Came across this wandering the webs. This is a serious scholarly study about the use of the female in pinball art. It’s a bit dry and lengthy, but interesting and well-done I thought.
Pinups and Pinball: The Sexualized Female Image in Pinball Artwork
http://scholarworks.rit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10384&context=theses
Oh no. Don't let this garbage settle in your community. I have seen several hobbies turn into internal shitstorms the moment a group decides that something is problematic or overly sexualized. I'm rather new, so I'm not sure if such discussions common here, but my advice is to ignore it, and support whatever appeals to you.
As a side note, I also think the author needs to write better abstracts (although I know this vague way of phrasing conclusions may be common in social sciences, I'm in the natural sciences myself).
Quoted from Trond:Oh no. Don't let this garbage settle in your community. I have seen several hobbies turn into internal shitstorms the moment a group decides that something is problematic or overly sexualized. I'm rather new, so I'm not sure if such discussions common here, but my advice is to ignore it, and support whatever appeals to you.
As a side note, I also think the author needs to write better abstracts (although I know this vague way of phrasing conclusions may be common in social sciences, I'm in the natural sciences myself).
Trust me, such discussions are very common here, LOL there are quite a few threads that go on about this forever. I just threw this out because it is related to pinball and I had not see this before. This paper provides another point of view and I thought it was an interesting analysis. Of course, it isn't really necessary to go through all of the machines and perform a statistical analysis of whether each one contains a type of sexualization of the female and put it all in a chart, it is pretty obvious if you just glance at 90% of the pinball machines that have been made over time. My own meager collection exhibits a nice cross-section of this phenomenon as I am frequently reminded of.
Quoted from Trond:As a side note, it also reminds me that some of the best pin-up artists are women. I got a signed book by Olivia Berardinis at Comic-Con this year . She made pin-up art for Playboy for many years.
Great reference, hadn't really known her before. She has a cool website and tons of cool art. The wikipedia story about her is kind of interesting - she was a trained artist but was having trouble making a living so she started doing pinup art in the 70s, thinking it would just be a temporary gig to make some quick money. But it stuck so she just continued on with it, to this day.
Quoted from Ballsofsteel:men have a penis, women have a vagina.
or at least they use too.
Thanks
Blake
Quoted from Ballsofsteel:men have a penis, women have a vagina.
You can't get a thesis approved with such a brief pithy statement. You gotta pad it out!
Quoted from WolfManCat:This post reminds me that I am in the market for some big juicy melons. Let me know what you got.
Backglass:
“Melony,” in highly sexualized attire (exposing cleavage, midriff, and upper thigh) holding two round melons against her chest. The character of Melony gazes outward at the player. The entire cast of male characters (and animals) surrounding Melony have their gaze affixed upon her. One man reaches out towards her, two men appear “bug-eyed,” and a man and a dog salivate as they stare. The chaos surrounding her is staged as if her attractiveness were the cause of the upheaval. The truck careening towards her also introduces an element of danger to heighten the tension in the scene.
Playfield:
Four images of women exhibit obvious innuendo by holding melons up to their chest. The female figures in the scene look outward, toward the viewer. In the middle of the playfield, the character “Melony” is lying down in a passive pose in a pile of watermelons. Several male figures cast their eyes upon the female figures in the artwork. In addition to the imagery, text plays a large role in the interpretation of the artwork through character speech bubbles. Although the interplay between text and image is important in discerning meaning (however overt this example may be), text analysis on playfield artwork it is outside the scope of this study.
We gotta put together another research study to analyze the text!!
Quoted from IdahoRealtor:Nice Strikes & Spares btw! Great pin!
Thanks for posting this, xsvtoys ! I found it very interesting.
I had heard that the melons game started as just a silly joke someone had been scribbling on a napkin or something over at Stern to entertain themselves, that the dirty old man in chief (i have never noticed a man staring at my chest as openly and consistently as he did when we met - he was otherwise a very nice and even polite guy...) Gary Stern saw and leapt upon to produce... Considering that, i think it is a bit of an outlier among modern games in terms of an overtly sexualized theme.
I had never noticed the hovering saxophone of The Creature! And also, that Woman Lib game?? Wow. I kinda want to find out more about that...it seems a weird theme for Japan! I wonder if it wasn't some sort of joke or something.
*Looks up Whoa Nellie, Big Juicy Melons*
"Players score points on the farm operated by the lovely Melony Mellon and her twin sisters while avoiding the wrath of their over-protective shotgun-wielding father."
Oh man, I'm loving the humor here.
Quoted from o-din:i'm hoping we can see more sexy broads on upcoming pinball machines.
I love the word "broad", and it's criminally underused these days.
I find it extra amusing when a woman uses it to refer to another woman. Sometimes, even for women, it sums up how you feel about a gal.
Quoted from Sinestro:I love the word "broad", and it's criminally underused these days.
I find it extra amusing when a woman uses it to refer to another woman. Sometimes, even for women, it sums up how you feel about a gal.
It certainly does have broad appeal.
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Los Angeles, CA
. She made pin-up art for Playboy for many years.
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