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This is beyond basic. You don’t get to see an artist’s impression of Nelson Mandela’s cock and balls in a park. There is no reason to depict Mary naked unless you are trying to be edgy to provoke debate, in which case show your own tits, not hers.
2016 was a hundred years ago but here’s some data https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2016/03/i-sorted-uk-s-statues-gender-mere-27-cent-are-historical-non-royal-women
And here is a podcast I did with Caroline in which I talk about Mary Wollstonecraft’s ACTUAL WORK AND LEGACY and its importance to me as a working class woman: https://mashable.com/article/caroline-criado-perez-tracy-king/
And here’s a viral infographic I made back when this stuff was less obvious (I didn’t include nudity because I didn’t think anyone would be ignorant enough to try and make a nude statue of a feminist icon). http://littleatoms.com/society/infographic-shows-why-britain-needs-suffragette-statue-parliament-square
How can women’s achievements and legacies be taken seriously when we’re being distracted by goddamn tits. For fucks actual sake. MEN DO NOT HAVE TO WASTE THEIR TIME DEBATING THIS SHIT.
“Hey here’s Edward Jenner’s perky ass and ginger pubes, a real starting point for learning about vaccine history”.
And that’s before we even get to the insane ‘flat belly and perfect Babycham-glass tits and no cellulite or excess body fat but she’s scowling because she serious, hope you feel sufficiently represented LADIES’ aesthetics.
Anyway. Maybe one day my legacy will be enough to warrant a naked statue, in which case please make sure to give me a thigh gap, very important. I’m off to write a book.
Oh one last thing: it isn’t empowering if it doesn’t get you any actual power.
Having to pop back to address ‘the naked woman isn’t meant to be Mary, it represents all women’. Hot balls does it. A) ‘everywoman’ is a lazy outdated trope in public art, B) if it’s not Mary then it’s every woman EXCEPT HER lmao in which case C) get her name off it then. Duh.
Still seeing a lot of post-hoc “the naked woman isn’t meant to be Mary” nonsense, as though a campaign literally called Mary on the Green had always promised a statue of literally every woman except Mary, on the green. That defence just makes the failure worse.
Can we have a statue of Mary Wollstonecraft or not? Take her name off the naked everywoman, call that statue A Monument To Everywoman* (Of A Rare Body Type), start from scratch with Mary. But please stop with the “it’s not her” stuff because that’s not the optics AT ALL.
Anyway, enjoy explaining all that to the groups of schoolkids that absolutely nobody is going to take on a field trip to see it
*there is no such thing as the Everywoman
Very amused by my quote in this, which now goes next to the time Guardian edited an article of mine to remove the phrase “legs akimbo”. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/10/insulting-to-her-mary-wollstonecraft-sculpture-sparks-backlash
