![]() ![]() There’s a place for that kind of idealization, but it’s hard to make it look real or forward-looking there’s no way to excuse it as being something other than what it is. Pin-up calendar art, on the other hand, can never really claim to be realistic: the great pin-up photographers or artists, like Gil Elvgren, dealt proudly in unrealistic, idealized glamour. But a show like Game of Thrones usually has a bit of plausible deniability on its side: it can always claim that the nude scenes are there for realism. ![]() Game of Thrones is a show whose popularity depends in part on the constant nudity, and while the show has gotten its share of complaints, that didn’t stop it from cleaning up at the Emmys. The line between exploitive and empowering art can sometimes be a little hard to define. Today, the pinup-girl calendar can’t compete with the other options, so it may make sense for a company like Pirelli to go after a new audience: women, who, after all, are approximately half of their potential customers. In the 1980s, television mostly gave up on the “jiggle” show-shows like Charlie’s Angels where the heroines were constantly in skimpy outfits-not because the ’80s were such an enlightened time, but simply because cable TV had made actual nudity available for anyone who wanted it. The same may be true of cheesecake, which is one step down from Playboy nudity. ![]() Playboy magazine announced last month that it would no longer publish nudes, and it was widely seen as an admission that this type of nudity couldn’t compete with the harder stuff that is now easy to access. For those who don’t believe in corporate protestations of responsibility, a more cynical explanation would be that cheesecake art simply can’t compete with the easy availability of pornography. ![]() When companies talk about why they’re doing this, they usually talk in terms of social responsibility. The drawing style familiar from the 1990s-women with oversized breasts who posed in such a way as to make both their chest and posteriors face the reader-has given way to more natural-looking poses and costumes that cover the whole body. “You will NOT see any future merchandising featuring the slave outfit ever again.” Campbell is an artist well-known for his cheesecake style, particularly in his comic book Danger Girl, and he and other artists have noted that this type of art is now not as prevalent at comic book companies as it used to be. “Disney is already well on its way to wiping out the ‘slave’ outfit from any future products,” wrote comic book artist J. And in 2015, more and more companies are abandoning that kind of fan service.Īs the new Star Wars movie approaches, for example, Disney has reportedly been downplaying the only obvious moment of cheesecake in the first trilogy, Princess Leia’s gold bikini from the third film. But that scene produced a bigger-than-expected backlash, to the point that one of the writers felt it necessary to apologize for the scene. Abrams’s second Star Trek movie could casually have a female character strip down to her underwear, in the long, long tradition of women conveniently losing their clothes at opportune moments. Only two years ago, this was still common enough that J.J. It’s part of a growing backlash: among corporations that produce this kind of thing, and against anything that looks like it’s putting women in skimpy outfits for its own sake. The message of the whole calendar is clear: a rejection of what used to be known as “ good girl art,” and of calendars that exist for men to ogle-like, for example, the last 30 or so Pirelli calendars. One of the few people who isn’t fully clothed is Amy Schumer, whose nearly nude pose is deliberately the exact opposite of the usual calendar photo: instead of a self-consciously sexy pose with lots of airbrushing, Schumer and Leibovitz chose a casual pose that emphasizes the real shape of a woman’s body. Instead she focused on fully clad women of achievement, like Selma director Ava DuVernay or beloved New York eccentric Fran Lebowitz. But this time around, photographer Annie Leibovitz eliminated “cheesecake” art almost entirely. The limited-edition calendar has almost always featured what you’d expect: pin-up pictures of supermodels. But that’s what’s happening with the new calendar from the Pirelli tire company. It may seem strange for a calendar-one of the most old-fashioned objects in existence-to be referred to as the herald of a new cultural age. Carrie Fisher in Star Wars Episode VI: Return Of The Jedi, 1983. ![]()
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