• fiat_lux@lemmy.zip
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      11 days ago

      The penis thing is pretty hotly debated, but savagery comes pretty close to my understanding of the theory you mention. It’s not a hugely different concept from some of the manosphere stuff you find today though.

      Basically the idea was (it’s theorized) that thinking with your dick leads to making hasty and bad decisions, but you want to be like the cool smart intellectual philosopher rhetorician dudes ruling society who are strong enough to control their urges. You want to be the civilized powerful master strategist, not the uncivilized weak-willed destructive glutton. So… because art needs to be about reality and be educational (there’s no place for that creative abstract shit), we’re going to de-emphasize the body part associated with urges that are difficult to control. These are powerful rational dudes afterall.

      The biggest difference with modern manosphere bullshit is maybe the part where they shrunk the pps on the ripped marble dudes to make that point. Instead we get… social media statue and peacock “science” analogies.

        • fiat_lux@lemmy.zip
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          10 days ago

          Phrasing. But yes, some of them - they seemed to prefer making plaster and metal fig leaves thankfully. Michelangelo wasn’t thrilled about being told to change his work either. Some of them were whacked off earlier than the Catholics, and some were whacked off by the Vatican even as late as the 1850s in “The Great Castration”.

          Many of the lost appendages were accidental though, natural disasters and the like did a lot of amputation and decapitation, to the point where there are entire catalogue methods for mismatched heads on statues.

    • KeenFlame@feddit.nu
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      10 days ago

      If we had? We have sculptors. We have people making sculptures. You don’t have to guess what they would make… but yeah, it’s bulges…