She holds her left arm aloft, with gold drapery billowing. On her lap perches a swan, its talons digging into each of her thighs, its pelvis on top of hers, its neck under her chin.
What is going on here? Is this actually a woman reveling in an erotic encounter with a swan? Or is this a mortal woman, deceived by a god? What does consent look like in art, anyway? And why should we, in , care about the implications of a decoration from two millennia ago? Even today — two months after the discovery of this fresco — the woman, identified as the Spartan queen Leda, is making headlines, but her rape is not. And yet, while applauding the discovery, neither of these sources call the scene a rape.
But first, we should look at the fresco itself. The majority of viewers have only seen this fresco through photographs, rather than in person, a distancing framework that subtly colors our interactions with it.
The framing of the photographs makes it clear this is a fresco; an ancient, mud-covered artifact; an object. The key questions are: how consensual is this intercourse? Is it rape? Or is it a titillating romp? And how do we determine this? In this fresco, Leda makes no effort to cover her naked body. For an unfortunate many, this lack of clothing points to consent.
Her hair is perfectly coiffed, not a strand out of place. But Leda is pinned with this creature on her lap. And Zeus is a god, which skews the power dynamics in his favor. And how can we even tell what Leda is thinking about this interaction?
We want to see the artist recognize that this encounter is painful, traumatic, and non-consensual. And, if we squint, we can see that. By doing so, headlines like these contribute to the objectification of Leda that was established in the framing of the pictures of the fresco. But, on the other hand, those who view this depiction of Leda as erotic would probably say that the opposite interpretation reduces Leda to a victim and, perhaps paradoxically, reduces her agency.
In modern society, these actions are held as requirements for considering an encounter as rape, or even as violent or coercive. While this Leda fresco may be a new discovery, it is important to look at this work with the same context as its original viewers. Furthermore, the rest of society shirks a moral imperative to address the problem. We must remember that ancient art, like all art, is a complicated system of symbols not immediately obvious to a twenty-first-century audience.
What looks like rape to us may have been interpreted as consensual to the Romans, and vice versa. So, how was rape depicted in ancient art? The syntax of the poem is a series of short, abrupt sentences depicting a sense of numbness or sadness.
Your use of these sentences is analysis because you explain why they are important to your thesis that Clifton creates a negative mood, while Yeats romanticizes the rape. We will talk more about analysis next class which is on Wednesday, because of Labor Day! Like Like. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email.
Notify me of new posts via email. Do you think anybody loves anybody? I told her that love had to exist. Why else would people keep getting married all the time? Jeanie seemed to find this very smirk-inducing. Still, I felt like I had to defend the most important part of my life, even if I had my own doubts about the future. I looked Jeanie in the eyeballs and told her that anyway I was in love, and that nothing else mattered.
He could never dump her for good, because their brains were conjoined. I felt very depressed after our conversation, even though I knew Jeanie was extremely diluted and making up stories. I went downstairs to see if I could locate my mother.
As usual, she was drinking white wine because of her nerve-wrecking marriage and lying in bed with the covers pulled up to her waist. I asked her if she was all right, and she said that yes, of course she was all right, if you call being married to a Nazi tire salesman with one ball all right, then I should send my congratulations to Eva Braun.
She asked me if I knew who else had one testicle, and I said no, and she said Hitler! I wanted to make her feel better, so I crouched beside her and took her glass of wine away and then kind of tucked her into bed like she used to do when I was a girl. I went into my own room after that and took out this picture I have of my father, my real and un-German one, who died when I was six in a car accident.
In the picture, my dad and I are in a boat together, one of those ferries you can take to Alcatraz to avoid the sharks. He looks young and very smart in his glasses, and you can see this funny detail above the enormousness of his nose, how his eyebrows kind of join forces in a unibrow. I sat there at my desk and stared at the picture for a long time. The next evening, Colin and I went to Mr. Pizza Man so he could play pinball on his favorite machine, which had a scoreboard featuring women in costumes from the future and very true-to-breast cleavages.
