The urgency and certainty of that point of view continues to strike me as unutterably bizarre. Fortunately, my blog is the one place in the world where I can demand, and get, the last word in an interminable argument about philosophy. Thread locked.

To clarify my post, I meant “apology” as in “speaking in defense” as opposed to “acknowledging wrongdoing and expressing regret”. Tragically unclear, admittedly.

Thanks for your perseverance as a blogger!

And found that my impression was different.

I didn’t mean to suggest your impression was wrong, but it certainly wasn’t the one that was imparted to me when looking at the art. And it would be interesting perhaps, to talk about why you had the impression you did, and why I had the impression I did, as a way of understanding the visual qualities that one looks to when assigning gender.

But the conversation clearly got judgmental, and that’s a shame. Because intelligent debate or sharing should be encouraged, whereas I agree, finger pointing or demeaning commentary should not.

At any rate, I considered the relative shortness of the hair, the proportion of the hips and buttocks, how the derrier dimples in from the side, and the massing of the thighs- all of which just spoke of youthful masculinity to me.

And rather attractively at that! Thanks for sharing the photo….

I have a fundamental philosophical objection to people who try to make “that IS” arguments about art. Art never IS anything, it creates impressions in people’s heads.

In this case, the impression created in my head differed markedly from the impression most commonly created in people’s heads. Which is fine, but I do not apologize for it.

What I do not understand, and what I will not tolerate on my blog, is people trying to tell me that the impression created in my head was wrong, in a situation where there is, and can be, no objective truth because there never was any objective reality of which this picture is a representation.

The absurdity I see is found in the arguments based on academic analysis or artist intent. I cheerfully admit that I am not parsing this piece of art the way the majority does. But I am not wrong because it is impossible to be wrong in looking at art.

As for what I can do about it, this comment thread is already missing about half a dozen comments from people trying even harder to prove how wrong I am, with mannerisms more rude than I am prepared to tolerate. I particularly liked the “you’re obviously wrong, get over it” comment, but not enough to publish it in full.

If you had posted an illustration of a poorly-sketched Medusa going down on Perseus, and captioned it “Snake-on-Man-on-Man Action”, you would have received essentially the same comments and could have made essentially the same point in your defense.

I can appreciate, however, that you get tired of having folks waxing pedantic while browsing your generous contributions. What to do about it? Whatever you want, I suppose. It’s your blog.

Nice choice of picture for a discussion topic, though! Thanks!

I have an abiding philosophical distaste for efforts to fix meanings into ambiguous art, because of the pointlessness of the enterprise. Given the lack of secondary sex characteristics visible, it is literally unknowable and unprovable whether the figure in the picture is male or female — because the figure in the picture has no literal existence and its gender is not unambiguously specified.

I said “girl” because I live in a cultural context where naked snake-charmers tend to be female, so the gender ambiguity of the scrawny figure in the image did not jump out at me. Affixing maleness to that figure in your head is just as legitimate as what I did, for whatever reasons you choose to do it. But trying to preference that opinion over a counter-opinion with which you disagree? What’s the point?

(And yes, I appreciate the comments with “to me” qualifiers. It helps, even if I remain baffled by enterprise of advancing firm opinions on fundamentally undefined issues.)