Oh my

Barbie Barbie Barbie (shakes head)

This argument was accented with nude drawings.

Also, recently Omer attempted to argue that men are better at drawing because they are trained/raised to look and thus are better at remembering from the point when they are looking at their model/object to when they look at the paper how she really looks. Women on the other hand are trained/raised to identify with the object/model and thus cannot actually see her or draw how she really looks.

I mean, it's kind of likes he's reading.

Kind of.

Everything past this point is now optional

So Harold, the Dutch man in my feminism and visual culture class was supposed to give a presentation on an article titled "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists" by Linda Nochlin (which you can read almost all of here in chapter 26 ). So rather than engaging with Nochlin's argument that:

"The question "why have there been no great women artists?" has lead us to the conclusion, so far, that art is not a free, autonomous activity of a "super-endowed" individual, influenced by previous artists and, more vaguely and superficially, by "social forces," but rather that the whole situation of art making, both in terms of the development of the art maker and in the nature and quality of the art work itself, occur in a social situation, are integral elements of this social structure, and are mediated and determined by specific and definable social institutions, be they art academics, systems of patronage, mythologies of the divine creator, artist as he-man or social outcast."

He simply states that "I am going to have to disagree with Nochlin. Women are capable of making great work and to prove it I have brought in a list of great women artists from the past five centuries."

He then produces a list of about 20 female artists from each century. "See, great artists! Women can do it."

And I'm all "Are you serious, did you even read the article or just the title and figured you got the gist of it? 20 women from each CENTURY and you're using this list to discredit the entire article?"

And then my professor was all, "Let's discuss in small groups! Everybody split up."


So the next class period we're watching the film All About My Mother so we can write about it for our midterm exam. We all sit through it as a class and naturally, attempt a bit of a discussion when it ends.

There's a lot of discussion about the gaze, gender norms, women working together in a mutually beneficial way, heterosexual male stereotypes, etc.

And when it gets to Harold:

"You know what I realize about this film? It really is all about my mother. I see my mother in this film and how she gives and gives and nobody gives back to her until she has nothing and that's what it's all about. My mother."


OH MY GOD Harold, did you even watch the movie? Seriously.