"Women in the Picture: What Culture Does with Female Bodies" by Catherine McCormick

 This was such an incredibly interesting book, I learned so much and it also made me mad. Maybe not a surprise given the subject matter. The parts of the book that I found most compelling where the sections about female bodies in fine art.

I've seen similar statistics before and they always make me mad: "In the National Gallery there is a collection of 2,300 paintings - only 21 are by women." or "an annual report on gender disparity in the creative arts sector found that 68% of the artists represented by London's top commercial galleries were men, only 3% were women, despite the fact women takeup more than 2/3 of the places on creative arts and design courses in higher education". Also unsurprisingly, these statistics are worse for artists of color: "in the US, African American women make up just 3.3% of the total number of female artists who work was collected by US institutions between 2008 and 2018 (190 of 5,832)."

Woof. Support living, female artists everyone.

On the topic of specific art. The image of Venus comes up A LOT. Venus de Milo, the Rockeby Venus, and the ultra famous The Birth of Venus. Even just these three examples you have a range of types of Venus, from demure and coquettish to more sensual. The status when a subject has the arm and hand draped across their groin and genitals to cover and yet also draw attention to that area is called venus pudica. Feel free to bust that fact out at your next cocktail party.

Another depiction of women that comes up frequently, unfortunately, is rape. And it's not just the classic Greek and Roman stories depicted in art - though goodness knows that assault by a bored and horny god with no consequences was a real possibility. A frequent story depicted is the Rape of Europa - this one is Reubens, this one is Titian  and this one is a Goya. Pictures with rape depictions are more frequent than you might imagine - they can be found on money (like the Greek and Italian 2 Euro coin), in a statue outside of the Council of the European Union headquarters in Brussels, and in a sculpture outside of the European Parliament building in Strasbourg.