Gallery removes naked nymphs painting to 'prompt conversation'

[oddoneout]

The success of male strippers in recent years - for example I read yesterday that some outfit called the Dreamboys will be in Sheffield City Hall the evening before the next Philharmonic concert would suggest that your views about women and the full monty are rather out of date !

I don't think that the rise of male strippers invalidates what I said. Just because the disparity between men and women with regards to the existence and frequenting of such places is lessening doesn't necessarily mean that all women want the same level of exposure to nude men as men seem to want of women.
If one has views about the 'objectification' of the human body and all that comes with that, then there is perhaps an argument that the level at which men are catered for is not something for the women's equivalent to be aiming for? Which is one of the points perhaps that Manchester may have been trying to encourage discussion about?

[greenilex]

I suppose many of us still fantasise about contacts with the maternal breast.

[Beef Oven!]

I suppose many of us still fantasise about contacts with the maternal breast.

speak for yourself .....

[Beef Oven!]

That's a very good point. Times change and this is surely an example of women's 'equality' : though whether such events play the same role as an all-men's do of the Presidents Club might be doubted. I can't say I'm very interested in this particular manifestation of 'women's equality' (I'd prefer a good book)! But I don't know whether I'm typical …

too rongs make a rite?

[Lat-Literal]

That's a very good point. Times change and this is surely an example of women's 'equality' : though whether such events play the same role as an all-men's do of the Presidents Club might be doubted. I can't say I'm very interested in this particular manifestation of 'women's equality' (I'd prefer a good book)! But I don't know whether I'm typical …

Part 1 of 2:

'I am about to eat sushi off a naked woman's body'

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/feb/12/nyotaimori-eating-sushi-naked-woman

"Nude restaurant in Spain allows diners to eat their food directly off the naked bodies of their model waiters and waitresses"

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4156684/Restaurant-diners-eat-food-directly-naked-bodies.html

Even this phenomenon isn't new. On one of the many evenings in the late 1980s when all university friends were still single and people were discussing where to go, one suggested a place in London, possibly Indian, where such a thing was taking place. He was on his own. We passed on the suggestion. He subsequently left banking for teaching and in his fifties has just become a father for the fourth and fifth times. Perhaps what is new is that it is no longer only women on dining tables. In the same period, I was in charge of an Administrative Officer, bright, nine stone, rather strange looking and from a council estate in Plumstead. He would join me and other friends at work for occasional evenings with drinks in the 1990s.

As we talked football, music and politics, he would attempt to steer the conversation towards strip clubs he had attended, hardcore films in which he was starring, a collection of Joe Soaps with an American "actress" shipped in to London for filming, and, perhaps most notably, all the things he was viewing on his computer in the office with a "who cares?". I am in no doubt whatsoever it was all as genuine as the way in which he was being championed in the Ministers' offices before ultimately being headhunted by a woman for a six figure post at a private political consultancy. Weirdly, it was the rest of us who didn't talk openly about what was being said to us. I think we valued these people's protection more than they did. They saw it as unnecessary. I am more than happy to write about it now because in financial terms alone I got the hump. Clearly, the attitude at the very least worked in their favour.

Elsewhere, I have already alluded to male strippers at working clubs since the 1970s in the north. That too was told to me by someone who was a sort of friend during and after university before a dramatic falling out. The one who rose to be a senior Civil Servant when every member of his family, male and female, had worked in some basic capacity in the mining industry. Some became market traders following cuts. With further consideration, I'm not sure that the historical evidence supports it but then he was bisexual and upwardly mobile, proud to be a Yorkshireman but very critical of working class Yorkshire culture so his character, including elements of pomposity, may have led to invention. Still, there was subsequently not only "The Full Monty" (1997) but "Calendar Girls" (2003). If the first was in some ways a late lament to fading industry - have to get money somehow etc. - the second was apparently about women's liberation and, crucially given that it was of this century, raising money for charidee, specifically leukaemia. That has sparked an industry of its own from female hockey clubs to male rugby clubs with an emphasis that is far from working class. Common mores which were maintained by not talking about things that might have been occurring less frequently and more quietly before these decades have been replaced by no one knowing what or how to think with any consistency. But then manipulation is preferred.

