Art’s great nudes remade for… modern… sensibilities.

I don’t know about you, but every time I saw Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, my one overriding thought was, “damn but she’s fat. She should be skinnier“.

Okay, I can’t even really say that facetiously. Sorry. My sarcasm is broken.

Botticelli's Birth of Venus
It's rather difficult for me to imagine anyone telling this lady she needs to shave off a few pounds.

So Italian artist Anna Utopia Giordano undertook a project to redesign many of art history’s greatest nude paintings, in order to bring them into closer alignment with how “beauty” is defined by today’s society. The result is a number of paintings of beautiful women who are, simply put, beautiful for completely different reasons.
Continue reading “Art’s great nudes remade for… modern… sensibilities.”

Art’s great nudes remade for… modern… sensibilities.
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Underwhelming response to trans rights bill, overwhelming response to trans beauty queen

I don’t know if you realized it when it happened, but last time around here in Canada, when bill C-389 amending the standing 1977 Canadian Human Rights Act to include transsexual and transgender rights was about to pass in the last parliament, it became a victim of the 2011 election when the government was dissolved before it could become law.

The process, which had taken almost a year, fell apart before its proponents’ eyes. Transsexual and transgender persons came within a hair’s breadth of being protected under our Charter, but became an accidental casualty instead of Harper’s bid for more power. They truly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

If you have a memory that stretches all the way back to 2011, you’ll remember the common media narrative and pushback against this bill was that it was the “Bathroom Bill” — a bid to allow “perverts” to use a woman’s bathroom despite having a penis, and possibly prey on unsuspecting little girls. Suddenly, public bathrooms would go from safe havens to molestation central.

You know, because homosexuality and transsexuality are all about molesting little kids. Or something.

So, you might be surprised to know that this time around, now that Bill C-276 by Liberal MP Hedy Fry and C-279 by NDP MP Randall Garrison were introduced and now that by luck of the draw Garrison’s bill was read into the Parliament, pretty much nobody’s taking it seriously at all.

Not the media, not the MPs, nobody.
Continue reading “Underwhelming response to trans rights bill, overwhelming response to trans beauty queen”

Underwhelming response to trans rights bill, overwhelming response to trans beauty queen