leftover breakfast cereal for lunchhh

You are comfortable in the box. Ok. Interrogate the box.

John Singer Sargent, ‘Gassed’ and ‘Six Studies for Gassed’ (1918)

In Gassed there is little suffering. Or rather, what suffering there is is outweighed by the painting’s compassion. In spite of the vomiting figure the scene has almost nothing in common with Owen’s vision of the gas victim whose blood comes ‘gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs’. What Sargent has depicted, instead, is the solace of the blind: the comfort of putting your trust in someone, of being safely led.

Not the first person to say this but a big part of why people hate women and hate the markers of being female (breasts, hips, pregnancy, motherhood etc etc) is because it reminds them we are animals. And they see that as degrading. Whether it’s a male attempting to distinguish himself by deciding women are inferior and that our primary value is animal value — natural aspects of what our bodies look like, and what they can accomplish. Or a blackpill spewing misogyny about the same thing. I don’t ever want to be pregnant or be a mother. But I accept that I am female, and that I am an ANIMAL. If I was to consider these intrinsic aspects and aptitudes of my condition degrading, I would fundamentally be hating myself. Whether that’s hating that I have boobs and hips and a period, and trying to pretend that’s not so. Or whether it’s hating that I have the capacity to have vaginal sex, and become pregnant, and give birth, and be a mother.