We do, though, need to talk about class issues here. That begins with the women's movement of the seventies. The one which saw Erin Pizzey fleeing for her life to the United States because of intimidation from British feminists who felt that she should be more critical of men. Looking after what were called battered wives in a refuge wasn't enough for them when she should have been doing "useful" things like parading about, working the legal system and giving speeches in the unreal world of Parliament. Next up, the early 1980s. Harriet walks into Westminster. She knows it is a predominantly posh boys' school although many women of substance have preceded her and more than held their own. She is, by her account, overwhelmed as well as angry. Lord knows how she ever managed to cope with walking the streets of Peckham. Privately, as she implies in her book, she can hardly remember her wedding to Jack. She didn't believe in marriage as it was patriarchal but, hey, they got married anyway. Then they had the kids while pursuing their extremely high level careers.

Arguably, it lasted partially because they were rarely seen or photographed together in public. It could look to some more akin to a marriage of convenience. That might well have been a part of their secret joke for when they got hitched, it was spontaneous, an oh we might as well do this today, a flung together thing and it isn't anyone else's business. In character, that is how it could still seem although behind the scenes there is no doubt love. Great. It meant that she would not have to be her oppressed mother, cooking the Harley Street husband's breakfast while balancing her law books on the stove before deciding she would have to give up on a career. The girls - five - were, I think, mainly sent off to all female private schools but even then the pressure was too much for her mother and for them all. Unlike in a poor family where there was no private education and each parent was often having to juggle parenthood with several jobs, Dad wasn't so much doctor as Superman, able singly to oppress six women in the house and the entire composition of St Paul's for Girls.

What was it that hadn't previously been spoken? Men's stuff, mainly. The stuff of being in the armed forces or even at war. Rare slide shows on a navy ship. Visits to brothels and similar. Pre-marriage. The movements of the emotionally desperate, not that they could present themselves as such, and mainly the economically poor in situations they had been required to endure. Of course, in the boardrooms it was different. There's an episode of sitcom "My Three Sons" in which sometime in the early sixties the character played by dear old Fred MacMurray expresses unease at the attendance of a stripper in a situation reminiscent of the President's Club in 2018. He takes her home in the most genuine of ways for her own protection. That programme and the transition of Hattie into her teens coincided with the emergence in Britain of "The Sun". Page 3 was far less remarkable for its semi-nudity or even its depiction of how young women, invariably working class, could now "express themselves" than for the manner in which it removed such imagery from the barracks and the Lodge.

It was now on buses and on trains and it was in the homes of married couples and their families. There were no petitions for it from men on any net for their natural instinct had been secrecy or privacy depending on how one sees it. It was entirely imposed by the mega wealthy, top down. And once that happened, there had to be a degree of compliance. To argue against it would have seemed like not being a real men to other men. Men - ordinary men - had no choice but the twist here is that, on balance, they dealt with it remarkably well.

[Barbirollians]

That's a very good point. Times change and this is surely an example of women's 'equality' : though whether such events play the same role as an all-men's do of the Presidents Club might be doubted. I can't say I'm very interested in this particular manifestation of 'women's equality' (I'd prefer a good book)! But I don't know whether I'm typical …

I think the point is really about power still in relation to these events as you say re the President's Club events . That is not to say of course that men are not sexually assaulted by women - self-evidently they are as the release of last week's statistics underlined - though the majority may well be men being sexually assaulted by other men. Which again is often about power .

[Stanfordian]

Watching last night's Super Bowl, I could just imagine President Trump making personal a request for the cheerleaders to wear extra skimpy costumes. Sorry for debasing a serious subject!

[Lat-Literal]

2 of 2

The Pirelli calendar was introduced in 1963. It would have had a similar history to girly images in "The Sun" if it hadn't been for the oil crisis in the mid 1970s when it ceased to be produced until being brought back in 1984. The timing of its appearance, disappearance and subsequent appearance was directly related to the state of the economy. With money, sexuality is generally more upfront and it is not without connotations of arrogance and power. As it happens, topless women didn't appear in tabloids until 1970. They were consequently there in the late 1970s and early 1980s when the Pirelli was absent. In parallel, leftish liberals and right wing libertarians were working professionally in tandem to free up discussion on sex in film and the broadcasting media, to free up imagery around nudity and to enable a burgeoning pornography industry, often very extreme and not wholly separate from the newspapers, to operate legally on what was still considered to be the fringes. Many women as well as men were at the forefront of these changes. While the practitioners were from a range of backgrounds, the facilitators were upper middle class. Ordinary voters who are usually the genuinely oppressed had no say in the matter and had to adapt as best they could.

