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We caught up with pinup & professional trainer Darling Darla for a quick Q & A! Here's what she had to say:

GGR asks: 

"As a pinup and professional trainer, what are your thoughts/advice for women on body image, body confidence and fitness?"

She says: 

"As a child I watched my mother frown at herself in the mirror everyday.  She often made negative comments about herself, usually along the lines of 'I’m so fat,' and I don’t remember her ever NOT being on some fad diet. I picked up on that mindset, and no matter what size I was, or what anyone said to the contrary, I was also 'fat.'  In high school I went through a couple of rounds of anorexia and that negativity of allowing my self-worth to revolve around a number on the scale has persisted over the last 27 years. Even sometimes still today, it is a monologue in my head that I have to work on drowning out and replacing with something more positive.

Fortunately, I have almost always been involved in some form of athletics and I have always been considered strong.  In my adult years I’ve played around with many different activities, but I’ve found passion in strength training, specifically in PowerLifting.  Now, I compete in, coach, and judge PowerLifting.  While aesthetics is still something that tickles the back of my mind, I made a decision when I had children that they would NOT be subject to the body shame I grew up with, and the body image I still struggle with occasionally.  I made the decision they would never hear me talk about how I looked, nor how ANYONE ELSE looked. It is not a subject in my house.  

Instead, I wanted my daughter to see that it was okay for a woman to be strong, to lift heavy if she wanted to, and to walk into a weight room (or any room, for that matter) with confidence.  I wanted my son to see that it was okay for a woman to be strong, even stronger than some men, and to never judge a woman by her body or what she chose to do with it.  I wanted my children to understand thatit is more important to be healthy in MIND and body than to look a certain way.

I challenge all women to be confident in their skin, to love themselves, to find a way to be fit with whatever activity makes them happy and makes them feel good and healthy, and to love their body: past, present, and future."

The "We Can Do It" poster was produced by American artist J. Howard Miller in 1942 for the Westinghouse Electric Corporation. As just one of many wartime propaganda posters produced during WW2, it was displayed for only a few weeks during February 1943 before vanishing into obscurity. The iconic poster reached mainstream popularity after being republished in an article about the National Archives in the early 1980s.

Despite being known as the "Rosie the Riveter" poster, the original poster had no initial association with anyone named Rosie. In 1994, a former wartime worker named Geraldine Hoff Doyle mistakenly identified herself as the model for the "We Can Do It" poster after seeing a photo that was credited as inspiring the poster and thinking that it was a picture of her.

It was actually a picture of Naomi Parker Fraley, as later proved by scholar James Kimble - and by the copy of the image Fraley herself had kept all those years. There is no way to know if that image was actually Miller's inspiration for the original poster, but at the very least it is another fine example of the glamourous images of female war-workers that were all over the media at the time.

Photo Credits, Clockwise from Top Left:

1. Original "We Can Do It" by J. Howard Miller, 1943
2. "Rosie The Riveter" by Norman Rockwell, 1943
3. "We Can Do It" by Global Couture, 2014
4. "Rosita Adelita" by Robert Valadez, 2010
5.  "WE CAN DO IT, ROSIE 2020" by Randall Slocum Art, 2020
6. GGR's homage to Rosie, 2020