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

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.

SnS MC BV 1 (resized).jpg

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.

You can't get a thesis approved with such a brief pithy statement. You gotta pad it out!

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!!

strikes and spares redhead notice (resized).jpg