After reading Susan Bordo's 'The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity' one main quote and overall point stuck out to me-

"The body- what we eat, how we dress, the daily rituals through which we attend to the body - is a medium of culture (165)."

In the words of a more 'normal' person this means the way our bodies look, the way which we present them or show them along with what we do to maintain and take care of them represents the culture we live in or come from.

'Nymphs and Satyr' by William Adolphe is a painting from the late nineteenth-century and is the image that is posted above. This piece of art is looked at in Richard Leppert's work 'The female nude: surfaces of desire.' From: Art and the committed eye: the cultural functions of imagery.

Leppert tells how this painting is from the Victorian age, and how representing the "nude body" was nearly impossible because anything to do with sex and sexual desire was strongly fought against. As you can see, and as Leppert states, this picture is ridiculous. There are naked women tempting a satyr.

I feel that this painting defends Susan Bordo's position in a way. Like I already stated this painting was created in the Victorian age where they had no sense of what it meant to be naked and sexual. 'Nymphs and Satyr' is such an unrealistic artwork that it goes along perfectly with the Victorian culture. If they did not talk about or have anything to do with sex in their culture, they would not really know how to represent it would they?

(I really like another point Leppert made about this painting. He talked about how the man in this image is depicted as a satyr, and how this represents the fact that "real men" is an evolved concept. This is true in any Western culture today. Real men have power over women, or are supposed to. This is not really natural though, just something that our culture has created.)