Victoria’s Secret…revealed at last!
The year was 1989. Manuel Noriega had declared war on the United States. The Schultz brothers were breaking girls’ hearts at Mt. Vernon High School. Guns ‘n’ Roses destroyed hotels around North America. Women wore jackets with padded shoulders, making them look like linebackers with breasts. And the Victoria’s Secret catalog began to arrive at the Johnson household.
I don’t know how my mom got on Victoria’s mailing list, but every few weeks the publication would come in the mail, and I would flip through it. Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, correct women wore mannish clothes, at least in professional settings. Throughout my schooling, educators tried to tell us that boys and girls were exactly alike except for a few minor anatomical differences, which we knew was utter rubbish. Still, this was before the feminists decided to immolate themselves on the pyre of Bill Clinton’s disordered sexuality, and their sex-neutral propaganda still held sway.
At the time, I thought the idea of Victoria’s Secret was a positive development. Here was a chain of stores that sold unabashedly feminine clothes and toiletries. The name evoked 19th-century England, and you could read into that what you liked — whether it was supposed to lend a rarefied air to what was primarily an underwear store, or to suggest that if a woman looks proper outside, underneath her clothes she might be sporting less inhibited attire.
It did not escape my adolescent attention that many of the women were attractive. Nay, they were beautiful: soft, feminine features with womanly bodies. They were leagues away from the sullen walking sticks who populate the wider fashion world. There was an erotic element to the catalog, to be sure — we are, as mentioned above, talking about underwear — but it was one element among many. Everything about the models, from their hair to their poses to their warm but not quite beckoning smiles, suggested elegance and class. It was an affirmation of the uniqueness of feminine sexuality without prurience, which is a tricky thing.
Yesterday, after getting back from a brief trip, I discovered that my wife is now on the Victoria’s Secret mailing list. (Why not? We’re already getting about 47 Christmas catalogs a day.) It confirmed my suspicion that Victoria’s secret is that she runs a prostitution ring. The first sign was the change in the stores’ decor a few years ago. Whereas they used to employ darker hues and subtle lighting, they switched to a style that can only be described as “New Orleans bordello,” with bright halogen lights and bold colors. They now sell outer clothes and underwear, and their television commercials are as frequent as they are frightening. (They are a multi-billion-dollar corporation. Was Dennis Miller the only person available?)
Worst of all, they have given themselves over to crassness. The classy models have been dismissed; in their place is a legion of Barbie dolls. All of the bodies are improbably skinny in most places and ludicrously generous in others. Cheekbones and hipbones are prominent. The implicit sales pitch has changed from “Buy our products, and you’ll feel like a woman,” to “Buy our products, and men will want to have sex with you the moment they see you.” I guess the public’s taste must be skewed toward trashy women, because that’s what the company has embraced.
Personally, I find the whole transformation repulsive. I’m not being a church lady here — I find the female form attractive, and I’d be lying if I said I could look chastely for a long period of time at pretty girls in their knickers. Even the old Victoria’s Secret catalog wasn’t something a Christian man should have been perusing. (In my defense, I didn’t take my Christianity very seriously until well after 1989.) Nevertheless, it’s disappointing that yet another corporation has resorted to the lowest-common-denominator approach. There is nothing wrong with eroticism per se, but when it is a brightly lit invitation to lust, it deserves our scorn. On a professional level, too, it’s unworthy of respect, for it takes real intelligence to be subtle, but anyone can be blatantly sexual. You have to wonder how long such a company will survive.
Ah, well. There’s always the Land’s End catalog.