Curvilinear Lines

Guyana television churns up the odd interesting program in the mish-mash of junk.  One such program I happened across was the ‘Looking at and Understanding Great Art’ series.

I caught the end of one recent episode which put up a picture painted by the German artist Franz Marc who preferred to paint animals, horses mainly, in bold colours and curvilinear lines. The lecturer narrating the series said that curvilinear lines are more pleasing to the eye and it struck me why men like looking at women’s bodies – ‘cos they’re all curvilinear lines!  

 I remembered being surprised that Page 3 of The Sun – a rubbishy newspaper but one of the most widely-sold in England when I was a student – pulled in wide sales because of the topless young girl it displayed with something trite — the girl in question purported to say something like – ‘this is for you Dad, because I know how much you like Page 3!’ (?!!?!)

So, the Saturday Woman’s Feature of Stella Says in one of the local papers, is entitled Blurred Lines and is talking about the objectification of women – being so widespread that the young impressionable women can see hundreds, even thousands such images per day so that they do not think it is wrong to put up ‘sexy’ images of themselves in social media and for the world to view generally. She then extrapolated the knock-on effect on the local men, who began to feel ‘entitled’ to pass comments on passing women and said ‘if a man thinks he has a right to treat a woman with such disrespect and aggressiveness in public, he will do far worse in private.’  This sadly referred to often violent response of men to the realization that ‘their’ women is/was planning to leave them after putting up with years of neglect and/or abuse;  the papers have practically reported daily a case of a man killing the children and woman before fleeing or killing himself. (The book I am reading has a great line- ‘Sexual jealousy is the greatest crazy maker we have.’) The article ends saying that ‘as long as society continues to objectify women, the violence against women will also continue.  Sadly, women play right into this trap. They want to feel wanted and they have been given a how-to manual on what they need to do to be wanted by men.’ She said that it is ‘sentencing ourselves and our daughters to more violence and death’.

Makes me wonder how things get taken out of context and get out of hand rapidly – the natural appreciation of curvilinear lines morphs in porn then exploitation (cos dirty old men persuading young attractive females to view their bodies as commodities could only be that!). The natural inclination towards sweet and fatty foods is then exploited when junk has high fructose sugars and artificial flavourings added to it to fool our senses that we are eating something good for our bodies. A Facebook post—always subject to exaggeration - found a fast-food burger had only 2% meat.