I say that this trumped-up nonsense proves only that we've become paranoid and easily manipulated. Personally, I'm not a touchy-feely kind-o-guy, but some people (male and female) are. They are not sex-mad monsters; they simply have a different concept of personal space. We've all run into 'em. We anti-touchies send non-verbal signals to the touchies -- sorry, but that's too close -- and usually, things work out fine.When touchies meet, it's hugs all around, and that's fine too -- for them.
Such is life. Things have always been and always will be that way, despite the insanity -- the literal insanity -- injected into our body politic by intersectional feminists and other postmodern loonies who use neo-Puritanism as a control mechanism.
Not long ago, a DU participant offered -- yet again -- this sage advice:
Believe women. PERIOD. ntMy response is below the asterisks...
* * *
Including the SRA claimants?
I tried to write a book about that Satanic Ritual Abuse controversy in the 1990s, and in the course of my research, I met women who made all sorts of unlikely claims.
Everyone seems to have forgotten that the SRA allegations were pushed heavily by the feminists of that period. I don't know why that fact has been allowed to go down the memory hole, and I don't know why this history should not color our current assessment of feminism.
What happened at that time goes no small ways toward explaining why, according to all polls, feminism is unpopular -- even among women. This, in a country where most people believe in equal rights. (Example. Another example.)
The axiom "Believe women PERIOD" is incredibly dangerous. Do you include Lauren Stratford? "Toby Cole" (a.k.a. Margaret Louise Herget)? Ruth Finley? Cindy James? Eunice Pringle? Betty Hill? Michelle Smith? Cathy O'Brien? You probably won't recognize most of those names, but if you fire up Google, I promise that you'll spend some fascinating hours. Give me a full five minutes and I can come up with another list of women who have made similar claims.
We all recall (or should recall) that a woman was offered $20,000 to "Me Too" Mueller. If she had taken the money, would she have been worthy of belief? Add a couple of zeroes to that figure, and you'll have an idea of what we're in for in 2020.
There is no data to support the claim that women are uniquely holy. There is no evidence that women cannot be bribed or corrupted. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, some 18.5% of the population suffers from mental illness in a given year, and I've seen no evidence to suggest that the 18.5% includes only males.
* * *
This madness invaded the art world a long time ago. As many of you know, I am (or was) a painter, although I don't allow anyone to see my current dabblings. Nowadays, I occasionally write about art on the Wetcanvas forums. Speaking as an (unsuccessful) artist, I have to admit that I am pluperfectly pissed off at what the feminist nutcases have done to what I still consider my passion. For perhaps the first time since the Renaissance, the nude has become off-limits, because so many viewers have been brainwashed by "gender studies" nutcases with body insecurity issues.
Allow me to republish some words I wrote back in 2005.
* * *
Any young person learning to draw encounters a huge problem: People love to watch artists at work. Unfortunately, most of those onlookers are annoying idiots -- especially if a young would-be craftsman is trying to teach himself the basics of human anatomy.
The moronic kids at school who watched me sketch all held to one basic theory of art: If you draw it, that means you want to fuck it.
If you draw a picture of a woman (even a clothed woman), you are considered guilty of creating a dirty picture. If you draw a man, you are guilty of creating a gay picture.
If you draw it, you must want to fuck it. Every school-aged moron in the world makes that presumption.
I shudder to think of how those morons must have tormented Audubon.
Of course, every young artist ought to spend at least one hour each and every day drawing naked people of both sexes. This practice has nothing to do with heterosexuality or homosexuality. You must draw lots and lots of naked people. Lean people. Muscular people. Also fat, blobby people. Short people. Tall people. Beautiful people. Ugly people. Parts of people. Heads. Feet. Breasts. Hands.
Why? Because that is how you learn.
If you want to be a great pianist, you have to spend many a youthful hour practicing scales. Same principle.
But the young artist -- unlike, say, the young baseball player -- soon learns that he must never allow anyone to watch him practice. The young artist learns that art, like masturbation, is something one has to do in secret. Drawing becomes a covert operation because the world is filled with jelly-headed morons who "know" only one thing about art: If you draw it, you must want to fuck it.
