Artistic Habits of The Mind, Body + Soul. Creating pictures of what cannot directly be observed, heard or written -- Arts Matter -- Expression At All Costs -- Heart Education
These Cape Town rope folks can’t get enough of us and we love them for it! @sungakonji will be running an amazing 4hour workshop on the 29th. This is going to be such a vibe for beginners and anyone who wants to relearn some thangs. Bring your wallets rope and toys will be on sale. Find the ticket plug in mans bio — limited tickets available so I encourage you to risk it before next pay day 🦂: your musing aunty ➰: @sungakonji 📷: @sungakonji ✏️: @mbongomuffin #BDSM #Johannesburg #MeetGreetKneel #RopeBondage #Shibari #Kinbaku https://www.instagram.com/p/BnYZ65nF5rdPTTA6FQusz2G3we2_zf3yENt9tg0/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=166iiat9mzz4l
For those who don’t know about this painting, the artist was the Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi.
Gentileschi was a female painter in a time when it was very largely unheard of for a woman to be an artist. She managed to get the opportunity for training and eventual employment because her father, Orazio, was already a well established master painter who was very adamant that she get artistic training. He apparently saw a high degree of skill in some artwork she did as a hobby in childhood. He was very supportive of her and encouraged her to resist the “traditional attitude and psychological submission to brainwashing and the jealousy of her obvious talents.”
Gentileschi became extremely well known in her time for painting female figures from the Bible and their suffering. For example, the one seen above depicts the story from the Book of Daniel. Susanna is bathing in her garden when two elders began to spy on her in the nude. As she finishes they stop her and tell her that they will tell everyone that they saw her have an affair with a young man (she’s married so this is an offense punishable by death) unless she has sex with them. She refuses, they tell their tale, and she is going to be put to death when the protagonist of the book (Daniel) stops them.
So that painting above? That was her first major painting. She was SEVENTEEN-YEARS-OLD. For context, here is a painting of the same story by Alessandro Allori made just four years earlier in 1606:
Wowwwww. That does not look like a woman being threatened with a choice between death or rape. So imagine 17 year old Artemisia trying to approach painting the scene of a woman being assaulted. And she paints what is seen in the x-ray above. A woman in horrifying, grotesque anguish with what appears to be a knife poised in her clenched hand. Damn that shit is real. Who wants to guess that she was advised by, perhaps her father or others, to tone it down. Women can’t look that grotesque. Sexual assault can’t be depicted as that horrifying. And women definitely can’t be seen as having the potential to fight back. Certainly not in artwork. Women need to be soft. They need to wilt from their captors but still look pretty and be a damsel in distress. So she changed it.
What’s interesting to note is that she eventually painted and stuck with some of her own, less traditional depictions of women. However, that is more interesting with some context.
(Warning for reference to rape, torture, and images of paintings which show violence and blood.)
So, Gentileschi’s story continues in the very next year, 1611, when her father hires Agostino Tassi, an artist, to privately tutor her. It was in this time when Tassi raped her. He then proceeded to promise that he would marry her. He pointed out that if it got out that she had lost her virginity to a man she wasn’t going to marry then it would ruin her. Using this, he emotionally manipulated her into continuing a sexual relationship with him. However, he then proceeded to marry someone else. Horrified at this turn of events she went to her father. Orazio was having none of this shit and took Tassi to court. At that time, rape wasn’t technically an offense to warrant a trial, but the fact that he had taken her virginity (and therefore technically “damaged Orazio’s property”. ugh.) meant that the trial went along. It lasted for 7 months. During this time, to prove the truth of her words, Artemisia was given invasive gynecological examinations and was even questioned while being subjected to torture via thumb screws. It was also discovered during the trial that Tassi was planning to kill his current wife, have an affair with her sister, and steal a number of Orazio’s paintings. Tassi was found guilty and was given a prison sentence of…. ONE. YEAR……. Which he never even served because the verdict was annulled.
