CREATIVE EXPLORATION | SEXUALISATION & OBJECTIFICATION OF GIRLS

A Creativity Journey Into Self

Pin-up Girls, My Father & Me & Sexual Abuse

Art and writing have been a major part of my inner healing. Allowing my unconscious to inform me of what I need to know.

As often happens with much of my creations, I have no plan of where it will end up and just allow whatever comes to unfold. It’s about the moment. Going with the flow. And this is how the Pin-up girls came to offer me insights.

In some of my sketchbooks, I use both sides of the page. The image above was done in an 8.5 x 11-inch hard cover sketchbook purchased at Michael’s.

If I use markers, the ink bleeds through to the back side of the paper. I later paint or paste images over those marks.

This time, instead of acrylic paint, I had the urge to use charcoal and just make marks and scribbles and blend it around the page. I had no clue where I was going from there.

Instead of using the spray fixative, I brushed on a coat of water-based polyurethane to stabilize the charcoal.

Wanting to use some of the many bits and pieces of paper I’ve collected for collage work, I sorted through folders of images to use up papers I couldn’t see a future use for. Such as the ones of pin-up girls.

I’d printed the tiny pictures of pin-up girls from the internet in December 2020 to use as a tattoo on a female’s arm. I ended up using two pin-up girl pictures on two of my paintings, finishing them both in January 2021.

Using all the leftover images, I randomly glued them onto the charcoal covered page, still with no idea where it might lead.

Then I found a couple of blurred photocopied images of women and glued them onto the opposite white paper page.

From there, I added more paper and paint, and was reminded of my father.

The first pictures of pin-up girls I’d ever seen had been in my father’s garage in the 1960s. He had many calendars on the walls from various years filled with scantily clad women posed against a tree, stretched out on the beach, or sprawled on the hood of a car.

These women had stared back with red lips, offering something I didn’t fully yet understand.

In the now, working on the collage, I remembered a copy of a drawing of that younger me I’d been when first seeing those pin-ups girls.

During the 1990s, I’d made a series of sketches for work I never ended up doing. I drew my parents as giants. Went through photos and drew various images of myself as a child.

Since then, I’ve been using copies of these drawings for collages.

Here is the picture of the black-and-white I drew the image from.

After I added a copy of my child image to the collage, I noticed how much her pose resembled that of a pin-up girl.

These words then came to mind:

Did I need to be like a pin-up girl to please daddy?

A bathing suit and confidence.

The stance that says I’m not afraid of anything. That I have a gift for you. And that gift is me. I’m not like Mommy. I’m not a prude. And I will do what she won’t do.

Our father often made comments for all to hear that my mother didn’t give him sex.

In my teen years, I leaned towards my father’s views of sex. (But maybe those views had started at a much younger age than I’ve always thought).

In my teen years, I found a stash of my father’s books and read them.

My father kept stacks of western comics and novels in an upstairs closet, all left over from his younger days. He went to work, came home in the evening, ate supper, sometimes watched a little TV, and went to bed early. On the weekends, he spent time in his garage. He was seldom around. He hid his drinking from us and confused me with his behaviour.

As a child, my sister and I had discovered porn magazines and liquor bottles under the mattress on his side of the bed. My mother’s side of the bed contained numerous Bibles and New Testaments.

Lusty & Busty

I was busty at a young age. Had it made me believe I also had to be lusty?

Babes. Boobs. Legs. Sexy looks. A willing woman. I understood my importance was in my body parts.

I was to be naughty, to be nice. Flirty and fun. I learned to play the game.

Snakes & Ladders had been a childhood game. A game of naughty and nice. My mother preached the climb up the ladder. The morals.

Our father bragged about his young man’s escapades. He was sex and the slippery slide down. And somewhere between the two I had to decide what to be.

Both turned out to be about pleasing someone else.

Words that came to mind about the pin-up girls:

They are sexy.

They're sweet and can dance you off your feet.

Why would I not want to be a pin-up girl?

Why would I not want to be what my Daddy wanted me to be?

The first pin-ups were in 1941. Pictures of sexually attractive women suitable for pinning on a wall for men to admire.

They originated from WWII, for a boost in morale for soldiers and other war-stricken men.

The pin-up girl later gained a more sexualized reputation in the 50s.

I recall when in my early 30s, my father and his brother-in-law, Phinney sat together once a week and watched the same few porn films over and over, all afternoon and evening. I didn’t think two elderly men watching people having sex over and over was a normal activity. Even worse had been that my kids were toddlers and I had to tell my parents it was inappropriate for my children to be in the same room while porn movies were playing.

I also recalled a wedding reception we all attended and how my father and Phinney sat around making sexual comments about women. Sizing them up. Making remarks about who looked like they wanted sex and who didn’t.

Sex. Sex. Sex. It was all they focused on. It was all about sex.

In the photo below, Phinney is the man on the left in the pink shirt. My father is on the right in the white shirt and vest.

Women were nothing more than sexual objects to them.

A memory from the 1990s when I first uncovered my father as a sexual abuser. I remembered sitting on his lap as a child and how he’d say, “Just move a little. Or sit more to this side.” He blamed it on the keys in his front pocket. That he had to move them because me or my sister were sitting on his keys, and they were poking into his thigh.

But as an adult, I questioned if the keys were poking into him. Shouldn’t they have also bothered us?

I got a sick feeling in my stomach. What if it wasn’t the keys at all? But he wanted to position us just right to be rubbing up against his penis?

Once I became busty, my father no longer let me sit on his lap. I was a big girl, and he only allowed the two younger girls in our family to sit on his lap. He rubbed their flat chests and joked that he had to make their titties grow. He’d look at me and say mine didn’t need any more hand cultivating. That they’d already grown enough.

I learned to listen to such remarks and accept them as my truth. I learned to like what I didn’t like in order to please men. Pleasing men involved sex. Meeting their needs. Satisfying them. Doing what they wanted. It was the only form of love I knew.

In my teens, did I re-enact my earlier life of what I already knew?

Convincing myself that I had power only by pleasing men. Power being a seductress.

Just like the many layers in creating this picture, it brought up the many beliefs I learned along the way. Thoughts. Memories. All like pieces of a puzzle. Pieces of me.

Barbara Carter — Artist and writer with a focus on healing from childhood trauma, alcohol addiction, and living her best authentic life.