The illustration above is a black-and-white rendering, editing by yours truly, of Gustave Courbet's famous 1866 painting, "L'Origine du monde." The painting, which has a fascinating history, was shocking for its time, and still has sufficient shock value to cause it to occasionally run afoul of censorship (on Facebook, for example.).
But what we are seeing in the picture is not a woman's genitals (women have internal genitals, which is much neater, and apparently more socially acceptable, than the male arrangement). What we are seeing is glorious, full-bush pubic hair, such as we seldom see now.
Since 1866, there has been considerable advancement of our ability and freedom to depict the female nude, partly due to photography. We think, for example, of Judy Chicago's installation, The Dinner Party, and of many photographic series showing the delightful diversity of women's vulvas.
Have we, then, become quite open-minded? I don't think so.
I am reminded of the ill treatment that early exhibitions of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographic work, mostly based on male nudity, received. There is, it seems, tremendous bias against male genitals, which cannot be easily hidden in nude art, and which bear the additional burden of indicating the presence or absence of sexual arousal, and its extent.
I have been a naturist for about forty years, and am well familiar with the lengths naturists and nudists go to to separate nudity from sex. The majority will tell you that nudity has nothing to do with sex. But an increasingly vocal minority will say, "except, of course, when it does."
I recently published the following poem in the blog:
Who Banned the Body?
Who banned the body?
Who imprisoned desire?
If the body is not free,
neither are we.
We locked ourselves up,
and threw away
the key
In the blog, I accompanied the poem with this illustration:
Because I did not wish to offend Facebook's robotic censors, after posting the link, I hurriedly suppressed the link preview (the picture). But in that one minute before I removed the photo from the FB post, the post got one "like." For the next eleven hours, after removing the photo from the post, it got none. I restored the photo, and soon got another "like." This tells me the Facebook's position on nudity is both hypocritical and unnecessary.
In retrospect, the illustration I used was quite tame. It's choice was predicated on awareness of the societal bias against male genitals. I would have preferred to use this one, which seems to me to be more honest:
Or this one, which is perhaps more honest still:
I, too, have allowed myself to be imprisoned when I really want to be free. In a more perfect world, though, one with full equality for male and female genitals, I would be able to use a tasteful closeup of male genitals.
I don't think we are quite there yet, but are getting closer. In the meantime, I would appreciate any feedback on this post. You can comment on the blog post itself, or via email: exolinguist at gmail dot com. And if you (male or female) would like to have your hidden treasures immortalized with respect and excellent photo editing, you can send original, tasteful photos to the same email address. I'll return the finished product by email (free of charge, of course), and will publish the best of them here.
We need to finish what Gustave Courbet started.
Text and original images © 2019 by Donald C. Jacobson Traxler.
ADDENDUM
Here is "L'autre origine du monde:"
In this space I'll add sample contributions, with my editing:
Please contribute, if you would like to.
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