Can someone explain to me why the term Cheesecake is used in Pin up art?

Question:

Can someone explain to me why the term Cheesecake is used in Pin up art?

Why is it used?
Where did it come from?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:

From "The Word Detective" March 2004 issue:

"How did "cheesecake" come to refer to provocative pictures of women, usually in a state of undress? Is this what led the Sara Lee Corporation to become both a major producer of the food and of ladies undergarments? -- Jay Vee Weiss.

Live and learn. When I first read your question, I assumed that you were either joking about Sara Lee or had been hitting the streusel too early in the day. Oh me of little faith. It turns out that Sara Lee Corporation owns a slew of other brands, including such "intimates" manufacturers as Hanes, Bali, Wonderbra and Playtex. They also own Polo Ralph Lauren, DKNY, Kiwi shoe care products, Brylcreem (!), and something called Mister Turkey. By the way, there really was (and is) a real person named Sara Lee. The daughter of an entrepreneur who named his bakery after her, she is today a grandmother and reportedly a computer whiz.

I happened to look into the origin of the hubba-hubba sense of "cheesecake" for my recent book "Making Whoopee" (Algonquin Books), so what follows is a short form of what I found.

Way back in the 1930s, long before the internet and cable TV put "hard-core" on the national menu, tabloid newspapers and disreputable "pulp" magazines would often try to attract their largely male target audience by festooning their front pages with photographs of attractive young women. This being the 1930s, such displays were chaste by modern standards and usually limited to what were known as "leg shots," featuring young women in swimsuits or relatively short skirts. Similar tableaus were common on calendars and playing cards of the period, and the genre was known as "cheesecake." (Among non-aficionados it was usually condemned as "smut.")

"Cheesecake" in the literal sense is a rich dessert made of cream cheese, butter and sugar. While real cheesecake was invented back in the 15th century, "cheesecake" as a slang term first arose in the depths of the 1930s Depression. Having enough food to eat was a daily worry for millions of Americans, and cheesecake, or any other fancy dessert, would have seemed an unattainable luxury to many. So it's not surprising that the young women on the covers of those risqu㩠magazines, similarly unattainable to the average male reader, would have become known as "cheesecake." "