All Posts Tagged as 'Art'

Who killed the sex symbol?

It's no mystery that in the era of #MeToo, the rules of combat have changed on the sexual battlefield. Women will no longer tolerate condescending or degrading treatment that was once business as usual in the workplace or dating arena. But in this long overdue push-back against sexual coercion and exploitation, has something valuable been lost?

The sex symbol was arguably Hollywood's most brilliant artifact, propelling the young movie industry to world impact from the moment that Theda Bara flashed her coiled-snake brassiere in Cleopatra (1917). Sex was great box office. With its impudent populism, Hollywood crashed through stuffy proprieties lingering from the Victorian age and stationed itself at the bold forefront of the modern liberalization of sex. Movies were in sync with the radical new spirit of American women, who won the right to vote in 1920 and kicked up their heels throughout the flapper decade of the Roaring Twenties.

The great sex symbols of Hollywood were manufactured beings, engineered by trial and error, with the mass audience as their ultimate judge and jury. Decade by decade, the movie industry rediscovered primal archetypes that have animated myths around the world since the Stone Age. Major male sex symbols like Clark Gable, Cary Grant and Sidney Poitier have a mesmerizing natural authority onscreen, a supranormal power of personality and density of being that transcend their roles. Like their antecedents in ancient hero sagas, they inhabit and explore physical space, whose frustrations and dangers they endure but ultimately defeat.

The female sex symbol, however, commands emotional or psychological space. Her sensual beauty is an alluring mirage, hypnotizing and sometimes paralyzing. Never entirely present, she is attuned to another reality, an extrasensory dimension to which we have no access. There is an unsettling aura of the uncanny around the major female sex symbols, who channel shadowy powers above or below the social realm.

Toledo, Ohio, Catholic school students were unceremoniously removed from a performance of The Nutcracker when chaperones realized that Clara’s parents would be portrayed as gay dads. Despite an apology from the administration, students still protested by painting the “spirit rock” in rainbow colors and emblazoning it with “God Loves U” on Tuesday, according to TV station WTOL.

Shakespeare has been given a digital makeover, in an effort to inspire the Instagram generation to connect with arguably the world's greatest playwright.

New research from the digital technology company, Adobe, has revealed 77% of 11-18 years olds struggle to understand William Shakespeare's plays because of the "challenging" language used.

42% do not understand how studying his work will help them get a job in the future - while 29% said modern day interpretations of his plays would help them understand them.