Wednesday 14 November 2007

The Past is a Foreign Country...

... they do things diferently there.*

The Victorians were fascinating. Ostensibly revolted by all things concerning sex, yet they could erect a fountain like this in Sydney's Botanic Gardens.




The lady here is named "Agriculture", but I suspect the man (there's no way this was made by anyone with breasts of their own) responsible didn't really know too much about rural life in general, and sheep in particular. Or he'd spent wwwwwaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyy too much time alone with them, but that's a thought better not pursued.

Either way, am I the only one to think that this sheep looks uncannily like Hugh Hefner? And that this is all more than just a tad creepy?

*L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between, London 1953

2 comments:

Wormwood's Doxy said...

Very creepy, I agree.

And I also agree that no woman would have created that statue!

Men seem to have some very weird fantasies--the weirder thing, however, is that they are paid to sculpt them and then given the freedom to place them in full view of everyone else...

Alcibiades said...

Sometimes I wonder if it's really just a case of other men lacking the courage to speak up and say, "hang on - that's just plain weird".

I'm thinking especially of the elderly Mr. Hefner, and his retarded quasi-adolescent sexuality, which he combines with a fixation for results of surgically implanting silicon/saline bags into women's bodies (and people think ancient Egyptian head-binding was weird!).

Instead of running along with crowd, or following the conservative "You're an evil sinner" counter-call, I'd like to see more men simply responding with "Well that's weird, and since when have you had the right to define my sexuality?"

I wonder how much of this sort of stuff happens because people have for so long been pressured to drive their fantasies underground, where they ferment and fester in secret, rather than being encouraged to develop them in a healthier atmosphere of reality, mutual respect, and love.