I’ll be brief. I just want to have a short rant. This could be the place for that?!
We just went to a local art and craft exhibition. And there, on display, no doubt with gardens in mind, were several statues of naked women. Which reminded me just how much I do not want to see statues of naked women in gardens.
I don’t care about cultural preferences. I do not want to hear about the long history of such images in dead people’s gardens. Here is one of those, at Rousham,
Which is very much a dead person’s garden, but it does do naked men as well:
Whoopee.
It also does a lion eating a horse, so how much better could it get??
Unbelievable, what people want to look at in their gardens.
Anyway, at this exhibition, there were these statues for sale:
My friend asked whether this is how I relax in the garden?
One of these IS dressed. Great. I’m not totally sure it’s an improvement.
This one also had a dress on but looked as if she was about to remove it:
(You can see it was a very rural exhibition)
This artist likes grey women.
Now, it’s not that I want to get all prissy correct and cancel whoever made these. But I spent my youth failing to be the sex object we all then felt we had to be and this stuff is an unpleasant reminder of that pressure to present ourselves to be gawped at.
And in the garden, for heaven’s sake. Out there in all weathers. This is art by and for people who also have no empathy. You may love looking at naked women in your garden – but in the middle of winter??? In a snow storm??? A howling gale?? Really? Wouldn’t it make you shiver??
We have a statue of a naked man in our local town, Chepstow.
He originally had all his equipment, but that was not popular, so he was neutered. Last winter I noticed that some kind person shared my preoccupation with nakedness in the cold :
Maybe that is what naked women in gardens need too.
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