Reviews for Sports Places Rated; Ranking America's Best Places to Enjoy Sports - Richard Whittingham - P...

The average rating for Sports Places Rated; Ranking America's Best Places to Enjoy Sports - Richard Whittingham - P... based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-06-30 00:00:00 Mark Yasuda The main focus of Valerie Steele’s Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age, published by Oxford University Press in 1985 and now sadly out of print, is women’s fashions from the end of the Regency period to the beginning to the First World War. Steele argues that there was much greater erotic component (an erotic intent) to the way women dressed in this period than is generally supposed. She is also somewhat sceptical of arguments that women’s clothing in this era was repressive, either in intent or in effect. Steele believes that women in the 19th century dressed as they did because it made them feel attractive, and sexually attractive, and that while attracting masculine attention was certainly a consideration it was not the only one by any means. Women dressed as much to please themselves as to please men. She also points out that the clothes were intended as much to attract attention to a woman’s body as to conceal it. It’s interesting to compare Steele’s views on the corset with those of David Kunzle, in his fascinating and provocative book Fashion and Fetishism. She feels he goes a little too far in his belief in the erotic appeal to women of corsets, although she doesn’t entirely disagree with his arguments. Steele also believes that the Victorians were in general much less repressed sexually than is usually thought. That’s not likely to come as a revelation to anyone here, but in 1985 it was still a fairly radical viewpoint. She also argues strongly that feminist opposition to fashion and beauty (both in Victorian and modern times) is ill-conceived and very much mistaken. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is her assertion that women’s fashion did not change radically as a result of the First World War. The radical changes were already well under way as early as 1909. Steele’s well-illustrated book is entertaining, enlightening, intriguing and thoroughly enjoyable.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-02-10 00:00:00 Carl Rigley While I found the main ideas of this book to be thought-provoking, I can't rate it that highly for several reasons. The first and biggest is that Steele's arguments become so repetitive that I often felt like I was re-reading the same passage I had before. She is often making fine distinctions of different schools of thought and theories about the reason behind fashion and especially the reasons behind fashion in the Victoria era, most of which she considers to be highly exaggerated and over-played. But perhaps her fine distinctions would have been better made in a book that was half the length of this one. I appreciated how she structured her setup (background theories, history of fashion in her focal period, and how each changing fashion period reflected changing perceptions of feminine beauty and eroticism). I also critique this book for its complete lack of explanation of how she found her sources, what her research methodology was, how she "analyzed." I find it difficult to be fully persuaded to someone's arguments when I can't tell if they're just using anecdotes from carefully-selected sources or actually did a comprehensive review with some sort of logic and criteria in mind. She does put forth counter-arguments and multiple viewpoints but again, I can't really tell just from her writing how solidly backed any of those are (except in adjectives and adverbs). Critiques aside I did feel that I learned much more of why fashion may change in general and the reasons behind Victorian fashion, far beyond "women were repressed and forced to wear corsets."