Turn Right @ Albuquerque, not Left

TFW I'm an early hominid and a rival walks up to me and attempts to snap my penis bone clean in half but I don't even have one

I can draw whatever I want. jon catguy. jon cativist. The Nya~rchivist.

I can draw the worst catboy in the entire world (cursed horrible elias (catlias meowchard) under the cut)

I've already started seeing Sora videos pop up on other platforms, so just know that if you see this watermark logo:

the video is AI generated. Some of them can be very convincing, so I just wanted to let people know if you haven't already heard of it.

Most recently, a friend came over my house and saw my computer background and went, "Wow, um, I didn't know you were into that." To which I look at the picture of the well drawn muscular female minotaur in historically accurate Greek clothing and I start geeking out about how I love the detail the artist did with the clothing and I point out the period appropriate folds and pins, how the artist even inserted the native plant that was used to dye the clothing this particular shade in the background, and even how the belt has technology AND historically accurate weaving patterns on it.

Then I start explaining how I love the muscular choices of the minotaur, that I was so impressed with the artist's anatomically correct depiction of the muscles converging into the neck. That many people get an upright cow's neck wrong because cow's don't have collarbones, so it can be very difficult to merge the upper arms and a chest of a human with a cow's body. I draw her attention to the beautiful way they've merged the pectoralis major so smoothly while also staying true to how muscular they've depicted the rest of the body.

I finish up with my thoughts on the artist's bold choice to depict the minotaur as a female, and despite the underlying themes of a minotaur being violence, child murder, strength, and muscles. I segue into how unlike bulls, cow are perceived as mothers. That they are the major source of milk in human culture, and that idyllic depictions of them in a field usually depict calves frolicking nearby, yet the minotaur kills and eats children.

I finish and there is a long pause.

Some of the boldest political and emotional messages I've ever seen came from straight up no nonsense porn. It's a setting that allows people to approach a major facet of the human experience without shame or obfuscation.

Keep in mind this is coming from an asexual person-- I don't think physical desire is some foundational keystone of life without which one isn't fully human. I think it's as morally neutral as hunger and thirst, and almost as impactful on all of human culture.

So why does the fetish cancel out the art?

Our tendency to dismiss anything associated with sex or the expression of sexual desire as frivelous and meaningless leads a lot of people to forget that pornographic art is still art.

The artist didn't just jerk off on the canvas and a beautiful minotaur appeared. They didn't spend hours researching greek dyemaking and bovine anatomy just because they were horny for muscular women. And their admiration for muscular women doesn't cease to be inherently transgressive of traditional and mainstream views of femininity just because they expressed that admiration in a sexual way.

Francisco Goya's The Nude Maja is a classical masterpiece that took three years to paint and is considered one of the greatest works of art ever made. [^] It's also porn. It was commissioned by a man-- the Prime Minister in fact-- to hang in a private room specifically for his nudes where he "often retired after dinner." It's believed the model depicted may have been his mistress.

In the political climate in which it was made, depicting a fully nude woman was extremely controversial (in fact it's considered one of the earliest western works to depict a woman's pubic hair without obvious negative connotations) especially because Goya painted her looking directly at the viewer, making her an active participant in an exchange of desire, rather than a passive object.

Eight years after it was finished, the Spanish Inquisition raided the Prime Minister's home, stole The Nude Maja and all his other paintings, and put Goya on trial for "moral depravity."

Goya, who had by then been rendered deaf by an unknown illness that may have been cumulative lead poisoning and was already sinking into the deep depression that marked his later years, escaped prosecution only by arguing that The Nude Maja followed in the "respectable" tradition of the classical nude [^^] , despite the fact that the full frontal nudity, pubic hair, direct stare, and the details that established the subject as a modern, living, literal woman, not a mythological figure or allegory-- the very features for which it was considered problematic-- were substantial departures from that tradition.

He could draw enough connections between it and a "respectable" painting in that genre by another lauded Spanish artist, appeasing nationalist egos and satisfying people that he was suitably reverent of the idealized past. Therefore, it wasn't porn. It was valuable, it was a classical nude.

To a modern viewer, it is in fact, more or less indistinguishable from any classical nude, despite the fact that when it was painted, anyone who saw it could have told you it was porn.

Today, The Clothed Maja, an almost identical but less risque painting which he created directly after The Nude Maja [^^^] is one of the paintings included in Animal Crossing: New Leaf.

