Blackcatter, I'm very glad you understood it was an apology--after I sent it I worried my goofiness about it might have muddled that.

But I think the Venus of W., more so than many other figures, had to be observed from life. I don't think it much affects your point, and you make another good point that we have to take such representations not necesarily as observed norms--just as with the case today. But in that one piece I feel the knees, the ankles... it just has that quality of observation. The same way one feels a degree of random specificity in a movie intones something of a memoir source. But that's just my feeling.

Apart from the historical reasons you outlined I think there's probably a lot to the implication--I think Genie suggested it--that the cultural obsession with thinness has a backlash effect on us.

I once decided to try to get rid of a bit of belly, just to know I was able, and I exercised, paid attention to what I ate, for the 1rst time. And nothing happened. I got to be able to do many many exercise reps, but that wasn't something I much cared to do. Then, finally, what happened was, my belly began to develop like a bicep muscle bulge--again, not something I hoped for. So I quit all that, and months later, the bit of belly was gone. For a while.

My conclusion is either (a.) chocolate doughnuts and french fries are the most effective way for me to slim down, or (b.) the exercise had strengthened my muscles so that I came to rely on them more, after I quit the exercise, just in the way I did things, the way I'd stand, etc., and that the effect is sort of indirect-- rather like Shaw's aesthetic idea that literary beauty is a by-product of other activity. I lost interest in the question beyond that.

There are times when one has more mental energy to percieve different kinds of looks than whatever happens to be fashionable, which is only just the easiest, laziest thing to recognize and appreciate. A more open way of looking is kind of a restorative state of mind, like how a while in the woods puts petty concerns out of one's head, free-floating anxieties dissolve. I've always found nude life-drawing to be a de-tox process, like that, but you have to do it without caring much to make finished pieces, just for it's own sake.

Genie, I think that notion of adolescence is maybe most damaging in education, where young men and women are considered as 'preparing for life' when they are very much alive, and their intense energies just can't be bottled in some existential formaldehyde. The sad thing about child-labor laws is that it's good if kids can have healthy little jobs. Enough time in schools is disengaged waste motion anyway, or was for me. I'm sure lots of people had better experiences, though.

There's something about this topic that seems to bring up everything else.