What's Wrong with the Female Nude  

"In addition to its economic and legal dimensions, sex oppression also has significant social and psychological dimensions. One such significant dimension, which many feminists have gone to great lengths to articulate with subtlety and detail, is men’s and women’s internalization of an erotic taste that manifests, promotes, and sustains male dominance. In particular, women and men both learn to eroticize men’s ascendancy over women. (Consider, for instance, the very common preference—on the part of both heterosexual men and women—that a man be taller than his female mate. This is just one example of the eroticization of a subtle form of male dominance and female subordination that permeates our everyday experience.) Because erotic desire plays such an important role in most peoples’ lives, the eroticization of sex inequality is a significant way that this inequality is sustained and reproduced." --"What's Wrong with the Female Nude?" (2012) Anne W. Eaton

"Very few active, strong, psychologically engaging, heroic female nudes and I know of no female counterparts to The Thinker, the Pollaiuolo engraving, or David. To make this point vivid, try the thought experiment of imagining a work like Ingres’s Turkish Bath with men rather than women, or Pollaiuolo’s Battle with women rather than men. The results, I think you’ll find, will seem so foreign as to border on the absurd."--"What's Wrong with the Female Nude?" (2012) Anne W. Eaton