No Bears

100 Day Project Day 77

I started my online day being served a very bad AI image of a group of young women being chased by a humongous bear. I mean all AI images are very bad images, not least because they steal from creators, but the women’s faces in this image were distorted and like something from a badly drawn horror cartoon.

That alone belies the misogyny of the man who went to some crappy image spewer and gave it a prompt, and selected this from the results. It was dire. Naturally, all the women were young and monstrous, white and monstrous, thin and monstrous, and their clothing showed lots of flesh. The guy had to show off his male-gaze, even if he wanted to show them as somewhat monstrous.

The bear, of course, was just a stylized image of a bear.

If you’re following The Discourse, you’ll know this all began when a woman stated that if she was along and hiking in the woods she would rather come across a bear than a man. Pretty much all the women who joined in agreed with her.

We all know several things to be true at once:

1. The bear is a known quantity, we know some basic tactics for meeting bears, even if we don’t live where bears wander.
2. We know that realistically a bear is probably more interested in foraging for food, and passing by.
3. We do not know what a lone man will choose to do if he encounters a lone woman.
4. We know there’s absolutely no chance he will simply pass by without making any contact at all.
5. We know that if we are attacked by a bear, people will believe us, and we know that if we are attacked by a man, we will be asked why we were wearing shorts while hiking, and why we were hiking alone at all.

Men, naturally, are very upset about all of this. Women who have participated in the discourse have been verbally abused, received death threats, doxxed, and all manner of things that only go to prove the point being made – we are safer meeting a bear than evening mentioning a man online.

The memes men have made as their contribution to the discourse tell more. All of them fail to notice the conditions of the meeting – that a lone woman is hiking in the woods and comes across a bear/man. Instead the male-gaze memes depict the women in a sexualised pose either with a bear or a man, and tell us that the only way they view women meeting men involves some sort of sexualised encounter. In their minds, a woman cannot simply be there, she must be there in some relation to the man.

With images like the shite AI one I saw first thing, the other tell is the way the man who made it immediately imagines women in danger, women being chased, women about to be harmed.

Women advocating for our own safety must be punished for doing so.

I find that anger can often be a motivator for creativity, and so I have a lovely and creative day working on my mixed media piece, and going into sketchbooks in-between layers.

I started out with a graphite sketch in my Strathmore Toned Gray, which I haven’t worked in for a while. I like what happened there, and I want to use that drawing as a reference for something else.

The rest of my art time was mostly working on my mixed media piece, and I brought her on a bit from yesterday. In-between layers I used up inks in a couple of sketchbooks, just playing.

Lastly I did a blind contour-ish drawing using a blue pastel pencil, then used my trusty clear gesso to seal it.

So lots of faces today.

No bears, unfortunately.

Til the morn,

Suzanne