Flesh Arcade

I follow several other artists on social media and have noticed some very obvious differences between how paintings or photographs of naked women and men are treated differently. For instance, I could easily find a picture of a man with his shirt off showing nipples and pubic hair but couldn’t with women.

After some research, I found that 90% of social media content each month is reviewed and censored by an AI or Artificial Intelligence program that is designed to find content that is “sexually suggestive.” The AI filters have tended to be heavily biased against women. For instance, the most censored content referred to menstruation, body-type, exposed bodies (nipples), suggestive objects, and body hair. Men are also deemed to be sexually suggestive by their what they’re doing, whereas women are deemed to be sexual just by showing their body. There’s also evidence that rises in sexually suggestive images among women are directly link to income inequality in the US and other developed nations.

In this painting, I wanted to reverse the gender roles and objectification of women through social media by showing what a female fantasy of men would look like if the roles were reversed. This included showing male ejaculation, exposed nipples, suggestive objects, and a little body hair. The cavern-like appearance is from the perspective of being inside of a mans anus. The object on the right is a prostate and the tv-like object at the bottom of the canvas is a simulated computer being covered in male ejaculation. Stylistic influences were based on various modern sub-pop artists and the sexually suggestive content they created for social media.