watching womEn bathing
Diana & her Nymphs bathing
Think about this: Diana, Goddess of the Moon and Hunt, was so outraged at discovering that Actaeon spying on her and her nymphs while they were bathing in a hidden pool that she turned him into a stag — whereupon he was torn to bits by his own hounds.
Such depictions enable and play into the eye of the voyeur — undermine the point that spying on a woman in a private moment without her consent is unacceptable and, in the eyes of this Goddess, punishable by death.
The magnitude of the paintings dedicated to this one story is amazing (these are but a few examples). This obsession with doing and depicting precisely what has been deemed unacceptable is fundamentally childish. Surely we can do better than that. Looking beyond childishness, this also seems like a calculated attempt at undermining the authority of the Goddess and a clear and continued demonstration of disrespect for women in general.
How long will we continue to accept this?
How long will we further and enable voyeurism?
There’s no question the works aren’t beautiful, nor that we shouldn’t continue to see them, however contextualizing these artworks as feeding into the voyeuristic gaze would be helpful if we have any interest in elevating human thought and behaviour.
A womAn watched while bathing
Two or more women watched while bathing
Venus Bathing
The stories of Bathsheba, and Susanna and the Elders take the issue even further. So often the depictions include and make the viewer complicit in the secret viewing of a vulnerable woman.
We must ask ourselves why, as a society, we wish to continue enabling such behaviour.