Censors are pissing me off
Saw this great image pasted on a construction board in West End (Brisbane Australia) a few weeks ago....it was a stencil in black and white of a nude woman in a circus pose - suspended by her waist, hanging upside down with long black locks of hair flowing down, breasts with prominent nipples thrust forward and legs in a pointed-toe pose. Her pubic hair could be seen between her legs.
Great stuff, I thought, should be more of it. Street art.
Couple of weeks later I'm walking past and despite there being several square metres of available space to put a poster someone had pasted two A4 sheets right over the female image - strategically placed to cover the offending nude.
What the fuck? I looked more closely at the posters. They were identical - advertising a call to come together to protest the military occupation of Afghanistan. Fucking Muslims, I said. And I ripped them off. I was even more pissed off when the glue caused a snatch (forgive the pun) of her pubic hair to come off.
I thought, "well this is how it starts". I'm extremely liberal, so liberal my friends think I have no cohesive moral code at all sometimes and accuse me of just playing 'devil's advocate' all the time. But this violation of an image that I had taken pleasure in, for the purposes of some fundamentalist anti-female sexual representation philosophy I felt transgressed the standards under which I live in this country.
Two days later I pass the image again to find someone else (the same someone?) has written in big felt tip pen underneath, "I DON'T LIKE THIS. WHY IS IT HERE?" And, the NIPPLES have been scrubbed out with felt pen.
And I just thought "Why are YOU here, censor? What is your problem?" Is it really that confronting to you to see a naked female in an empowering athletic pose?
Great stuff, I thought, should be more of it. Street art.
Couple of weeks later I'm walking past and despite there being several square metres of available space to put a poster someone had pasted two A4 sheets right over the female image - strategically placed to cover the offending nude.
What the fuck? I looked more closely at the posters. They were identical - advertising a call to come together to protest the military occupation of Afghanistan. Fucking Muslims, I said. And I ripped them off. I was even more pissed off when the glue caused a snatch (forgive the pun) of her pubic hair to come off.
I thought, "well this is how it starts". I'm extremely liberal, so liberal my friends think I have no cohesive moral code at all sometimes and accuse me of just playing 'devil's advocate' all the time. But this violation of an image that I had taken pleasure in, for the purposes of some fundamentalist anti-female sexual representation philosophy I felt transgressed the standards under which I live in this country.
Two days later I pass the image again to find someone else (the same someone?) has written in big felt tip pen underneath, "I DON'T LIKE THIS. WHY IS IT HERE?" And, the NIPPLES have been scrubbed out with felt pen.
And I just thought "Why are YOU here, censor? What is your problem?" Is it really that confronting to you to see a naked female in an empowering athletic pose?