Media beauty competitions cultivate commodified feminine status in ruling classes.

Evidence

The male industrialist continues to work even if he is a millionaire, but his wife and daughters are turning, more and more, into “luxury mammals”. Beauty competitions, competitions for new film actresses (recall the 30,000 Italian girls who sent photographs of themselves in bathing costumes to Fox in 1926), the theatre, etc., all of which select the feminine beauty of the world and put it up for auction, stimulate the mental attitudes of prostitution, and “white slaving” is practised quite legally among the upper classes. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1127

Categorization

• XREF: Gramsci’s account of how culture industry shapes subjectivity parallels Frankfurt School culture-industry analysis; the 30,000 Italian girls detail shows cross-Atlantic circulation of Americanism. — connects to: Women’s organizations competed for prestige with male bodies on equal symbolic footing — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 736; Beauty standards make women self-inflict bodily injury through intramural competition — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 678; Social media performers systematically conceal the labor behind curated feminine glamour — Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love:…, 500 (+3 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Women’s organizations competed for prestige with male bodies on equal symbolic footing — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 736; Beauty standards make women self-inflict bodily injury through intramural competition — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 678; Social media performers systematically conceal the labor behind curated feminine glamour — Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love:…, 500 (+3 more)