"It was impossible to remain an elderly academic woman fully clothed. I felt like that was insincere..."

"... and that people would say ‘we’ve had all this about power relationship and the vulnerability of the nude – you never got vulnerable, did you dear.’ So I had to do it."

Said Mary Beard, in "Mary Beard sits for naked portrait in new BBC programme/The academic’s latest TV show investigates the line between art and pornography" (The Guardian). Beard is a serious academic, and the TV show is "Shock of the Nude" — a play on "Shock of the New" — about art history. She called the nude "soft porn for the elite" and got some strong pushback:

“It’s quite a shock to think a slightly academic point about the difference between art and porn, produces that real sense of a violent reaction... If you’re look[ing] at the nude you can’t avoid that question of where is the line between art and porn?”...

[She] said the process of posing for her own nude portrait was “very relaxing”... “I could have walked away, for a lot of female models they’re doing it because that’s how they’re going to get their next meal and whatever the male artist is like they’re going to stick it out.”

And here's a second Guardian article on the subject, "Is Mary Beard right to say classical nudes are ‘soft porn for the elite’?/The academic is not the first to suggest that nudes in art were about titillation as much as aesthetics – but is there a difference between nakedness and nudity?"

Having your desire recognised and recognising your desire is important. To take Beard’s description of art as “soft porn for the elite” as criticism per se is to assume that honesty about our enjoyment of the revealed body somehow lessens the art; that art should be above that. This is naive....

The perspective of the model is important, and I commend Mary Beard — who is 65 — for taking on the role of the model in a short experience (even though that experience is necessarily different from that of a model who doesn't have the perspective of an academic with a TV audience watching her bold experimentation).

But I don't think nudes — even in photographs — are pornography. Pornography is a graphic sexual depiction, and nakedness is not even a necessary element. You can feel sexual looking at a nude, but the nude per se is not sexual. The sex is in the mind of the beholder (even if the artist was hoping to inspire it). Or do you think that in saying that I'm a propagandist for the elite?

"When I looked back to the ancient world about this, Romans in particular were always saying that women, in some way, are fake."

"The problem about a woman is that she’s always made up, she’s never what she seems. Reading your book, what was so interesting was that women in public life – and I’m happily removed from that – you’ve got to look the part and you’ve got to be authentic. And that’s impossible."

Said Mary Beard (whose book "SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome" I've paused in the middle of reading). That quote is in the middle of an interview with Hillary Clinton, who responds: "Well, that is the core dilemma. Like, today, I have makeup on. You don’t. But that is just part of the uniform that one wears in public life and politics, at least in my experience."

Beard says: "If I started to wear makeup now, I would get so abused on Twitter. I’m actually as trapped as you are, Hillary!"

And Hillary Clinton says: "Men can get a haircut; it doesn’t change their authenticity. They can grow a beard; they are still who they are. Whereas we are constantly held to that good old double standard, which is so complex and deep and charged with historical and mythological and cultural totems."

Totems, eh? I know I don't really have to try to understand bullshit. In one sentence she claims everything is simple and obvious and everything is exquisitely complicated.

"Totem" is a word that's only appeared maybe 6 times in the 50,000+ posts on this blog, so it hit me hard when it appeared the second time in a single day. The other time was in the post about about Emma Cline and Chaz Reetz-Laiol. I was quoting something from "Can the Plagiarism Charges Against Emma Cline Hold Up in Court?"  Emma Cline had written: “My mother spoke to Sal about body brushing, of the movement of energies around meridian points. The charts.” Reetz-Laiolo had written: “Laurel in the morning brushing her body on the patio with a body brush, slowly combing it up her legs towards her heart, up her arms towards her heart. Circling her belly. There was something totemic about her out there in the sun.”

What are we talking about here? Wikipedia says:

While the term totem is Ojibwe, belief in tutelary spirits and deities is not limited to indigenous peoples of the Americas but common to a number of cultures worldwide. However, the traditional people of those cultures have words for their guardian spirits in their own languages, and do not call these spirits or symbols "totems."

Contemporary neoshamanic, New Age and mythopoetic men's movements not otherwise involved in the practice of a tribal religion have been seen to use "totem" terminology for the personal identification with a tutelary spirit or guide....

So what, if anything, was Hillary Clinton trying to say? I did a search in her book, "What Happened," to see if she delved into the complex and deep topic of totems, but the word does not appear. I tried "makeup" and got 15 hits, including:

Once Bill entered politics, the spotlight on me was glaring and often unkind.... When he lost, and I heard over and over that my name—my name!—had played a part.... So I added “Clinton” to Hillary Rodham. I asked my friends for hair, makeup, and clothing advice. That’s never come easily to me, and until then, I didn’t care. But if wearing contact lenses or changing my wardrobe would make people feel more comfortable around me, I’d try it.