Another painting included in New Leaf is Beauty Looking Back by Hishikawa Moronobu. It's an arch-typical example of the ukiyo-e genre. While far from all ukiyo-e art was erotic, it's not an exaggeration to say the overwhelming majority of it was, at the very least, intended to titillate.

The very name ukiyo-e associates the genre with hedonism, courtesans, brothels and pleasure districts. Beautiful courtesans were the most common subject. Nearly every ukiyo-e master produced explicitly pornographic work at some point in their careers. [^^^^] Beauty Looking Back is a pin up. It would have been recognized in the time it was created as something inherently sensual and referential towards sex, despite not being explicit.

And yet, it's "artistic value" (I do not like this term. The value of art is not and should not be quantifiable) is so unquestionable that Nintendo included it in arguably one of the most family friendly games in their notoriously, stringently family friendly catalog.

What is a fetish, if not a non-sexual element that inspires sexual desire?

What is fetish art, if not a depiction of these non-sexual elements intended, whether explicit or not, to arouse that same desire in the viewer?

What defines something as being outside the boundaries of "normal" sexual desire? Breasts aren't a reproductive organ, they're not inherently sexual. Neither is the ass. But they do inspire sexual desire, at least in those whose cultural back ground has taught them to associate those body parts with sex.

If feeling sexual desire because of anything that isn't genitalia is a fetish, then all erotic art-- from the most explicit adult films to those Levi's billboard ads where the models are doing their best not to wear the jeans they are advertising-- is fetish art.

So when did The Nude Maja and Beauty Looking Back stop being fetish art, and become art?

When does it stop being shameful to admire the beauty and technical skill of a creative work just because it's sexual in nature?

Is it just time? Or have we let ourselves be led into imagining the past was a land of chastity and virtue, its art inherently more valuable and firmly divorced from physical desire-- where men could paint tits all day and other men pay small fortunes to commission and purchase those tit paintings all without a single impure thought-- compared to which our modern age is debauched, immoral, deviant, degenerate?

If that Minotaur was hanging in a museum with a placard that said it was painted in the 1700's, would you, or your friend, still assume it was fetish art?

If you'd come across it in a context where you knew it was sexual, would you still have stopped to notice and appreciate the skill and the research put into the details?

This was a hell of a tangent, and if OP is the kind of person who notices period accurate historical details at a glance and the particulars of bovine anatomy to the degree of being able to make an educated statement about how well someone has accounted for the musculature whilst attaching a cow head to a human body-- probably none of this art history trivia is news to you.

The point is just this. Maybe you weren't "tricked" into seeing the art before the porn.

Maybe your friend was tricked by our deeply sex negative culture into only seeing the porn and missing the art entirely.

[^]: Though he's better known on tumblr for Saturn Devouring His Son, which I'm always delighted to remind people is not a name he gave it. It wasn't discovered until after his death, so we can't know for certain what he intended to depict. The greek myth of Zeus's father eating his children was a best guess and, imo, a way of sanitizing the disturbing nature of the image by framing it as part of the classical tradition of mythological art, rendering it allegorical and academic instead of horrifying and unexplained. It was not the first time Goya's work would rendered more palatable to conservative audiences by claiming it was part of classical tradition, which brings me back to Maja.

[^^]: Physically fighting the urge to add a rant here about fascism and "degenerate" art. Just go watch Jacob Gellar's "Who's Afraid Of Modern Art." He does a better job of it than I would anyway.

[^^^]: presumably also at the Prime Minister's request, with the intention they be displayed together and not, as urban legend likes to say, because the Inquisition forced him to. The concept of creating a clothed and a naked version of the subject so that the viewer can imagine undressing them is a tradition well preserved in commissioned pornographic art today.

If you're not proud of this piece of writing, you should be. Which, funnily enough, is now a case of art imitating life imitating art imitating life, because it's an incredible informative academic piece...about porn. Which brings us right back to your thesis about "is there really a difference between porn and art."

Context is that we used to have a VERY vocal protestor in the class who I’m firmly of the belief was taking the course for general education requirements. Every time we ever discussed out-of-norm-for-a-normie topics, it’s like this guy had to hold up a school notebook with a marker-drawn cross on the cover, screeching, “BEGONE SATAN!”. At this specific point, we were discussing some of the differences between our culture and that of remote communities like the Koma, Sentinelese and others; note that for some of these cultures, it’s common to wear little to no clothing at times (though it wasn’t the standard for all these remote peoples to be doing).

