I commend your vaginal martyrdom, but this is an elective, short term, zero wellness-benefiting procedure that is not privilege but a right to dismiss or accept.

Not gonna happen.

I imagine it is, but the discomfort of the thought alone is enough to dissuade most people, myself included. I know it's irrational, but so are people.

My girlfriend completely refuses to take the hormonal treatments, including the shots, the pill — all of it. And often, for those that take them, hormonal contraception is used as supportive medication to maintain hormonal balances, and the contraceptive part is ancillary. So you're asking men to willfully take a shot…

You can still get together, but no one will feel like eating.

Yeah, no. When the nurse asks me where I'd prefer the shot I never point to my vas deferens.

Now on to finding out the woeful target of "Bad Blood", the Neil Sedaka 1975 smash. Some say it was his choreographer. Others: his tailor. Discuss.

Wait 'till you meet my son, Elizabert.

Yikes!

Yes, I believe I underrepresented the impact of tradition in forming the individual aesthetic of Renaissance artists. Reviewing my older posts, occasionally it almost looks almost like I'm making a tabula rasa argument for the imagination of the artist, which would be absurd in any era, let alone the Renaissance with…

It's a very hard argument for me to make because essentially it's a subjective observation that there's a fundamental difference (and, even more personally speaking, a qualitative difference) between paintings made by imagination and those made off of photographs, and that that division can be seen in the historical…

By imagination I mean specifically formal imagination, the ability to distort the appearance of physiognomic forms to achieve a face that is deemed beautiful to the creator. I believe there was a desire to prove those private intuitions mathematically, which led to many alternative attempts like the Vitruvian Man or…

Aside from the Vitruvian Man (whose proportions Da Vinci himself didn't follow in his subsequent work) I've already addressed Albrecht Durer and his eventual discrediting of mathematical schema. Piero della Francesca's mathematical interest was in perspective and geometric forms — see his famous drawing of a well in…

My main point about photography's role in contemporary art was the division it caused between the ideal and the real, whereas in premodern work that division didn't exist. Viewers of the Ghent Altarpiece accepted its look even though it was obviously fabricated and idealized as a type of truth. The hypothetical of a…

They were working from imagination only long, long after achieving a full knowledge of forms from the type of careful study you alluded to. But even the nudes they drew beneath their figures are only anatomically correct when the painter desired it — especially those superhuman titans of Michelangelo, where certain…

I think the attribution of mathematic rules to visual artists for the creation of their art is overblown and after-the-fact. Aside from Albrecht Durer's attempts at defining beauty via 'perfect' proportions (which he later stated was a dead-end) and Hogarth's attempt at defining the perfect curve (which was never…

There is plenty of historical writing about painters idealizing, 'creating from fancy' and not being reliant on the physical presence of the sitter. Some of this information is first hand, like the letters from Raphael to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola about him pursuing an image that is in his head when painting the…

0:07? Raphael even gave her a unicorn, which can be used as an implement of self-defense.

Of course they were often just making stuff up out of their head. If sitters were available they were only precursory to the shifting and morphing work of the artist's imagination. That's why painters have noticeable 'types', why their figures have a family resemblance—they were fashioned in the artists' imaginations.…

I think it eroded the skill to create imagined faces. Actually, if you look at 19th century painters in general the ability to imagine faces well was already dwindling horribly (look at the inept drawing of eyes in Courbet, the cartoonish reliance on perfectly round eyes in Jacques Louis David and, to a lesser extent,…