A Great Sense of Loss: Vintage Airplane Nose Art

When I was in Shreveport with the husband the last time, we strolled through the collection of airplanes at the small museum on base. The base has what seems to me a fairly good sized (considering the smallness of the museum) collection of airplanes, including big ones like B52s and other big bombers. What struck me while I was looking at these planes up close was that most of them have been stripped, sanded, of any of the old nose art they used to have. You could see the pattern on one silver plane where the painting had been-- it had been a bomb with shapely women's legs coming out of it-- but the paint had been sanded off the plane very carefully. The fact that you could still make out the picture also reminded me of the subversive practice of pagans carving their own gods into the robes of Christian statues in cathedrals-- it was still sort of there, if you looked closely enough and "between the lines." But I'm not sure that was intentional.

I asked the hubby about it and he said that in his air group, they have one plane left that has the air nose art of a woman on it. You know what I'm talking about-- those cool, pinup style pictures that used to grace the fronts of airplanes. One of the most famous is probably the Memphis Belle art, but there are lots of vintage style women on planes; I'm sure the artists' inspiration and airplane's name gave lots of room for variation. Some of them were a little risque-- some of the replications I've seen on the Internet do not leave a lot of room for the imagination. But the art, to me, has always been a beautiful part of vintage airplanes-- and the reason why I figured it's not on modern air craft was just lack of time and/or inclination for other reasons. Virgin Airlines' logo harkens back to the practice, and I love it for that reason.

But I begin to wonder if there's not some sort of policital correctness gone wrong here. Perhaps it's a problem that people think now that there are women involved more readily in aviation, they'll be offended or feel objectified by the women on the planes so they'd better scour any trace of them off the plane before it's too late, and our delicate sensibilities are wounded. Or that perhaps there were actual women who complained, for those same sorts of reasons, and the military, smarting from past problems (cough Tailhook scandal cough) and really overly sensitive and quite eager to avoid anything that could get them into trouble again, removed anything left over for fear of offense. Trust me when I say, from an insider's perspective, that the military is quite worried about its public image, and doesn't want people to think that it's all boobs, beer, and bombs (anymore). (How do you like that clever alliteration? Hmmm?) To the point where military gatherings are realllllly boring most of the time, and everyone leaves as soon as possible, because everyone is way worried about doing something inappropriate. (And the few occasions where something remotely inappropriate did happen, it was swiftly dealt with).

But this removal of the art, the careful sanding to eradicate any piece of something that someone might or might not be disturbed by is horrible to me. The idea that the mere picture of a sexy woman on an airplane from the 1940s would cause me to feel all "dirty-need-a-shower" bothers me a whole lot. It reminds me, in fact, of the idea that women must be veiled from head to toe, with only her eyes peeking out, or else perhaps she might inflame the lust of males by her mere ankle showing, and, because of women's inherent lust and vile corruptiblity, it is for her protection that she be covered up. To protect her from herself. The assumption that sexy pinup women would offend me is a worse sort of offense, in that way, than seeing the suggestion of nipples under the painted-on shirt of a vintage pinup girl on a B52.

I think, and I'm fairly sure that any historian would back this up, that the art on airplanes served two purposes. One: it reminded men (often terribly young ones) who were alone and very far from home, being shot at and perhaps dying, of what they were fighting for (the home front, love, family, and yes, sex). Two: it was very like the old fashioned figureheads on the fronts of ships from "days of yore." Those figureheads were there for a lot of reasons, too-- including protection from evil, as well as representations of the "soul" of the ship. So no, it's not that aviators are dirty minded lechers out to corrupt the hearts and minds of the world. It's not that they want to do some vile damage to the purity of womanhood. It's sort of a long-standing tradition, and the loss of it pains me greatly if it is political correctness, and I'm sad that something related partly to women's insistence that we not be treated as inferior, might have something to do with. If so, it's truly a misrepresentation of the concept of objectification.

It's truly a sign that women are not equal that we still have to worry about whether someone looking at our boobs means they are not respecting us as equal. (Does that make sense?) If we really were equal, it wouldn't matter at all.


To see more air nose art, check out the following webpages: http://www.airpowermuseum.org/trartgal.html#exhibitlist

http://www.nose-art.net/index.html There's also a couple of calendars and book collections, if you feel really strongly about it.