaw (played by Marcia Cross) embodied the trope of the empowered bitch, according to Kahn, who says that casting women as powerful, manipulative villains counterintuitively indicated progress. He likens it to old Hollywood when black actors were not given dynamic villain roles because of the concern of perceived racism: “You had to walk on eggshells. But finally, they were accepted and given really good bad-guy roles.”
Kahn says women’s evolution in Hollywood mirrored this progression. “Women were helpmates. They were sweet, and the love objects. You couldn’t really make a woman a bad guy. But what it felt like was happening in the 90s, and what Melrose was certainly doing, was the same kind of parallel thing. We gave women power and showed that they could be bitches and that they can be horrible and manipulating, just like men. It was that, and in personal relationships, power was wielded to a certain extent with sex and emotional manipulation. That was a more classic way that women and their roles and domain was more emotional and psychological.”
Creators of Melrose and other shows may have believed they empowered women by making them bitches. But surely, thwarting other women and stealing men wasn’t new or empowering behavior for female characters on television. Soaps had long been beating that drum. Melrose employed an old daytime formula for primetime. All the women waxed villainous, crushed other women when they could, and fought over men.
90s Bitch Page 3