During this time and a bit after (1611-1612), Artemisia painted her most famous work of Judith Slaying Holofernes. This bible story involved Holofernes, an Assyrian general, leading troops to invade and destroy Bethulia, the home of Judith. Judith decides to deal with this issue by coming to him, flirting with him to get his guard down, and then plying him with food and lots of wine. When he passed out, Judith and her handmaiden took his sword and cut his head off. Issue averted. The subject was a very popular one for art at the time. Here is a version of the scene painted in 1598-99 by Carivaggio, whom was a great stylistic influence on Artemisia:
This depiction is a pretty good example of how this scene was typically depicted. Artists usually went out of their way to show Judith committing the act (or having committed it) while trying to detach her from the actual violence of it. In this way, they could avoid her losing the morality of her character and also avoid showing a woman committing such aggression. So here we see a young, rather delicate looking Judith in a pure white dress. She is daintily holding down this massive man and looks rather disgusted and upset at having to do this. Now, here is Artemisia’s:
Damn. Thats a whole different scene. Here Holofernes looks less like he’s simply surprised by the goings ons and more like a man choking on his own blood and struggling fruitlessly against his captors. The blood here is less of a bright red than in Carrivaggio’s but is somehow more sickening. It feels more real, and gushes in a much less stylized way than Carrivaggio’s. Not to mention, Judith here is far from removed from the violence. She is putting her physical weight into this act. Her hands (much stronger looking than most depictions of women’s hands in early artwork) are working hard. Her face, as well, is completely different. She doesn’t look upset, necessarily, but more determined.
It’s also worth note that the handmaiden is now involved in the action. It’s worth note because, during her rape trial, Artemisia stated that she had cried for help during the initial rape. Specifically she had called for Tassi’s female tenant in the building, Tuzia. Tuzia not only ignored her cries for help, but she also denied the whole happening. Tuzia had been a friend of Artemisia’s and in fact was one of her only female friends. Artemisia felt extremely betrayed, but rather than turning her against her own gender, this event instilled in her the deep importance of female relationships and solidarity among women. This can be seen in some of her artwork, and I believe in the one above, as well, with the inclusion of the handmaiden in the act.
So, I just added a million words worth of information dump on a post when no one asked me, but there we go. I could talk for ages about Artemisia as a person and her depictions of women (even beyond what I wrote above. Don’t get me started on her depictions of female nudes in comparison to how male artists painted nude women at the time.)
To sum up: Artemisia Gentileschi is rad as hell. This x-ray is also rad as hell and makes her even radder.
I’m reblogging this again to add something that I also think is important to know about Artemisia Gentileschi.
Back in her time and through even to TODAY, there are people who argue that her artworks were greatly aided by her father…. As in he either helped her paint them or just straight up painted them himself. Hell, there are a number of works only recently (past several years or so) that have been officially attributed to Artemisia because people originally saw the signature with “Gentileschi” in it and automatically attributed it to Orazio.
So, not only was Artemisia Gentileschi an amazing artist and amazing historical figure, but I don’t want it to be ignored that there are people over 400 years later who still won’t give her the credit she deserves, just because she’s a woman and obviously women can’t paint like she did.
Actor Kofi Siriboe, 24, directed a short documentary, titled WTF Is Mental Health in hopes to kickstart a conversation surrounding the Black community and the importance of mental health.
Adapted from the short story “Jambula Tree” by Monica Arac de Nyeko, the film is described as a love story between two teenage girls whose romance blossoms despite the opposition from family and society. The film made history by being the first Kenyan feature to debut at the Cannes Film Festival. Rafiki’s director, Wanuri Kahiu, recently announced that the Kenya Film Classification Board has banned the distribution, exhibition or broadcast of the film in Kenya. Samantha Mugatsia and Sheila Munyiva star as the two female leads.
Directed by Wanuri Kahiu, “Kena and Ziki long for something more. Despite the political rivalry between their families, the girls resist and remain close friends, supporting each other to pursue their dreams in a conservative society. When love blossoms between them, the two girls will be forced to choose between happiness and safety.”
The film will be the first Kenyan feature to debut at Cannes Film Festival.
And you thought Instagram's policy on nipples was ignorant
One week ago, the worst possible legislation curtailing free speech online passed and sex censorship bill FOSTA-SESTA is on its way to be signed into law by Trump.
Hours after the announcement, everything from the mere discussion of sex work to client screening and safe advertising networks began getting systematically erased from the open internet. Thousands — if not hundreds of thousands — of women, LGBTQ people, gay men, immigrants, and a significant number of people of color lost their income. Pushed out of safe online spaces and toward street corners. So were any and all victims of sex trafficking that law enforcement might’ve been able to find on the open internet.
The Senate has passed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, or SESTA, and tacked-on FOSTA (Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act), by a vote of 97–2. Lawmakers did not fact-check the bill’s claims, research the religious neocons behind it, nor did they listen to constituents. Significant organizations, including the Department of Justice, ACLU, EFF, and more had assembled to object to the bill both publicly and in letters to elected officials. In the process, law professors and anti-trafficking groups, along with sex work organizations, unearthed the bill’s many alarming legal, constitutional, and human rights disqualifications.
