Sprue Cutters Union #6: Won’t touch it!

I’m jumping into the Sprue Cutters Union (SCU) with this entry. SCU is a “blog carnival”, a collection of bloggers being challenged to answer the same questions on a weekly basis. Join us!

This week’s question:
What will never make its way on to your workbench?

I’m still very new to this hobby, so I’m not going to rule much of anything out, genre-wise. I might not be that interested in civilian cars, but then again, rusty, old, busted cars might be fun some day!

That said, there’s one clear answer to this question: scantily clad female figures. I can comfortably say that I will never be doing figures like the one featured in the most recent Weathering Magazine:

As I wrote about in depth, this is an unnecessary and fairly sexist subject that creates a pointlessly difficult conversation with my 6 year old daughter. As I said over in my rant article:

If any of you have daughters, you’ve almost certainly faced questions from her or to yourself about how far she can go in life and what restrictions society may place on her dreams as a woman. You’ve almost certainly gotten mad when you see overt sexism or underlying threads of it, at work or at play. I work in the computing industry and I’m ashamed of how my industry has largely shunned or flat out chased off women who are interested in learning and joining the industry. It’s not good for them or for any of the rest of us.

I build to recreate history, to focus on interesting construction, detailing, and scratchbuilding techniques. I build because I like having something my daughter and I can connect on. I don’t build to live out some teenage fantasy of painting girly parts on disproportionate female figures. My daughter is growing up with plenty of unrealistic and harmful body image influences in the world around her… she doesn’t need to see it on my workbench.