Having literally been a child in the sixties, I am in no position to comment on the earliest social shifts. I cannot say for certain how softer public images were welcomed by men when introduced. What I do know is in two decades, it wasn't just some women but some men who were questioning what had taken place. For example, there were heterosexual men who said that they didn't find the imagery especially arousing and others who tried to justify it not in the usual way but on the higher brow grounds that it was erotic art. The imagery had become ubiquitous in the mainly male workplace. It was there in every garage. The occasional woman member of staff - a receptionist or a secretary - was expected to just put up with it but it wasn't as if it actually meant much to most men. Mostly married with children and needing to earn a wage, it was just there and in real time terms it would barely be given a glimpse. This then was a situation in which the ways of the barrack room were absorbed in the workplace before it became more gender mixed because of senior level led changes in culture. Of course, in more establishment offices, it was mainly absent. And with one or two exceptions, there was no great resistance when it disappeared although the portrayal from those making careers via feminism is often different. Even where there was resistance, it had little to do with objectification. There was a bit of gender power-play but mostly confusion.

Why confusion? The answer is in the concept of progress. For twenty years, people were bombarded with messages that the changes represented progress and that to say otherwise was to indicate backwardness. The idea that it could be backward was consequently difficult to accommodate. For the wealthy, progress meant being educated every bit as much as it meant having wealth. For ordinary people of limited means, it mainly meant having more money to live reasonably well. So it got to the stage where it was out of the mainly male workplace but that sort of notion of it symbolising being richer had really taken hold. The picture of the oriental lady whose eyes seemed to follow people round the living room was replaced by a woman whose breast could be seen. I know this from the branches of my family who had damp rented terraced houses and an outside lavatory. Dads pinned her up above the fireplace. She shared the home with their wife and with all the kids running around below her. She was the one hint of them all going up in the world. In parallel, there would be uneasy silences in homes like mine as the teatime news discussed teenage sex, contraception and abortion and other programmes introduced greater amounts of semi-nudity. We, you see, had risen above such things what with Dad in an office, the house with a mortgage and me with something of a brain. It could only, though, have ever been seen as comparatively tawdry when viewed through the lens of our past poverty and significantly us never having risen to the heights of seeing let alone understanding with any intellect true classic art.

Well, you come from that kind of background and return from inter railing holidays with postcards from galleries and even then it is felt that you have somehow disturbed the peace. To begin to look at great works of actual art as art, whether involving nakedness or not, may well require having some sort of university education or at least it did in the 1980s. What is "shocking" when it is not in truth shocking is as deeply rooted in money as anything else. She's sleeping around. She could get pregnant. It's irresponsible. She will end up homeless and in poverty. That's the gist. That men has no clothes on. He can't afford clothes. He's poor. It isn't experienced in that way but it's at the heart of it. The middle classes were and are completely oblivious to it. Of course, there was another strand. As the cultural changes took images of naked women and all the rest of it from the National Service buildings into the male workplaces and ultimately into the family homes, there was a very knowing invasion there from the movers and shakers. From the beginning of time until the present day, parents have not especially wanted to discuss their sex lives with their offspring and vice versa. The veneer is embarrassment. More substantially, it is about respect for privacy on both sides. While that may be as true of the wealthy and intelligent as of everyone else, the former had especial conditions in their upbringing. Too much normal distance between parents and children on the one hand and too little privacy from each other in general terms at boarding schools which led to mind sets that were not without huge amounts of emotional jealousy. The ordinary classes would have to have some of their cosier arrangements challenged by blasts of others' too distant or too close arrangements being forced culturally into their homes.

