Rob, you will actually like this. Look up "Lena testimage" and try to find the original.
The title is supposed to allude to Picasso, if that helps any.
Thanks for your link, Oscar.
I'd never heard of the use of the picture like that; nice to discover new things at this late stage!
I went on to read the Wiki story about it, and was amazed to find that there are people in the sciences that see it, the use of the picture for scientific purposes, as degrading to women! It's nothing but a classy portrait, for God's sake!
It strikes me that those with that mindset are actually - and I mean this sincerely - mentally ill. They suffer from such a dose of indoctrination (most probably from universities; strange, the connection between high education and aberrations) that their thinking has become tainted with a new version of the old religious concept of original sin. How much deep thought does it take to accept that there are two genders in humans, and that there is such a thing as beauty as there is also of ugliness? If one is going to use an example of a human for an experiment, then why should the beautiful one be intentionally snubbed in favour of the ugly sister (or brother)? If such thinking would not be perverse, then nothing ever will be.
This has really become a curse of the post-60s era; I remember perfectly well the years before all of this nonsense developed in the US campus arena, and spread into print via those students taking their place in the world and getting literary employment. Not only has it scarred the USA and spread its tentacles way beyond the literary but also into everyday life and, sadly, politics, but it has also influenced life in the UK. I can remember chats with my two granddaughters - as well as with my own daughter on this line of faux, diverted feminism, and from a rabid subscribing to it, they have apparently grown up and adopted a far more sensible view on the world and its workings. They appear to have taken a delight in being women, are perfectly aware of their power and have no need to scream from the rooftops about gender equality. My late wife had, all her life, never shown the slightest doubts about her own power as woman. She was well-educated, a bookworm; by inclination a mathematician as well as a chemist, yet totally devoted to family and providing the best of home life that anyone could dream of enjoying. The shrill voices that women have to be copies of men to ammount to a hill of beans is not even as relatively benign as a siren's song: it's a pile of deadly, harmony-destroying crap.
The way to happines is to be what you are, not what some popular cultural belief wants to turn you into being. Creating doubt and self-loathing in people is not a good idea; the advent of social media and its grip on the childen of today is awful. I wonder if the time will arrive when people come to their senses and all of these time-wasting, personality-destroying sites will be closed down, kids freed to be kids and not cry themselves to sleep because they have
not been cursed with a massively fat ass...?
Thing is, the young of today do not have the experience available to them of the past; they have no idea of the pleasures of a simple life where your friends and foes were people you really knew. Life was real, not something lived apart and on a screen, where fantasy and PS'd bodies are the goals in life, where doctors are willing to change healthy bodies into false ones. So much for medical ethics.
;-)