Later, when Bill was running for President for the first time, I stumbled again. I now had the right name, wore makeup, styled my hair. But I hadn’t tamed my tongue....

But we never did get comfortable around you, did we, Hillary? I don't see why we should be comfortable around any politician, and I appreciate that you admit you adopted phony devices in an effort to trick us into letting down our guard, but it's kind of funny that you turn around and lambaste us for not accepting your "authenticity."

"What we wear should not matter: Ideas, arguments, theories, and thought are the stuff in which academics trade."

"But our institutions are riven by power, and teaching and research are themselves underwritten by claims to authority and expertise. No matter how much we know, we still feel the need to show that we know it to solidify our status as bona fide intellectuals, deserving of deference and respect. One of the ways we demonstrate our possession of knowledge is in what we wear — an age-old tradition beginning with Plato orating in a toga. Only now we stroke manicured beards in thought, carry bulging book bags to demonstrate commitment, and wield Moleskine notebooks when inspiration strikes."

From "What We Wear in the Underfunded University," by Shahidha Bari in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

My first question is: Plato orated in a toga?

The toga is the distinctive garment of ancient Rome (not Greece). And here's something interesting about it, from "SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome" (by Mary Beard*):

Everyday Roman clothing – tunics, cloaks and even occasionally trousers – was much more varied and colourful than this.** Togas, however, were the formal, national dress: Romans could define themselves as the gens togata, ‘the race that wears the toga’, while some contemporary outsiders occasionally laughed at this strange, cumbersome garment. And togas were white, with the addition of a purple border for anyone who held public office. In fact, the modern word ‘candidate’ derives from the Latin candidatus, which means ‘whitened’ and refers to the specially whitened togas that Romans wore during election campaigns, to impress the voters. In a world where status needed to be on show, the niceties of dress went even further: there was also a broad purple stripe on senators’ tunics, worn beneath the toga, and a slightly narrower one if you were the next rank down in Roman society, an ‘equestrian’ or ‘knight’, and special shoes for both ranks.

So the modern word ‘candidate’ derives from the Latin candidatus, which means ‘whitened’.... Perhaps we should eschew the whiteness-infected word "candidate."
___________________

* Speaking of "beards in thought."

** "This" refers to Cesare Maccari's 1888 painting of something that happened in 63 BC (Cicero denounced Catiline to the Roman Senate):

"And she’s such a ’60s girl! She’s still faithful to the hairstyle. It’s like Jean Shrimpton...."

Said Manolo Blahnik, the shoe designer, about Mary Beard, the great writer about books on ancient Rome. He's quoted in a NYT article titled "Mary Beard and Her ‘Battle Cry’ Against Internet Trolling," which is about her self-defense against things that have been said about the way she looks. Most of the article is about her supposed "vindication of one of the rights of woman: to look, even in her 50s, like her unvarnished self." But what jumped out at me and made it bloggable was Blahnik's praise of the way she looks — the assertion that it's good and not the dreary assertion of some "right" to look bad. 

The article has quotes from "Tina Brown, the founder of the Women in the World conference (in which The New York Times is an investor)" — oh, hell — including the denouncement of Donald Trump for his "ugly" "injection of pure derogatory comments about women." Beard expounded in a sort of scholarly tone about Trump and trolls: "You could make a powerful argument that the kind of tropes in Trump’s discourse overlap with the discourse you see in trolling: about women shutting up, about menstruation." The NYT assures us that both women — Brown and Beard — displayed a sense of humor.

“This is exactly what we need more of in American feminism: wry humor,” Ms. Brown said. “The outrage meter is getting out of control.”

“It’s about talking about it,” Ms. Beard said. “It’s not being fazed. It’s about having a laugh about it. A bit of outrage is good, but having your only rhetorical register as outrage is always going to be unsuccessful. You’ve got to vary it. Sometimes, some of the things that sexist men do just deserve to be laughed at.... Go back home to mummy,” she said. “She’ll smack your bottom.”

Yes, there is too much outrage, so perhaps I should resist expressing outrage at the idea that it's funny when a woman hits a boy, that domestic violence is only serious — and then it's utterly serious — when a man hits a woman.

Anyway, here's the iconic magazine cover of Jean Shrimpton that blew our mind in 1965:



No one is really still faithful to the hairstyle. The huge back of the head "bump" reads as lunacy now. You can't have it today and be seen as Shrimpton was seen back then. The eye has changed, but in the mind's eye — in Blahnik's mind's eye — Beard is faithful to the 60s hairstyle. You have to modify things to keep them the same.