Pinups

Now that the awkward first post is out of the way, I can forge on ahead with my subject, posting daily as long as my enthusiasm holds and my wife doesn't find out. Of course, if T doesn't like me posting on these subjects, maybe we can sit down and talk about them. That'd be fine with me, but I don't think it's going to happen.

You guys that know me know I spent my kindergarten and 1st grade years in a neighborhood where porn just drifted by on the breeze. Perhaps this accounts for my perversion (or healthy honesty) on the subject of the female body. But most of that stuff was just raunch, the kind of thing that'd be good much later for choking the chicken, but really didn't teach me anything about beauty.

What did teach me about beauty was a discovery I made a little later, a collection of Vargas' paintings for Playboy. Really a beautiful magazine, it was dozens of paintings of women in mostly softcore poses showing off what they had. Sort of. Few of the pictures had more than a hint of pubic hair. Mostly they were this sort of thing. But they really hit me. I looked at them again and again and again until the magazine disappeared, mysteriously. A tragic loss.

But these women became a benchmark for me. Curvy, mostly busty, luxurious and playful, they were sexy, but they were more than just sex objects. Maybe it's just me, but I read a lot of personality into the banal one-liners, the fixed expressions, and seductive postures.

Recently, I've really come back around to an appreciation of pinups. they're erotic art of the sort that in the days of ancient Greece would be all over the walls, and sculpted everywhere, art that very simply acknowledges the fact that sex is normal, natural, and vital, and that, hey, men love to look at women (and in the case of Greece sometimes men) sexually. In ceding the pinup from the realm of accepted male culture, we've given up our right to be men without being considered perverts. And we've become pushed more toward the tawdry end of erotic art, the really graphic pornography which is cheap and easy to produce and which encourages us to have only one, very base, erotic response.

Now, I like my base erotic response as much as the next guy, but sometimes all I want is the cheer that comes from looking at the nicely balanced shape of a beautiful woman. A lopsided smile on my face, a skip in my heart, and a twinge in my crotch are sometimes just what I need to get me through a bland day, and it's sad that it's not allowed.

Fortunately, there are still artists at work out there. Here are a couple of my favorites. Andrew Bawidamann does a lot of really good work, much of it military-themed, plugging into the notion that the pinup is an integral part of the US military tradition. His work captures a lot of what's best about pinups: the innocence, the fun, the stylized beauty. I like what he does with movement and shape. His women's breasts and butts do what they're supposed to do when the women move in inertial and non-inertial frames, if I may get physical.

Frank Cho is a comic book artist, but, really, his work is ideal for pinups, at least partly because his writing isn't that great. But, boy, he does know how to draw a hot woman. This is not the picture I wanted to put here (I wanted to show my ass-men friends what he can do with plump posteriors), but my scanner is on the fritz, so it'll have to do. Besides, this particular picture captures again the spirit of the pinup, although in the peculiar fantasy world of Sheena.

Let's call that good for now.