also cheese-cake, mid-15c., from cheese (n.1) + cake (n.). In figurative uses for "soft, effeminate" from 18c. Slang meaning dates from 1934, when a "Time" magazine article defined it as "leg-pictures of sporty females." In its early years this sense of the word often was associated with Marlene Dietrich.
: unless one perceives in cheesecake photographs illicit and limitless pleasures
noun[apparently fr the appreciative comments of one or another New York City newspaper photographer at the ocean-liner docks who posed women so that their legs were featured, and pronounced the pictures to be ''better than cheesecake'']