Psyduck

But to the modern eye, there's something uncanny, even upsetting about this image. If the Venus continues to fascinate, it is because she makes manifest something we'd rather ignore: Behind every perfect face and breast is a horrible jumble of meat. Our culture's relentless obsession with female bodies extends only as far as the skin; we're all supposed to covet the ideal female form as an image or a possession but not as an actual carcass. Once the lid of the torso lifts off, we shudder and turn away. Even the ubiquitous images of stylised violence against women, which echo the Venus in their juxtaposition of beauty and gore, are intended to position the body as a pristine canvas on which passion is enacted — sexual passion or violent passion, but anyway, the passion of a man. The beautiful corpses of television still don't void their bowels. What the anatomical Venus highlights, and what we now choose to ignore, is not violence but the gross corporeality of even the loveliest human body, the thin line separating the trophy from the cadaver. At the height of the age of the Venus, this was considered instructive, but now we mostly find it offensive. Ebenstein's book also quotes the British Literary Gazette from 1825 about an anatomical Venus display: "It is a large, disgusting doll, the alvus of which being taken off like a pot-lid, shows the internal parts, heart, liver, lungs, kidney, &c. . . . The thing is a silly imposture, and as indecent as it is wretched." "Indecent" sums up how many people feel about women's embodiment. Contemplating how this object of desire is also full of farts, sweat, germs, and pee is like picking up a Fabergé egg and realising it's been packed with rotting meat.

“Subverting” Catholic art? Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You log onto the internet and you post about how “Wound of Christ” from Psalter and Prayer Book of Bonne de Luxembourg, attributed to Jean le Noir, c.1349, for instance, looks like a vulva because you're trying to tell the world that you enjoy Catholic art and imagery in an alternative, queer, risqué way that challenges Christian beliefs. But what you don't know is that that stigma isn’t just a vulva. It's not just a mandorla. It's not just yonic. It's actually intentionally erotic. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that around 1297, Saint Angela of Foligno experienced a vision of Christ himself, who called her to put her mouth to the wound in his side and lick the freshly flowing blood. And then I think it was Saint Catherine of Siena who drank blood and a clear liquid from the wound before receiving a ring made from Christ’s foreskin? And then graphically erotic encounters with the side wound of Christ quickly showed up in the writings of eight different mystics. And then the yonic interpretation of the stigmata filtered down through the illuminated manuscripts and then trickled on down into some pseudo-intellectual corner of the internet…where you, no doubt, fished it out of some Pinterest board. However, that interpretation represents hundreds of years and countless visions of religious ecstasy. And it's sort of comical how you think that you've come up with an idea that exempts you from Christian theology when, in fact…you're posting an image that was sexualized for you by the very Medieval saints you think you’re so different than…from “subverted” Catholic art.