"To blanketly say, you must be naked to pass my class � it makes me sick to my stomach."

Says the mother of a student at the University of California, San Diego. 

UCSD professor Ricardo Dominguez has been lighting his classroom by candlelight and baring it all alongside his students as part of the assignment for 11 years and never received any complaints, he told the TV station.

�It�s a standard canvas for performance art and body art,� Dominguez said. �If they are uncomfortable with this gesture, they should not take the course.�

"You could read Vera Wang's transparent wedding dress � which functions as wearable art much more than sellable merchandise..."

"... as an extreme answer to those often rather cruel tensions: What better way to criticize the constraints of the wedding industrial complex than by creating a dress that is, effectively, invisible?" writes Megan Garber in The Atlantic.

You could also read it, of course, as an overt rejection of the sexual mores at play in the traditional wedding dress. Wedding dresses have always been, on some level, about sex: the white as a sign (and a reassurance) of the bride's virginity; the expanse of fabric as a tacit promise that, while sex will be had, it will be had in the proper way. Women are getting married at older ages than they used to. Which means, among so much else, that they're less inclined to opt for princess-driven designs � and also that they're less inclined to designs that emphasize the virginal. �For my generation," the soon-to-be bride Natasha Da Silva told The New York Times in 2008, "looking like a virgin when you marry is completely unappealing, boring even. Who cares about that part anymore?�

How about creating a wedding that is, effectively, invisible? That's what we did.

"For all the righteous concern people expressed about the welfare of my children, what most of them failed to understand was that taking those pictures was an act separate from mothering."

"When I stepped behind the camera and my kids stepped in front of it, I was a photographer and they were actors, and we were making a photograph together. And in a similar vein, many people mistook the photographs for reality or attributed qualities to my children (one letter-�writer called them 'mean') based on the way they looked in the pictures. The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind and shade. These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph. Even the children understood this distinction...."

Writes Sally Mann, whose very arty photographs of her (sometimes naked) children were published to much elite acclaim in 1992 and � simultaneously � intense criticism as �manipulative,� �sick,� �twisted,� �vulgar� � in part because of what Mann calls the "cosmically bad timing" of coinciding with the controversy about Robert Mapplethorpe�s photographs. Mapplethorpe had "included images of children along with sadomasochistic and homoerotic imagery," and: "Into this turbulent climate, I had put forth my family pictures."

From the comments there (at the NYT):

There is absolutely no question that Sally Mann is a photographic artist of great stature. There is also no question that were she not, she would have had her children taken from the home decades ago, and probably would have been jailed. If the father down the block from Mann took similar photos and made them public, he would have been thrown under the jail house. She was, and remains, ethically tone deaf - at best. To use one's children, who cannot possibly understand the ramifications of what they are doing, as one's subjects to create sexually charged images, is the grossest violation of the concept of informed consent. and is inexcusable.

"Think of it this way: if none of us wore any clothes, then it would be the male genitalia sticking out visibly..."

"... while women�s would remain largely hidden. Maybe the entire point of formal attire to invert this possibility, to say, 'Yes, in nature, it is women who have mysterious hidden powers of creation, but once we get all dressed and civilized, it�s precisely the other way around.'"

The last paragraph of "Dickheads/The paradox of the necktie resolved," a Baffler article by David Graeber (with an excellent illustration).

Via Metafilter, where there are many comments, including:

Couldn�t we say that a tie is really a symbolic displacementof the penis, only an intellectualized penis, dangling not from one�s crotch but from one�s head?

Is this a comp lit undergrad class in 1986?

I see I have a neckties tag. I'll have to publish this post so I can click on it to see what the hell I've said about neckties over the past decade. Beyond this past decade, for the past half century, the most common insight into the necktie has been that it's a phallic symbol. But what I liked about Graeber's take was the seen-and-unseen angle � and seen and unseen is one of my all-time favorite tags.

ADDED: From the necktie-tagged archive. This is from a 2004 post about shopping for a suit at Brooks Brothers:
Click for more �

"If you weren't imagining a MALE (NUDE) engaged in PHONE SEX while wearing a SANTA HAT, well... you are now, and you're welcome."

For the fantastic/alarming visual alone, I'm going to give that SW corner the 'Best SW Corner Of All Time' award. � The only thing I'd change about that corner is the "G" in GIMPS. I get that it's supposed to add (I think) to the overall mildly perverted feel of that corner (insofar as 'GIMPS' reminds me of 'The Gimp' from 'Pulp Fiction'), but it's a borderline offensive word (making it a verb doesn't really change that). I'd actually prefer PIMPS there, though I somehow doubt that would fly in the NYT. LIMPS or SIMPS works too. But this is hardly that important. What's important is MALE NUDE PHONE SEX SANTA HAT. *That* is a jolly good time. It's like the rest of the puzzle barely exists..."

From Rex Parker's discussion of yesterday's NYT crossword.

"I admire the way [Leonard Nimoy] presented the women as standing there looking the viewer full in the face."

"Saying look at me � I�m entitled to stand here and present myself to the world. I don�t have to be ashamed and cower in the corner," wrote Natalie Angier in the foreword to the photography book "The Full Body Project." (Clicking the link won't display nudity on screen, but scrolling down will.)

"It really disturbed him that women who considered themselves overweight had this terrible feeling about themselves... He wanted to show the world that there�s beauty to be found in different body types."

I noted Nimoy's photography project back in 2007, in a post that read "So, Leonard Nimoy is into fat women. I have a similar preference." The link on "similar preference" went to a 2005 post titled "Drawing from the nude model":

My undergraduate degree is in Fine Arts, and I've spent many hours drawing from a live model, both in art school and in evening sessions here at UW....

It can also be tiresome to draw from the model. You may think it's always going to be interesting to look at a naked person, but many people who try to be artist's models are not very good. You need an interesting body and an ability to find a good pose and hold it. The artist can move around looking for a good angle on a pose, but with some models there are no interesting angles. Try drawing a thin man! The best models are overweight women -- like the woman in the photo at the link. One reason I stopped doing the evening drawing sessions here at UW was that nearly all the models were thin. I mean, if I want to draw landscapes, I'd go to the mountains, not the plains.

ADDED: The 2007 post linked to a NYT article titled "Girth and Nudity, a Pictorial Mission":

Mr. Nimoy... admits that before he began ["The Full Body Project"], it had never occurred to him that beauty might be culture driven.... His enlightenment came about eight years ago, when he had been showing pictures from his Shekhina series � sensual, provocative images of naked women in religious Jewish wear � at a lecture in Nevada. 

(Nimoy � according to Wikipedia � was "the son of Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Iziaslav, Soviet Union (now Ukraine). His parents left Iziaslav separately�his father first walking over the border into Poland�and reunited in the United States.")

Afterward, a 250-pound woman approached him and asked if he wanted to take pictures of her, a different body type....

�The nudity wasn�t the problem,� he said, �but I�d never worked with that kind of a figure before. I didn�t quite know how to treat her. I didn�t want to do her some kind of injustice. I was concerned that I would present this person within the envelope of an art form.�

But soon he relaxed into it, lulled by the clicking of the camera and the woman�s comfort with her body. He placed some of the shots in various exhibitions, and they invariably garnered the most attention. �People always wanted to know: �Who is she? How did you come to shoot her? Why? Where? What was it all about?� �