Again, man had a great meltdown insisting that if we had the means to make clothing and get into contact with them—never minding that either we’ve agreed to limit or never begin contact with these tribes to preserve their cultures/respect the wariness they have for foreigners—then we SHOULD. He insisted that it was really gross and “unkind” of us to fix this apparent problem of showing too much skin.

To which my professor, running on likely three cups of decaf with no sleep, grading midterms, goes, “Oh boy... [Insert whatever the fuck his name was here], you wrote your paper about the Venus of Willendorf, you know. If you have problems with the idea of a naked human body, I wonder then how you became so desensitized to it in craft.”

For those unaware, I included a photo of what he’d covered:

You can see where this is going, right? Anyhow, the discussion then veered away from our original point right off the cliff side to impact upon the head of this guy and his worldview in order to inform him: "Hey, there's a lot of things you might consider gross and sexually-offensive, but did you ever think the most obvious thing you're interacting with can be in the same category of what you despise?"

It didn't go well for that kid. I'm pretty sure he flunked the course but ah well; if you can't accept that people can be funky little shits who like funky things, you're not going to get far in life.

But yeah, hi, it me.

The original video, for anyone who hasn't seen it:

And the relevant album cover:

Sessler was a teenager when "We're Not Gonna Take It" it was on the charts. Probably had MTV so he saw the video.

They do not create art, literature, culture

Even most of their ideas are stolen

The only thing right wingers create is death and suffering.

They do nothing but take from others

They drain the world of life, while draining life from the world itself. There is no benefit to anyone other than themselves as a result of these actions.

There's a word in nature for such a creature

And that word is "Parasite"

“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot

Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women's bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as "objectively terrible" and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn't like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn't like a light "unpopular opinion!" conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.

There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone's mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.

Now I can't find any adults who don't hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, "well except for book X..."

Actually, I did reports on book banning three separate times with three separate teachers, with three separate sets of parameters so I was able to write about the same topic in different ways, but this is specifically about the report I did in university. The actual specs for the report included that we were supposed to complete some kind of study or poll (this was not a science class). I put the questions out on a couple of forums I belonged to at the time and asked a few IRL friends as well. A lot of the questions were standard for this sort of thing, I think - were you ever assigned to read a banned book, did you ever read banned books on your own, did you read/were you assigned them BECAUSE they were banned or did you find out about them being banned later, what's your opinion on banning books, etc.

But there was one question I asked that ended up reshaping the entire thrust of my presentation: "Are there any books that you think SHOULD be banned, and if so, why?"

Here's the thing. Most of the forums I was posting on were fan spaces for a book series that, at the time, was one of the most banned/challenged books out there. It's a fandom that I have since entirely distanced myself from, that I one hundred percent do not recommend to anyone, that I will actively attempt to dissuade people from reading or talking about, and that I would like to not be popular anymore. I'm sure most of you reading this can guess which one I'm talking about (I won't name it or go into specifics because I don't want to trip any filters unnecessarily). But it was KNOWN that these books were banned in a lot of places. A lot of people wore the "I read banned books" badge with pride. I fully expected that the answer to that question would be a resounding "no" from the forums, and that I'd maybe get a few affirmative answers from one of the other spaces.

I was shocked. Not only did a lot of people come back with either "not exactly but I think we should keep [author] or [book] out of the hands of children" or "yes, [book]/anything by [author] should be banned because XYZPDQ", but not a single person who responded gave me the same answer. The only one I remember - keep in mind it's been almost twenty years - was that one person specifically said The Bone Collector, and for the "why do you think it should be banned" question, they only said, "No. I'm not explaining it. It's too horrible to even think about. Just believe me when I say nobody should ever be allowed to read this book."

I highlighted that last comment in my presentation, along with several other of my "favorite" official reasons for banning books - the Alabama school board that banned The Diary of Anne Frank in 1984 because it was "a real downer", the district that removed A Raisin in the Sun because it was "pornographic", the library that took Charlie and the Chocolate Factory out of circulation because it "might be hurtful to children without parents", and things of that nature - and pointed out that all of these were the same thing. This was somebody saying "I don't like this, therefore nobody should read it, and I shouldn't have to explain why." I also pointed out that if you can't give a good reason, the whole thing falls apart, and then I quoted "Smut" by Tom Lehrer:

All books can be indecent books, Though recent books are bolder, For filth, I'm glad to say, Is in the mind of the beholder. When correctly viewed, Everything is lewd. I can tell you things about Peter Pan And the Wizard of Oz - THERE'S a dirty old man...