I sat in one of the booths, watching him dominate the machine with his perfect skills. Then we drove to the Church like always and parked in front of the big transformer with the sulfur lights brightening the sky and putting the stars out of business. He stopped advancing and frowned for a second and then looked at me seriously, his eyes shining in that weird way they had.
That was when he told me about his secret powers. He made me promise not to tell anyone and then explained that he could see into the future before it happened, which was why he could play pinball forever without losing a coin.
He knew the itinerary of the pinball before it occurred. He said yes, he could see my whole life and even beyond that, but that the knowledge was in his body and the only way to share it was to pass it directly. The Gift, he called it. That week, I was totally aside myself. Perhaps, Mr. Patterson, you remember talking to us?
There were about a million families all squeezed into the arena, and I watched all the married couples following behind their offspring or step-offspring and it suddenly seemed like Jeanie was right, like it was just some meaningless random thing who intercoursed who, like the moms and dads had just picked whoever was around because they were too lonely or desperate or sex-crazed to wait. It was a very warm day for December, and I parked behind a trailer where no one could see me.
Colin was up there on top of the house he was building, kneeling like a Japanese person and hammering nails into a two-by-four made of wood. It was kind of weird that Colin was working, because I saw the other guys on the crew taking their lunch break on the gates of their pickups in a very chummy manner. Colin had his shirt off, and when I first saw him from the back, the way his muscles kind of remained invisible until he bent down to hammer a nail and they came up like a secret promise to Natalie Mudbrook, a volt of longing went through me and all my doubts about intercourse were exploded.
I fantasized that Colin and I were already married and that he was building us a house, a big beautiful mansion where we could live out our days in endless eternity. And then something very strange occurred. This woman walked by in one of those running tops that show your bellybutton, walking a big dog in front of her, and the crew started yelling at her in this very discriminating manner. They were wiggling their tongues and making their hammers into phallic symbols and even performing air intercourse.
Instead, he put his hand on his sewn-up heart and called her a mamacita in Spanish and asked for her phone number in this loud voice that everyone could hear.
I left the construction site and drove around for a long time, sort of without knowing where I was going, like a ghost or something, until finally I stopped at a random Burger King for a Pepsi. I mean it was out there, but no one had bothered to tell you where it was?
I was feeling a desperate need to talk to her and started to knock on her door, but then I heard her plowing her slutdom and froze in midknock. I pressed my ear against the door. Jeanie was talking to someone in a strange voice, kind of loud and whispery at the same time, like she was trying to melt an ice cube in her teeth. Now and then a deep voice would interrupt her in a very personal fashion. Then the deep voice said something and she laughed.
The weird thing is, I felt kind of jealous. Not because I wanted to be a full-time premier slut, or because a boy had never made me laugh like that — but because I wanted to be the one making her laugh. Then whoever it was she was talking to got up and walked around and I lost my breath for a minute, because his shuffles were united with a faint sort of jingling, like coins.
It made me very sad. There was this little worm of rain moving on the window, kind of wriggling for no reason, and I watched it for a long time. The energy collected around my body and seeped into my own skin too, like I was a giant battery getting charged.
Everything seemed connected: the rain squirming, my heart pounding, the earth turning on its axle. Colin opened the door. His clothes were only a little damp, despite the undry weather. I was very scared. He walked over to the bed and knelt beside my face. He stood up all of a sudden and walked over to the window — I guess to close the curtains so no one would witness my conduction.
His jeans were kind of slipping down like usual, and I could see this strip of skin below his tan line that was all bumpy and wrinkled from the elastic force of his boxers. But sure enough, her steps began coming up the stairs. For a second, I just lay there like an embalmed person. There was just a frizz of gray hair like a piece of tinsel hanging into her eyes for Christmas. She walked over to the bed and looked at me with a sad expression.
She said she was sorry, and I said what for?
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