What I'm beinging to find interesting is that Manet's Olympia was deemed "vulgar" and "immoral" by the majority of critics seemingly because Olympia gaurded her sexuality; placed her hand firmly over her gentiles as if to suggest that it were in fact, her property; not the viewer's or her patron's. Titian's Venus met no simlar outcry with her pubic-hair-less privates, only delicately and suggestively covered by her hand, seducing the onlookers with a sincere look of "come hither." Thank heaven she was called "Venus" and her little dog was near by to remind us of her fidelity.



"..and elsewhere he notes that diverse critics, in 1865 and since, have found Olympia somehow masculinized, or androgynous. As far as he is concerned this response is a "wrongheaded" reaction to the figure's nonconformity to the traditonal notions of Woman. "Surely Olympia's sexual identity is not in doubt," Clark remarks, "it is how it belongs to her that is the problem.""
-Figures of Ill Repute