It isn't very difficult to see in this respect how the likes of Harman and Hewitt could have got themselves in such a mess at places like NCCL over the rights of children and consent or the subsequent decades of their cover-up. The entire culture was designed to break down those respectful mutual boundaries. It wasn't necessarily deliberately sinister in all respects on their part. Much of it was based on an absence of everyday experience. It was their confusion which often led to confusion all round. Undoubtedly there was a lot of merit to the new openness. There was no longer unequivocal shame about the need for contraception, pregnancy outside of marriage, abortion, divorce, homosexuality, basic nakedness and more. However, it could well be argued from the perspective of 2018 that many of these matters would have been better addressed via technical information about the nature of people generally and where to seek advice if and when required. Not all of them were best achieved in news and other forms of entertainment. Ironically, it has always been white collared, wealthy, abusive and overly powerful men who have at least found the decency to protect the family in some ways. More inclined when together to sexual behaviour that is not to the benefit of women, most of it was undertaken underground. That it surfaced in a major news story during 2018 says a lot about how there are more women in the workplace who are prepared to speak out and prompt revisionism. It also shows that when the arrogance in anyone powerful is tolerated less, their only place of refuge is the simultaneous supporting of charities which are like multinationals. Perhaps what should have been most noticeable in all of the critique was the total absence of references to children. When it is a wealthy male "I want" versus a wealthy female "I don't want", their disinterest in their families is paramount. As one feminist MP said in a television interview recently, when she gets back and says "I'm home" the kids say nothing and keep playing on their X-Box. Luckily she laughed it off as men with escorts do while patting themselves on the back for good causes they support.

More generally, these are complex areas. Mostly, they are about what women seek to achieve and whether they will ever be able to find the honesty to work it all out. The working class women who enjoy the Chippendales or whatever the current equivalent to those might be will probably in time accept that it was fundamentally a power thing, albeit comparatively harmless. What they wanted was mainly richer men - American? - parading in front of them so that they were subservient to them in many ways and also a symbol of wealth to which they forlornly aspire. Powerful, middle class women will find it more difficult to be honest. For example, they will at some point have to acknowledge that what they put down to men was in fact imposed on most men by people of their own class background, mainly male but also female. They may well need to accept that in all the years when powerful male managers focussed sexually on women in the workplace and coerced women into situations that were entirely inappropriate that not only was the coercion very wrong but it led to discrimination against women who were not coerced and all men who were not in power positions. At that point - and with 50% of people going to university - perhaps we can as a society truly progress to open advice wherever it is needed, a media where sex isn't still in the seventies, greater economic equality and the intellectual appreciation of all art as art.

[Beef Oven!]

I guess you don't use Twitter, Lats.

[Lat-Literal]

I guess you don't use Twitter, Lats.

Good lord, no.

I'm too old to give opinions - I just devote my time to building an aviary around everyone else's to my own satisfaction.

[Stanfordian]

There is a move to stop teenage cheerleaders at Crystal Palace football club. The headline in the 'i' newspaper reads "What is it with Palace and their semi-naked women?"

What next, banning women's swimming costumes and men's trunks at swimming pools - measuring hem lengths on skirts, The Victorian bathing machine, that I joked about the other day, doesn't seem so far away now.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

There is a move to stop teenage cheerleaders at Crystal Palace football club. The headline in the 'i' newspaper reads "What is it with Palace and their semi-naked women?"

What next, banning women's swimming costumes and men's trunks at swimming pools. The Victorian bathing machine, that I joked about the other day, doesn't seem so far away now.

I think there's a big difference between the two. Cheerleaders are generally selected for their good looks, so exploiting teenage girls in this way immediately activates the safeguarding button.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I think there's a big difference between the two. Cheerleaders are generally selected for their good looks, so exploiting teenage girls in this way immediately activates the safeguarding button.

[french frank]

I think there's a big difference between the two. Cheerleaders are generally selected for their good looks, so exploiting teenage girls in this way immediately activates the safeguarding button.

[doversoul1]

... Cheerleaders are generally selected for their good looks, so exploiting teenage girls in this way immediately activates the safeguarding button.

I don’t think that’s quite true. I have a friend whose granddaughter practises cheer leadering(?). She is probably 12 or thereabout, goes to practise every week, gets taken to see ballet, musical and many other performances and very serious about it. I don’t think looks comes into it at all. It is a group performance as much as orchestra is. Let’s not assume that anything that involves women or girls is an exploitation. They (women and girls) are not that helpless.