Statue to honour Wollstonecraft

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelley_Memorial

Clothes maketh the man but restrictith the woman, apparently.

Wasn't it Mark Twain who commented "Naked people have little or no influence on society".

How right he was. Those who have little or no influence on society are presented as naked in art to make the point about there's nothing else really relevant about them. Clothes certainly do make a statement: the first one for females being "this person is present for another purpose than an object for males". It's not an issue the male sex has to deal with. As many have said; male statues to celebrate male achievement are not presented with their bits hanging out and no other indication of identity or what they actually did.

What ever I did, whatever I said
Whether I'm living or whether I'm dead
Here is all Mankind will care to remember
The style and the shape of my tits and pudenda.

Everywoman.

Now it's a trans rights issue.

The Daily Dot is batshit TRA nonsense. Several of their writers fantasise about violence towards women who support women's sex based rights.

Also the weird twisting silver mass looks like a smoothed out version of the men in the rape of the sabines to me

*blob not blog

Seeing those lovely pics of the statue being dressed in a Woman t-shirt made me realise that a much more inspiring representation of Wollstonecraft's legacy would have been a life-size Julia Long emerging from that amorphous blog of silver, complete with leather jacket and jeans. Love that woman.

Re value, you can be valued for sexual purposes and for your labour in looking after any resulting offspring, but this bears no relationship to whether a man values or respects your intellect, your desire for autonomy, your thoughts, feelings, your essential humanity.

It is our desire for autonomy, power or intellectual challenge interfering 'too much' with the instrumental biological value we have to men as a class that causes the pushback.

In a patriarchy, the traditional 'good wife and mother' gets any respect she gets for being and staying an excellent support human. She loses it if she wants an inconvenient inappropriate promotion to main protagonist.

Can you think of a single statue that is 'for' a famous man that's naked? Is it about their genitals or power? You don't have to be naked to show strength.

To go against the grain of this thread, I liked the choice of a naked woman in all her womanhood. What does it mean to be a woman when you strip all the faff away? What has the trans debate revealed to many women? The simple truth and deep impact of our female bodies. That IS fundamental to being a woman, unashamedly so.

It's got to me too - it's a statue I'd travel to see int jerky, but am I going to take my two primary aged dds to see a statue of model with her kit off? They can see that anywhere on any advert for anti wrinkle cream or perfume.

The fact that it was commissioned and made by women just makes it sadder. We've been fooled. It reminds me of the actresses who are convinced it's "art" to do sex scenes and full frontal nudity and end up on Reddit and PornHub with a load of men talking about how they'd like to "smash that". Fuck this shit. I'm so tired.

I don’t mind the anatomical accuracy of the statue. It’s obviously a young, athletic woman with natural breasts. But that’s all it does, showcase the sculptors knowledge of the female human body. Like ooh look how good I am at carving a female. Thought I could only do seashells, hah, think again.

It has no real meaning behind it, except for blatantly copying the Greek birth of Venus statues. The sculptor Maggi said she was inspired by Mary Wollstoncrofts statement that she “is a new genus”. Or new woman. Perhaps that’s why Maggi went an entirely unoriginal way and chose a birth of Venus figurine to depict MW being “born” but without really understanding the mythology of Venus herself as goddess of love and beauty which was NOT what MW stood for or fought for at all. I even think it’s a bit of trolling against MW who argued about women being more brains than beauty and more logical than romance/emotional.

Since Maggi decided to copy the Greeks for the MW statute the least she could have done was do one based on Athena- Goddess of wisdom, and strategy in war, protector of freedom.

”She has to be naked,’ says Hambling, ‘because clothes define people. We all know that clothes are limiting and she is Everywoman. As far as I know, she’s more or less the shape we’d all like to be.’” (Daily Mail)

This statement shocked me. Are women’s aspirations to just be a certain shape? One which is attractive to men? Her achievements and ideas would not be worth aspiring to if present as a less sexually desirable ‘shape’? Or are her ideas, and those of other women, not worth considering at all? Only our shape?

Mock up was so different wasn’t it? Did someone else make it for Hambling? Feel sorry for the committee who didn’t really get what they wanted

The mock up was actually much better. No pointy boobies abs or broccoli bush.

I much prefer the Martin Jennjngs statue. But I knew nothing about MW before this controversy, and now I do. So that is good?
If art is supposed spark conversations and make us reflect upon society then it has also achieved that goal.
It is just the same bloody depressing conversations!

Why does that matter? So is Ghislaine Maxwell. Women can be awful, be sexist too, make bad decisions and be wrong

Absolutely.

Hopefully, this thread will be spared derailment if we all agree with this instead of engaging otherwise.

There were a few people on Woman's Hour who were desperate not to be mean because it's by Maggi Hambling and after reaching hard the best they could do is "it's missing the point of Mary Wollstonecraft but it has got people talking about her".

The more I read & the more pictures I see the more I think of the PP that suggested it was a sculpture MH had in the garage...

Love Julia Long