Empowerment

A common theme out there is one of empowering women by making and publishing nude photographs of women. This is a little strange, but I do get it, honest.

We're taking back control
We're pushing back against male-driven so-called norms of beauty

and so on. These are real, these are legit. But the result is still pictures of naked women, and generally pretty heavily weighted toward the contemporary standards of beauty. Guess which women are most comfortable taking back control and pushing back against the male-driven so-called norms of beauty? Yep. The women that cleave most closely to those norms.

So, as happens from time to time, I got to thinkin'.

What would be similar to this idea, but more directly, or less obliquely, empowering. What would be less tangled up with the problems of producing more pictures of good looking women with their clothes off?

How about we stand the 1000+ year old dynamic on its head, and have women take, and publish, nude photographs of their male partners? Men have been painting and photographing their lovers for public consumption more or less forever. That is the standard dynamic. It is male-driven, it is rooted in dis-empowering women.

Much as I love running Art Things I'm out of bandwidth, so I'm not running this one. I might be willing to go first, though. Must talk to the wife, I guess.

Also, has this already been done? It seems obvious, but if it has been done, it's largely google-proof, because I can't find it, at any rate.