Deconstructing Beautiful Women

The two pictures of an obscure model in this blog post originally appeared on my beautiful-women picture blog, and it's gotten over four hundred pageviews in the past fourteen years.  The print ad below first came to my attention back in the early 1980s.

At first glance, it looks like just another ad for pantyliners. Kind of embarrassing to the male eye, to say the least. But while most ads for feminine products of this sort use anonymous models, this one names its model in the question it poses: "Why does a model like Nancy Toner choose Lightdays, the Comfort-Design Pantyliner?"

I was of the wrong sex to ponder the answer. Indeed, I was asking a different question: "Who's Nancy Toner?"

Needless to say,  I filed that name in my memory bank, and decades later, with access to the Internet, a modeling comp-card site, and my beautiful-women picture blog part of the way through its fifth year, I got to answer the question, at least in part, as to who Nancy Toner, her headshot shown below, is.

She's a model who was active in the eighties and was represented by the HV agency in New York.

The ad she appeared in was effective because it tied a name as well as a face to a product not usually brought up in polite company. It made the task of selling such a product an honest and direct one by presenting Nancy Toner as a woman no different from any other.

I was pleased with how this post worked out.  I came upon my post of Nancy Toner on my beautiful-women picture blog, from April 2011, as I was going through my posts on that blog month-to-month.  A friend of mine told me it would be a shame to close down my beautiful-women picture blog after having put nearly nineteen years of work into it, and I ultimately decided to look at the possibility of  harvesting the pictures of all the models I featured - no actresses, singers, dancers or anyone else - for a possible Web site of famous and not-so-famous women in the modeling profession, and I've been saving them on a flash drive as I go through my blog content.

Looking back at the rest of said content, I found myself embarrassed and regretful at more than a few of the women I featured once the low-hanging fruit of famous actresses who are household names began to ran thin . . . movie actresses who were lucky enough to have at least ten seconds of fame, television actresses who weren't even successful enough to appear at nostalgia conventions to sign autographs, wide-eyed local-news anchorwomen broadcasting on UHF network affiliates - possibly owned by Sinclair Broadcasting - in minor-league cities that barely merit the word "city" in their official names, hosts of daytime talk shows produced by Dr. Phil McGraw, Carrie Underwood, and other present and future Trump supporters.  I kept asking myself, "What was I thinking?"  The answer?  I needed the content to keep my blog going.  Quantity over quality.  I just didn't realize that the quantity-quality ratio was much more tilted in favor of the former than I thought.  And I'm not even halfway through it yet.

Quantity is fine, but I focused on the wrong sort of quantity in my beautiful-women picture blog.  I focused on a quantity of names rather than a quantity of pictures of only a small number of women.  Focusing more on the latter is perfect for a Web site, but not for a blog that has to be constantly updated.  The seeds of my blog's destruction were sown from the start.

And why will my proposed future Web site feature only models?  Think about it.  For both women and men, modeling is pretty much the only profession in which good looks are one of the job requirements.  There's no really good reason to focus on the looks of women in any other profession.  Maybe MSNBC's Chris Jansing is an attractive woman, sure, but that should not be the reason we celebrate her when her primary job is reporting the news on television.

Anyway, my schedule hasn't changed; my beautiful-women picture blog will still be up until May 31, even if I'm done long before then with harvesting all of the pictures from it that I intend to keep on file, and after that it's gone for good.  No new posts will be published this month.  As for my proposed Web site devoted to models, I haven't figured out how I'm going to put one together, but you can bet that all of the big names will be featured, as will those models who never became household names.

Like Nancy Toner. 😊