It’s dubbed the “anti-trafficking” bill for the internet, but it’s really an anti-sex sledgehammer. The bill removes protection for websites under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and makes sites and services liable for hosting what it very, very loosely defines as sex trafficking and “prostitution” content. FOSTA-SESTA puts into law that sex work and sex trafficking are the same thing, and makes discussion and advertising part of the crime. Its blurry interpretation of sex and commerce, as well as the bill’s illogical, incorrect conflation of sex trafficking and sex work is straight out of a bad movie.
If only the politicians who voted this Morality in Media (NCOSE) mess into law had fact-checked it with Freedom Network USA, “the largest coalition of experts and advocates providing direct services to to survivors of human trafficking in the U.S.“ Freedom Network unequivocally states that protecting the rights of sex workers, and not conflating them with trafficking victims, is critical to the prevention of trafficking. They also have the data to back up the fact that “more people are trafficked into labor sectors than into commercial sex.”
It’s already an unmitigated disaster for free speech in America. Which was, of course, predicted. The Technology and Marketing Law Blog wrote that there’s no mistaking that FOSTA-SESTA violates the First Amendment; it plainly stated that “this statute implicates constitutionally protected speech.”
It’s unconstitutional, but the damage is already being done. Despite the fact that FOSTA-SESTA isn’t even law yet – it could take anywhere from 90 days to until 2019 to take effect – online companies, always dangerously prudish with their algorithms, or hypocritical with their free speech rhetoric, appear to be in a rush to proverbially herd sex workers (and all us people who talk about sex for a living) out of the airlock into places where no one can hear us scream.
Safety resources disappear overnight
Websites are removing content and communities wholesale, the result of FOSTA-SESTA making safer working conditions more difficult by criminalizing digital conversations about sex work, screening tools and discussions about how to be safe doing it.
By way of its ambiguity, FOSTA-SESTA has begun the largest wave of censorship the open internet may ever see.
Craigslist removed its entire Personals section. All these amazing moments can never happen again.
As some may recall, Craigslist already voluntary closed its Erotic Services section in 2010 under pressure from conservative groups. This is despite a study from Baylor and West Virginia Universities, which found that Craigslist’s erotic services page directly reduced female homicides in the US by 17 percent, “principally because sex workers were able to use the free advertising service to move into safer indoor environments and screen clients more carefully.“ Request for comment to Craigslist and our queries asking why Personals was removed ahead of the bill’s signing were not responded to by time of publication.
Within days, Reddit removed entire communities. Notably, its r/escorts and r/sugardaddy subreddits. We asked Reddit for comment about its pre-emptive removal of those subreddits, and how that lines up with the company’s controversial philosophies regarding freedom of speech, but did not receive a response by press time.
Right now, sites and safety resources are falling like dominoes. In short order, sex work networks NightShift, CityVibe, and furry personals site Pounced shut down entirely. Sites that facilitated safety in sex work including The Erotic Review, VeryfyHim, Hung Angels, YourDominatrix, and Yellow Pages shut down their discussion boards, advertising boards, and community forums. Other sites, like MyFreeCams, have changed their policies to ban any talk about transactions of any kind.
FOSTA-SESTA’s timing puts a dark spin on recent Terms enforcement by Google Drive and changes with Microsoft products.
On the Survivors Against Sesta shutdown list of services, growing every day, Google Drive is listed as “deleting explicit content and/or locking out users.“ Google declined to comment on the record, but Engadget was assured via email from a source with knowledge of the situation that the enforcement wave on Drive has nothing to do with FOSTA-SESTA.
Similarly, Microsoft released a Terms update this week that got the company put on the FOSTA-SESTA censorship list as well. A spokesperson for Microsoft told Engadget in an email that the changes are not related to FOSTA. Further, the spokesperson told us, “The recent changes to the Microsoft Service Agreement’s Code of Conduct provide transparency on how we respond to customer reports of inappropriate public content.”
Human canaries in the free speech coal mine
The hashtag #LetUsSurvive is a current rallying point on Twitter, directing attention to the sex work community’s determination to get out of this insidious wave of conservative anti-sex silencing alive. To that end, sex work websites feature guides to self-censoring, the kind of thing you’d expect belongs more in Weimar-era Berlin than coming out of modern-day San Francisco.
Sex workers are right to be scared. They’re facing all this sudden and casually disastrous censorship as a threat to their safety and livelihoods, and are well aware that few are willing or brave enough to fight for their free speech and human rights. Even sex writers such as myself know this; any of us who’ve tried to make a living off anything relating to sex online has a list of products, services, banks and payment processors, social networks, companies, and business tools that everyone else takes for granted — that we are expressly prohibited from using.