Alas, although those jelly-headed morons in school have all grown up by now, they refuse to progress beyond moron-hood. Some of these adult morons call themselves fundamentalists. Some consider themselves feminists. They're really just morons.
If I recall my art history, the earliest nude sculpture of the Renaissance was Donatello's David, created in the 1430s. Before that time, the morons of the Middle Ages equated nudity with sexuality. Before Donatello, the last time anyone had dared to display nudity in art was when the Roman empire still ruled.
I am sorry to report that we've returned to the bad old days of the Middle Ages.
This is true even in the rarified world of "high art." Paint a naked human male in any context, in any style, and I guarantee you -- I GUARANTEE you -- any art critic who describes the piece will include the word "homoerotic" in the first paragraph.
If you draw or paint a nude female, take care not to do so realistically. And make sure she is unattractive. Otherwise, moron critics will make dismissive references to your "Playboy mentality," and feminists will blather on about the objectification of women and how sad it is that little girls must grow up with unrealistic standards of feminine beauty. And so on. You know the drill.
That sort of moronic critique was not heard in the so-called "Victorian" age. But it is now inescapable.
All such critics are morons, even if they have degrees in Art History. Anyone who insists on viewing a nude figure purely in sexual terms is just a grown-up version of those annoying jelly-headed pseudo-humanoids who made my life in school hellish while I was trying to practice my craft.
Today, I read an infuriating, just INFURIATING article in the Los Angeles Times about an artistic brouhaha in Venice, California -- an L.A. beachside suburb known as a home for artists and avant-garde thinkers. This is also the home of "Muscle Beach." When I was young, this city was where you would find California's most famous nude beach.
I was astonished to learn that such a community could house a sufficient number nasally-blue morons to endanger the installation of a new public sculpture. The work, by Robert Graham, is a stainless steel female torso.
A publicly-displayed nude sculpture wouldn't bother Europeans, of course -- just look at the fountains in Italy and France. And there are plenty of nudes adorning various temples in India. Hell, the Sun Temple of Konark in Orissa is famous for is sculptures of people (or divinities) fucking. Fortunately, the creators of those lovely, large-breasted goddesses did not have to deal with feminists, or with art critics who make snide references to Hugh Hefner.
But Americans are not so civilized:
Regina Weller, Venice Foursquare Church administrator and the pastor's wife, complained that from the office window of the church on Riviera Avenue "we would see her backside. I work with women in recovery, and no matter what, it's a naked torso of a woman."Dig it: The bluenoses are using the argot of "recovery" to justify mindless puritanism.
Oh, but it gets worse:
The objectors are not the first to charge Graham with degrading women. In 1994, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker was awarded a Graham-designed statuette of a nude female torso for being a California "state treasure."YARRRGH!
Walker, who had just completed a book and a film about female genital mutilation, was outraged. "Imagine my horror when...I was presented with a decapitated, armless, legless woman on which my name hung from a chain," she told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Robert Graham is an extremely gifted artist. (From a web page devoted to his work: "Robert Graham is known for his sculptures of women, which convey not only physical strength and beauty but also individuality, intelligence, and grace.") This fine talent creates a female torso -- a traditional subject for art -- and Walker, instead of being gratified, moronically wonders where the arms are.
My god. Does she really think that if an artist chooses not to sculpt the arms or feet, that those limbs have been cut off?
Are some people SO FUCKING STUPID that they believe the traditional bust to be a depiction of a decapitated head?
(Flashback to sixth grade: The jelly-headed moron looking over my shoulder while I'm trying to draw asks -- as I KNOW he will ask -- "Where're the legs?" I answer, as I always do: "I haven't drawn them yet." If I had started with the legs, the same moron would have asked where the torso and head were. I'm tempted to shoot back: "What if I don't draw the legs at all? Do I have to draw a complete figure every damn time? Who made that rule?")
