Gustave Caillebotte, The Floor Planers, 1875

All hail Gustave Caillebotte, the only Impressionist who bothered to say “You know what this art movement doesn’t have enough of? Shirtless rough trade, that’s what!” And then he became the change he wanted to see in the world, and I think that’s beautiful.

i saw this in a museum once and i gotta go off on this for a second– not only is it a gorgeous display of technical mastery over light, darkness, composition, form. it’s also a slap in the face to artistic conventions at the time. at the time, you could have nudes but they had to be heroic. they had to be virtuous. 1875, paris– art was supposed to be elevating. it was for the wealthy, it was to be uplifting, it was so everyone who commissioned the pictures could flex their classics education. okay?

so here’s the floor planers. they’re workmen. they’re workmen. they’re not some rent boy you dolled up with a helmet to be achilles or adonis. artists have been hornily painting working-class models (and sex-worker boyfriends) into their portraits forever, but you’re supposed to frame your appreciation for the male form as an intellectually irreproachable appreciation for the heroic body from literature, or, conversely you could depict the humble beauty of peasants, if you must, but it had to be a sort of ode to nature and the simple life. peasants could be art, as long as they were… out there, you know. in a field. being a metaphor. so there’s your options for looking at a shirtless guy: he’s got to be mythic.

but no. look, here, at the workmen. the floor planers. the workmen’s bodies not dressed up in sandals and helmet, in flowers, on a pedestal. the workmen not employed as some distant paean to an arcadian countryside, not stacking sheaves or holding a lamb or elevating the beauty of nature. they’re here, they’re urban, they’re in a room just like you might have. the workers of your world, in your home, in this reality. the male body as a very real, very nonfigurative tool, humble and employed, but still gorgeous. the beauty of the men that the patrician class pays not to see. the men who come into your mansion through the back door and work unseen and leave unseen. those men. there, right there, this painting, glowing and beautiful.

not adonis. but beautiful.

anyway at the time everyone fucking hated this picture because it’s a direct slap across the classist chops. they were BIG MAD, this was filthy, it was an affront. they hated it. the paris salon rejected it. established intellectuals didn’t want anything to do with this kind of confrontation. it wasn’t art.

i just love that.

like, look at those hot guys go. look at the shine on the floor and the way their arms are. no virtuous framing, no classic allusions. just some regular guys making the floors nice for a rich fucker who never laid eyes on them at all. but here they are: look at them.

they’re still beautiful.

#if youd ever walked barefoot on a floor that isnt planed youd think this is heroic too

My legs hurt from something probably i don't know. Legslop.

I leave the room for like five minutes and you start slop posting.

Girlfriendslop

still thinking about "decolonising" missionary work.

the way you decolonise missionary work is by not doing missionary work

the way you decolonise missionaries is like this:

"but it's part of my religion to evangelise"

🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆 infinite jaguar attack

"but we need to go to Ethiopia (one of the oldest christian countries in the world) to make them the right kind of christian!"

🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆

jaguars

"but..."

🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆🐆 jaguars

"but missionaries bring schools and hospitals to poor countries" that's called humanitarian aid and trying to use humanitarian aid to get religious converts is actually SUPER fucked! hope this helps 🐆🐆🐆

man. shoplifting in the 70s must have been so easy. no cameras in sight only living in the moment

born too late to shoplift in surveillance-free stores born too soon to download a car. born just in time to have to ask the CVS employee to unlock the stupid acrylic door to get shampoo

this vintage meme is from a bygone time when trans people could get united states passports

Oh come THE FUCK on… I couldn’t make commentary this blatant and on-point if I tried

(image ID: a tired and bedraggled bugs bunny with black tousled feminine hair wearing pink eyeshadow & tanktop stands at a counter. the hand of someone out of frame is holding up a "united states of america" passport beside bugs, on which is a picture of bugs looking peppy with no hair or makeup. end ID).

At no point did I expect what he was making. I think I just assumed it was book binding?

Lads, he is not making a book.

I know enough about book binding I assumed he was making a belt, or kink gear? But that is NOT what he is making.

My NSFW Catgirls zine.

i think 90% of the time being like 'all my political enemies are personally miserable' is on some level cope. but when it comes to elon musk it is just obviously true and thats pretty funny

did they get the rock lee reference

Yeah teachers know about Naruto now

"UM OP DON'T YOU REALIZE THAT THIS INNOCUOUS VIDEO/IMAGE/POST IS ACTUALLY FETISH CONTENT"

everyone is correct in that i missed a crucial option 3. i'm into that actually

4. Please consider some internal exploration of why you "recognized" this as fetish content.

Devils sacrament?!

5. All content on the internet is fetish content if you believe in yourself.

BEHOLD!

Fetish content!

distraught that i understand this

June 5th can't come fast enough

THIS BLOG IS SO BACK, BABY! (Sadly, that means that we are all experiencing the emergence of a dystopian hellscape. But hey, look at this funny trader. He's so sad. Haha.)

As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can't argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.

In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.

Robotgirl: I am hypervisor-based, allowing my CPU to run multiple sapient consciousnesses in parallel.

Human: oh! You're plural?

Robotgirl: I believe that's what I just said.