She lies on her back in a glass case, like Snow White, but for grownups. She’s young and conventionally attractive. Her head is tilted back slightly on her white pillow. Her pale face is calm, even beatific. Her arms relax at her sides. It is a pose of languor. She might be very newly dead, or even sleeping. Her abdomen is peeled back to reveal her organs. A near-born baby rests within her womb. She is the medical craze of eighteenth century Europe, a life sized model designed to be viewed and, ahem, experimented on, by the male medical students of the day. She is the Anatomical Venus, an exquisite example of eighteenth century aestheticized science. This was a time when Europeans were fascinated by anatomy and artists captured the wary eroticism of it with paintings of old male doctors spending way too much time on their own with young female cadavers. Its piquancy comes from true High Transgression. It is not just being naughty. Anyone can break laws and norms unthinkingly and selfishly. The purpose here is lofty and serious and knowing. And yet it is as dodgy as fuck and you just know that intuitively. It is in the space of tension between lofty scientific endeavour and Baudelaisian smut that High Transgression flourishes.
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