Question for Alice Walker: Your novel "The Color Purple" is set in the 1930s. Why don't you talk about Adolf Hitler in that book? Why doesn't your novel describe the rise of Mao? Why no chapters devoted to the Spanish civil war? Huh? Why'd you cut all that important stuff out? Why the censorship?
The answer is obvious: The artist must be free to narrow his or her focus. Otherwise, the only acceptable sculpture would be a full-scale duplicate of planet Earth.
I once visited the studio of a wood sculptor in Big Sur. A genius. He happens to be gay. His works included a large statue of an erect penis. Would Alice Walker consider this piece a "dismemberment"? I fear she would!
I don't care how many awards that woman has won. She's just another moron.
So there we have it. I like to draw nudes, particularly female nudes. I often paint realistically. I think it would be fun to paint a female torso.
But how can anyone create work of that sort in an age when everyone -- EVERYONE -- highbrow and lowbrow -- defines the nude purely in terms of sexuality? How can we escape the tyranny of the presumption that "If you draw it, you must want to fuck it"?
6 comments:
I might extend this to include this bullshit: if you touch it you want to fuck it.
A slight twist on Joe's subject: http://algonquinonthebayou.blogspot.com/2013/02/patty-and-sharon-get-their-mojo-working.html
Sorry to hoard your comment section, but I'd also like to observe that there are too many who will not be satisfied until all women wear burkas.
An unintended consequence of the widespread recognition of gay rights is that the art world has been deprived. In times past, gay people had to struggle with their alienation and their pain through art. Now that gay people are accepted in professional circles, they have options, they can live the white picket fence life -- they can be just as boring as everybody else. Justice's gain is art's loss.
I am the only true anon
Anon, I don't want gay people to suffer alienation and pain. Oddly, the gays I met in L.A. in the 70s seemed happier -- more "gay" in the traditional sense of the word. Nowadays, too many gay people are tiresome, guilt-giving scolds. And -- I hasten to add -- the EXACT SAME COMPLAINT can be made of non-gays. The problem isn't with the subculture; the problem is with the culture as a whole.
That said, it is true that the art scene in New York has been controlled since at least the late 1960s by "the Homintern," a play on the word "Comintern." "Homintern" is a word coined not by sneering outsiders but by gays themselves, at least the ones controlling the art galleries and museums. Basically, they came up with that word as their way of both confessing and celebrating the fact that they now controlled the art world.
The big problem: If you own it, you have to take responsibility. We have to ask ourselves: Do we LIKE what has happened in the world of art since that period? Should we be happy when fraudists like Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Jean-Michel Basquiat are considered geniuses, while truly talented artists like Odd Nerdrum are dismissed as kitsch?
If you DON'T like how that world is run, then you have no choice but to blame gays. Ownership is ownership.
The same can be said about fashion. How many times have we heard feminists bewail (with justification) the industry's obsession with ultra-thin female models? Years ago, I made a few female readers howl with outrage when I pointed out that GAY men control that industry. If you don't like the way that industry is run, you can't blame "the patriarchy" and you sure as hell can't blame guys like me. If it were up to ME, all of the women on those runways would look like Christina Hendricks plus an extra 10-25 pounds.
“…no wonder people social-climb in New York, since it has more genuine social mobility than London or Paris, where clothes, accents, and manners reveal all too much about origins and where there are no more than three degrees of separation between any two people. Everyone already knows every single bad thing about you. In all three cities, people practice what Paul Valéry called the ‘delirious professions,’ those careers that depend on self-assurance and the opinions of others rather than on certifiable skills. The delirious professions, I’d hazard, comprise literature, criticism, design, the visual arts, acting, advertising, all of the media—but not dance, for instance, where you can either do your thirty-two tour jetés without ‘traveling’ downstage, or you can’t. If you can do them, you can dance in any company in the world without further ado. But all the delirious professions, having no agreed-upon standards, require introductions and alliance, protectors and patrons, famous teachers or acclaim by someone reputed. In short, they depend upon that most mercurial of all possessions: reputation.”
~Edmund White (“City Boy”)
Post a Comment