Go back to that paragraph I mentioned earlier, about those books that I no longer recommend to anyone. Notice how I phrased that. I don't recommend them. I will tell you all the reasons why I don't think you should buy them. I will tell you all the problems with the author, with the franchise, with the writing. I wish they were out of print, I wish they were deeply unpopular, I wish nobody would ever read them again.

But I still won't advocate for banning them.

It's so easy to twist a justification. Look at what I quoted up there! A Raisin in the Sun was banned for being "pornographic". One of the websites I used as a source responded to that accusation with "Did they read the same play I did?" At the time, I thought the comment was funny. Now, twenty years later, I realize: It was a buzzword. It was a convenient label. At the time of the challenge, just saying "it's pornographic" was enough. Obviously you're not some kind of sicko who wants to hear about all the pornographic details, are you? Freak! That's pornography! And they're teaching it in schools! We should get rid of it!

A Raisin in the Sun, for anyone who didn't study it at any point or read it (or watch the movie, which was very good), is a play/movie about a black family in Chicago in the 1960s. The family matriarch has been in domestic service for years, but she's just received a very large insurance payment from her husband's death and is retiring. Wanting to give her family, especially her young grandson, a better life, she goes out and buys a house...in an otherwise exclusively white neighborhood. The head of the homeowner's association (essentially) comes to visit them and offers to pay them a substantial amount of money to not move into the neighborhood, because segregation isn't officially a thing and they can't legally stop them from moving in, but they don't want them there. There's a lot more that goes on in the play, and I highly recommend you go and read it, but the point is that there is nothing sexual or titillating in the entire thing. The closest we get is a scene where the daughter (Beneatha, a college student) is gifted a traditional African dress from her boyfriend, who's Nigerian, and he shows her how to put it on over the clothes she's already wearing, and maybe the scene where the daughter-in-law (Ruth, a laundress) accidentally reveals that, having found out she's pregnant, she's planning to have an abortion rather than bring another child into the world/have another mouth to feed.

It's not pornographic. But someone didn't want it taught in schools, so they called it that to get it banned.

It's so easy to twist labels. If you, a liberal, agree that books with X trait are okay to ban, the people who don't want books to exist will find a way to say they have X trait, and then what are you going to do, admit that you like that sort of thing? Sicko! Freak! Pervert!

Anyhow, it got super political (even though I told her I'm not one for politics when it comes to the stability of my mental health-only a little at a time, not a geyser!) and then she started listing off books she didn't think were good-ones with very broad themes she called 'problematic'-including some like The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. For those of you unaware, that book covered the plot of a police shooting of a POC adolescent and the subsequent fallout of it. Her reason? Because it put cops "in a bad light where one apple is rotten and then suddenly everyone is rotten". I was quiet.

Then, interrupting her message, I sent, "So, if you don't like so many books, what DO you read?" I was legit confused.

She never replied back.

Another ex-friend (who is now good friend because we really patched things up) got told this and she laughed. "Nonners, I think you caught her red-handed," this friend-now-good-therapist said to me through voice chat. "If she couldn't grace you with a simple answer to that question, chances were that she was either wary of what her reply would imply to you, or she was bent on getting you to agree to her ranting without having a back-up plan."

It's interesting to think about and I wholly agree with these posts above. It's so easy for someone to twist justification for censorship because "I don't like this so it shouldn't exist"; in their case, if a "truth" (or in this case, content) isn't pretty they're going to try hard to white-out it, even if they must resort to lying to do so. Ostracizing things isn't wholly new to civilization but in my opinion, the level of pettiness sure is something to behold. We lament the loss of the Great Library of Alexandria, the book burning in Ancient China and beyond; people claim it was such a shame to have lost knowledge and culture because the "oppressive times and warfare" of those eras.

And then... we have this shit, of someone being butt-hurt enough to not just mosey on when they find something they dislike. By god, the mental image of Alexandria somehow surviving into the present-day, and a pro-censorship person grabs something off the shelf and hates it? "The Great Library holds pornographic material so burn it to the ground," is the what this mental image ends with.

Whatever you landed on has completely disappeared from Tumblr. Any posts including or referencing it have vanished, and none will ever be made again. No one else notices its absence, and no one else will ever ask about it.