Don Juan’s Breakfast
by Dorothea Tanning
Hello Subscribers,
This Fur Cup encounter is a very short one as I am setting it up in advance of a crazy couple of weeks in which I have a ‘big’ birthday, a party with lots of wonderful houseguests and then a music festival.
This soft sculpture from 1972 by Dorothea Tanning always makes me smile: I think even feminists have to laugh at exaggerated cleavage sometimes!
So enjoy, and I’ll see you on the other side: muddy, bleary-eyed and into my next decade.
Everything this morning is plump. Life fills the tankard and overspills with plentiful foam. Her body can scarcely be contained by clothes and her breasts push at her dress with friendly urgency. Buttons are fit to burst, releasing a peal of laughter. Her skin is creamy and supple and young. There is elasticity, and firm round forms: the dimple in the elbow, the comfortable broad buttocks in the velvet dress.
This instance of the objectification of the female body is so casual, so good-natured and so merry that it is making me smile despite myself. I gladly forget the sexual politics of the Byronic rake and the need to condemn the long, annoying succession of female nudes for men to buy and paw over.
Instead, I remember hot afternoons on holiday beaches where women of large proportions are celebrating themselves in coloured swimsuits and loud kaftans. They spill over their bikini tops with soft, generous, inviting flesh while relaxed babies snuggle into their necks, at home in the warmth of their motherly forms.