It has been a speech issue for a long time, one most people have turned away from as Instagram censors more nipples, as PayPal freezes and shutters the accounts of sex bloggers and book authors, Tumblr deep-sixes erotic artists, and more.
Hateful gamers? No problem. Death threats toward women? Here’s a form to fill out. MAGA racists terrorizing women and people of color off the platform? Gotta hear both sides. But expose a nipple in artwork, discuss non-reproductive sex ed, or talk about making sex work safer by screening clients? Now that’s a misguided business plan guaranteed to create lasting cultural harm. Let’s definitely keep Peter Thiel on the board. If you thought all that was bad enough, just you wait. FOSTA-SESTA is making us disappear before your very eyes — and it will affect you, too.
Under FOSTA-SESTA, we’d most likely have no Stormy Daniels. That Stormy Daniels is making headlines while the absolute worst is happening to sex workers online is not lost on anyone.
“In a titillating cross-section of lawmaking and scandal,” wrote sex worker Morgan Claire-Sirene, “we have on one side Stormy Daniels suing 45 for unlawful payoffs and calling him to account publicly for his associates’ threats against her, and on the other side, legislation that has already silenced common sex workers, with the overlaying intersections of race and class; good whores and bad whores; victims and perpetrators; and misinformation all around.”
Daniels is a perfect lens with which to view the exact way FOSTA-SESTA harms one of America’s largest at-risk populations. Writer Ben Udashen points out, “The level of sex worker whose lives will be harmed by SESTA are not at the same level of fame and notoriety as Stormy Daniels”
“Daniels won’t be caught up in a sting sending her to jail because she had to work as a streetwalker to help pay her rent and feed her children. Daniels won’t have to carry a weapon to defend herself when she meets with a new client.
“Most importantly, Daniels’s children won’t be woken up to the news that their mother didn’t come home last night because she was murdered by a serial killer, a class of criminal who have always targeted sex workers from Jack the Ripper to the Green River Killer. Poor and working class sex workers, regardless of gender identity, will pay that price.”
And for a short moment in history, the advent of the open internet reduced that horrible cost.
“Frank Ocean wrote a fantastic ballad that was truly lovely and poetic in every way, there just wasn’t a scene for it. I could have thrown it in quickly just to have it, but that’s not why he wrote it and not his intention. So I didn’t want to cheapen his effort. But, the song is fantastic, and when Frank decides to unleash it on the public, they’ll realize it then.”
— Quentin Tarantino explaining why he didn’t use the song in “Django Unchained.”
New moon highs with @ithongomusings at the opening of Grada Kilomba’s ‘Speaking The Unspeakable’. We were shooketh by just how relatable the exhibition was. As part of our intention for claiming our future growth and healing courageously we shared our own experiences of othering #Exposition #NewMoonRituals #Conversations #MuzvareMusings (at Goodman Gallery, Rosebank)
Cause you asked @insta_holaa — expressive play is one of the ways I love on myself. Made this piece the other day to celebrate femininity and transformation. I called it ‘Kubarwa’ which loosely translates to being born or made anew #oilpastel #foragedflowers #KuzvidakweMuzvare
Asked the universe to show me what a snake feels when it sheds its skin. It’s been learning me growth and balance ever since. Decided to spell my chase of suppility and these painfully beautiful lessons with a yin-yang piece by @labrart_lifestyle 🐍🌝🌚 #ChasingSuppility #TransformationTuesday #Balance #Ehoyi #GirlsWithInk
Made this list for my fellow witchies who like their kitchen to be full of the green stuff :
Basil : like lots of sun and warmth. More difficult to grow in the winter months
Bay : needs plenty of sun and fresh air.
Chives : needs at least 6 hours of sun and plenty of water.
Dill : prefers slightly acidic soil, needs plenty of sunlight, doesn’t need too much water.
Lemongrass : My personal favorite as you don’t plant it in soil. Grow in a couple of inches of water. Easiest to grow.
Mint : needs plenty of water and needs to be placed in an area with indirect light. Harvest frequently.
Oregano : does not deal well with cold and drastic temperature changes could kill it.
Parsley : Doesn’t require too much light or maintenance, but is a slow grower.
Rosemary : needs 6 - 8 hours of strong, direct sunlight. Only water when the top layer of soil feels dry. Needs good ventilation. A bit trickier to grow.
Sage : Needs plenty of sun.
Thyme : Needs 6 - 8 hours of sunlight a day and maybe even supplemental light.
