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Pick Of The Week in Digital Artists United

The fabulous group Pink Panther Magazine have been engaging in a heated debate about the objectification of women in art and in the media.

Is nudity soft porn, or are we feminists over-reacting?

Nudity has always been a feature of fine art, and yes, the female body is indeed beautiful. However, we need to see and acknowledge that nudity is a commodity, which is traded and sold. It titillates, it excites, it arouses and it sells.

Women’s bodies are frequently little more than a commodity in art and in the media. They are the sweetmeats – the candy.

The happy feminist on her blog explains…
“A lot of men I have met confuse the feminist critiques of porn with the notion that feminists hate sex, hate pleasure, and hate beauty. They believe that we want them to feel guilty every time they look at a picture of a beautiful naked woman, or admire a woman’s body. Indeed, there is a strong strain of prudery in our culture that sometimes affects feminist thinking about these issues. However, critiquing porn is not the same thing as telling men they are bad people for wanting visual sexual stimulation.

I do not believe that sex and nudity are inherently degrading. I do not even believe that sex and nudity on camera or for money is inherently degrading. I believe that women who pose nude or who engage in sex work should be viewed as fully-fledged human with hearts and brains and souls worthy of respect.

But I don’t necessarily see porn or sexualized images of women in our society as the major problem women face as women. I see it as a symptom of a larger issue in our culture, the fact that a lot of cultural views and assumptions about women in a variety of contexts have not caught up with our legal equality, and are thus still demeaning.

The problem is that so much of the most popular soft-core porn in our culture does seem to be predicated on reducing, degrading, or pulling one over on women. While I favor full freedom of expression, I think as ethical consumers feminist men and women can work to promote more egalitarian views of women in all areas of expression."
Source
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STOCK:
This image has been created in Photoshop CS4.
The Original image came from Wikipedia and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

I wanted to try and show the objectification of women, by isolating those body parts that form the basis of soft porn. Here they are sitting on a butchers cold counter, like slabs of meat, selling for so many dollars per kilo.

You cannot see it on this small image, but I marbled each part of the bodies to give a more meat like effect. I Spherised the bums – to make the association with peaches, and textured and painted the two ‘carcasses’ hanging from the hooks.

The annoying halos on the legs are not present in the original image – it is something to do with the image compression here on RB.

All the body parts were culled from images of nudes in Wikipedia.
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I have chosen the wonderful song by John Lennon – please do listen to the words, – they are so appropriate for this work.