No Offense

I’m a very tolerant person. I mean that I really do accept and respect other people’s right to like what they like, even if I don’t. I also accept that there are people who enjoy things that I may find offensive. That doesn’t mean that I take personal offense or that the person enjoying it offends me. It simply means that I find that thing to be offensive. That being said, this will be a mini rant, not about those who enjoy it, but just about the thing and why I find it offensive.



I have always disliked “sex-art,” that is artist renderings of women in revealing lingerie or provocative poses, like the pinup drawings of the 1940s and 50s. That is not me being a prude. That’s actually me being both a feminist and very open minded. I am not offended by and find it quite preferable to see pornographic photographs than a drawing of a cutsie girl in see-through clothes.

I’m not sure that I understand at all why I have seen the sexy cupie-dolls on so many scrapbook sites. I mean, I would expect a hobby that is enjoyed by predominately women to be the last place I'd see women sexually exploited. That’s what those drawings are, sexual exploitation. A lot of the modern ones I’ve seen online are even credited as being works done by men and they appear on women’s blogs!

I had done some research and an editorial a few years ago about the pinup-girl smut drawings. They depicted women victimized by, if nothing else, their own lack of intelligence. The most reprehensible part of the old “sexy lady cartoons” was that these weren’t actual women per se, so the assumption was that no one was harmed in the distribution of them. In fact, it was often average American housewives that were the subject of the “artist’s” renderings.

Imagine it today, a woman is grocery shopping with her kids and an “artist,” or maybe you’d call them “perverts,” sees her and fantasizes her on her knees in a see-through nightie. He draws his fantasy, while doing whatever else that fantasy drives him to do, then he copies, distributes and profits from it. All the while a woman buying Mac and Cheese for her five-year-old has no idea that she was undressed, drawn and sold.

I sometimes wonder if in the pinup drawing days there were men who bought pinups that they found attractive because they were modeled after their own wives? I find pornographic photography to be much less offensive. In those photos, for whatever reason they model posed, she was compensated, not victimized. I don’t think there is anyone that poses for a nude photo that has any naive delusions about for what they will be used as an end product.

It's my opinion, but the latter is women stopping the exploitation of the former. If the pictures are going to be made and bought, the subjects are going to make to profit, not some perv hanging out at the mall!



Okay girlie-drawings rant is over. Like I said, I find them offensive, but I’m not personally offended, nor do I hold it against anyone else who DOES enjoy them.

Here is my original editorial: http://simplydavine.motime.com/1094564961#335847