Honey, does this peplos make my butt look fat?

Venus KallipygosMuch discussion of sex and antiquities over at GardenRant this week.

Hank comments “Everything is sex. Either overt or covert. All sex. All the time.” (What, you can’t liveblog from Sweden Hank? They have ‘the internets’ over there I think. Or did you run into the Swedish Bikini Team?)

If I could afford it, I would buy classic statuary for my (less than formal) garden. But when I see Venus Kallipygos, I don’t feel a connection with the ancients based on sex. All I can hear is the most feared question a man is ever asked:

Honey, does this peplos make my butt look fat?

You can buy classic statues if you’ve got the bucks. (Page down. I have no clue why the golfer sorts to the top of that gallery. Ironic.) No thanks. I’m stuck with a pink flamingo (the kind with the spinning wings) and a bowling ball on a piece of rebar.

saronged statuaryI was searching for some images of the tacky modern nude garden statue crap that I remember gracing ads in gardening mags. You know the ones — a hybrid of Hustler and Gary Lee Price. Instead, I ran into this USAToday article Garden Center covers nude statues with velvet sarong.

Ummmm… Leave it to a Bible Belt nursery to make classic statues even more erotic in a tacky twins-in-bondage sort of way. (Yes. Sales increased and customers were caught peaking peeking.) Reminds me of John Ashcroft screening Lady Liberty.

In a perfect world, I’d have sculpture in my garden like what Nicole posted about in More Buddha Park. (She’s got another great slideshow of Asian garden sculpture and much more worth exploring over at her blog, A Carribean Garden.)

Lots more to blog about and lots of pent up pix to purge. But I’ve got to go make hay while the sun shines — or at least it’s not raining.

Update: Keeping with the classical them, Bill Kirchen (formerly of Commander Cody) is coming to town. His latest is ‘Hammer of the Honky Tonk Gods’ — a tribute to a Fender or one of those other classic guitars. I’m clueless, but I get his point:

It was born at the junction
Or form and function
It’s the hammer of the honky tonk gods.

Here’s a taste.

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5 thoughts on “Honey, does this peplos make my butt look fat?”

  1. Thats a funny post, Craig. What mental gynmnastics to get in some alluring female nudity on a garden site! Thanks for visiting my site and your post, here.

  2. I have to keep in mind that my wife has an RSS feed and is a regular reader. So I have to keep things within bounds. She also reminded me that people might think that she uses the ‘does this make my butt look fat’ line on me. For the record, she has never put me in that position.

  3. Interesting cultural difference-in Trinidad people comment all the time ( in public) about anyone’s appearance. You can be walking on your way to the office or lunch and anyone on the street (especially all the cops when you pass in front the Police headquarters!) will give their honest commentary on your appearance, dress etc. whether positive or negative. Needless to say many people there don’t have overinflated egos and false sense of themselves!
    And within our social group its considered the DUTY of your significant other and close friends to give you their honest assessment of your appearance, clothing, hairstyle etc. esp if you are going to attend some big social or work function. The idea is that you get the opportunity to correct anything so others (ie people who aren’t so close to you) wont pick up on the flaws. This is also a practice within groups in some European countries. This is part of how one cultivates a sense of style.
    So it was quite a shock to me when I first started working with Americans, and giving them gentle suggestions on how to improve their appearance and dress, to find that this was taken with great offense!
    As for clothes making one’s butt look fat, it was also interesting to me to see that in the US most women would classify themselves or others as either fat or thin, whereas in the Caribbean and Latin America there are 3 body types -slim, fat, and a third category that is considered most desirable-shapely or sexy.

  4. Trinidad sounds like a great place to live. (I’ll bet the police there are far more polite in their assessments than NY City cops.) I think here that people judge others a lot by there appearance but lack the decency to comment gently about it in helpful ways or the humility to accept criticism. I think our egos are frail because the advertisers have done so much to make us feel uncomfortable about our bodies.

    Perhaps the title of my post lost something in the translation. It’s a play on the question every man fears from his significant other. Answer yes and you imply that she does not know how to dress (or indeed her butt is fat). Answer no and you imply that her butt is fat and it’s not the selection of clothing that is causing the look.

    Not that there is anything wrong with fat butts. Again, I blame the advertisers.

  5. Yes, I understood it. My mentor at University of Colorado, who has been married for 35 years, had explained to me why he has NEVER given an assessment of any woman’s dress, even his own wife’s.

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