The Jedi From The North West

congrats! Now you have a motif! A recurring theme! A focus for your art! Something to haunt you!

Seventeen still lives of dandelions? Three hundred poems about grief? A sketchbook dedicated to your grandmother’s house? Two books trying to unravel the complexities of familial relationships?

An early exploration of the themes Hokusai would keep coming back to is Spring in Enoshima, done in 1793 when he was 33. The wave is small and there are no boats, but Mt Fuji is clear in the background, and Enoshima is in Kanagawa, so we are clearly beginning to work towards something here.

A second pass, eleven years later in 1803 when he was 44. The title of this one begins to get more familiar: The View of Honmoku Off Kanazawa. It has a towering wave over a smaller boat, but Mt Fuji is not present, and the boat is considerably larger and has a sail. But the feeling of danger in the wave and the smallness of the boat are here, and of course the general composition is definitely recognizable.

This is A View Of Express Delivery Boats, done in 1805, merely two years later at age 46. Here we find the wave and the boats almost exactly as we'll find them in The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, though Mt Fuji isn't present, and the location is uncertain. And it's a good picture! The wave is threatening, the boats are small -- but the feeling of "ocean" isn't really there yet, is it? It's unlikely this picture would have become a classic for the ages. But that's okay, there's still time.

And here we have it, a full 26 years later, done by Hokusai in 1831 at the age of 72. The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world. The boats are there, the mountain is there, the wave is there, and the FEELING is there. He did it! He reached the apex of his ongoing motif and theme!

Or did he? Because the whole point of a motif is not that you're striving to get to the perfect version of it, the one idealized image you carried in your head all along, and when it is done, you are also done. Hokusai is on record at the age of 73 saying he'd only just begun to feel like he was learning how to draw things properly, and that "if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint — dot and line — will be alive." He had drawn The Great Wave, but he didn't believe he was finished -- he thought that he was still just beginning to get started.

And he wasn't finished with his ocean motif, either. Please check out his Mt Fuji At Sea, done in 1834 at the age of 75.

I tracked down a copy of this invaluable classic and somehow got my hands on a near pristine copy secondhand from the 4th printing. It’s lost the dustjacket, alas, but that means I got it for like £5 and not the £4200 a first edition printing in fine condition goes for.

(Who’s the author? *looks at smudge on spine* uhhhh Mkkhill Montanann)

It looks right at home in my bookcase 🥰

Under the cut: a look inside at what the book holds:

Hey man I think you can do both. Like I appreciate man tits and those are legal p much everywhere, but if I was ogling people or touching folks without permission or clutching my pearls whenever I saw a nip it'd be a different story

It's not so much "do I think boobs are hot and do I enjoy seeing them" so much as it is "do I think it's reasonable that what I personally find hot shouldn't get to dictate how others dress"

All u really got to be careful of is how u support- cause yeah,it may come off as skeevy if u get too excited about it.

But the drum we're beating here isn't "STOP EXPERIENCING FEELINGS", it's "YOUR FEELINGS AREN'T MORE IMPORTANT THAN MY BODY" and "THE HUMAN BODY IS NOT IN ITSELF OBSCENE" and "WOMEN'S BODIES BY THEMSELVES ARE NOT PORNOGRAPHIC"

Picture the LEAST attractive person with breasts you personally can imagine. If your knee-jerk reflex is, "I no longer support that person's right to be topless", that's a Gratification motive paired with a Disgust motive.

The key is to move AWAY from Self-Gratification and Disgust and TOWARDS "Equality".

Self-gratification is something we encourage in our view of women so strongly that it almost becomes invisible- to the point of detriment to BOTH sides, which is what bedrock stone-bottom Feminism exists to address.

Your grandmother should be just as commonplace being topless at the pool as your grandpa. Your sister should be able to take her shirt off when it's scorching out and still be as safe and blasé as your brother. Seeing a mom whip out a tit on the bus to feed her baby should be as commonplace as a milk bottle.

The foundational idea is, "the primary purpose of a woman's body is for women to live, not for others to pick apart for approval".

The fun part is that you could do this extremely easily by just bundling a key with an item you can't buy unless you're 18. Like a beer that includes a PGP key, or a pornographic magazine with a page that's a randomly generated key.

The site/app doesn't need to know WHO you are, only that you have access to something you can only get by being 18. This way they're putting the burden of verifying your age onto someone else, someone else who is already legally required to do exactly that.

But no one is interested in developing this because the point of age verification has never been age verification. it's always been governments trying to tie a real-world ID to internet identities, and companies trying to get more private information on users so they can sell it to advertisers.