In August, The Washington Post reported with some glee that an anarchist collective was mocking Donald Trump with a naked-Trump statue. The headline and the article publicized the anarchists and their very negative thoughts. The headline was "These protesters wanted to humiliate ‘Emperor’ Trump. So they took off his clothes."
Peter Holley lightly enjoyed the art: "Hoping to strip away the Teflon Don’s legendary confidence to reveal the fleshy mortal beneath the expensive suits and long ties, members of the anarchist collective INDECLINE decided they would showcase the aspirant president in the most humiliating way they could imagine: without his clothes."
But is turnabout fair play? When the naked-Hillary statue arrived in Manhattan, the Post put up this headline on October 19: "Nude Hillary statue vs. nude Trump statue: Fair game or sexist?" Instead of a badly disguised leftist press release, now it was a debate about sexism. Travis Andrews reported:
Inevitably, some are arguing that the two statues, Trump and Clinton, are not equivalent.
As Carin Kuoni, a professor of contemporary art and political engagement at The New School, told the Associated Press, the Clinton statue can be easily viewed as offensive rather than satirical.
“The history of how the female body appears has clearly been so negatively coded and inscribed that it makes for a completely different intervention when you see the sculpture of a naked woman than when you see a naked man,” she said.
Others saw a double-standard at work.
“It is absolutely unfair and ridiculous,” Michael Bauer, 23, a business student at Baruch, told the New York Post, referring to Nancy’s protest of the statue. “I bet that lady laughed when she saw the Trump thing online and yet got super-pissed at this. Like, where is your logic?”
It wasn't "inevitable" to find unhappy "art/political engagement" professors to take offense. After all, Holley never found anyone who would declare the naked-Trump statue unfair to Trump. In this case, it was mostly quotes for the offended:
The statue wasn’t up for three hours, the New York Daily News reported, before a furious bystander named Nancy (she refused to give her last name) knocked it to the ground and yelled, “This is obscene.”
“To put something up like this in front of my workplace . . . I shouldn’t have to see this,” she later said.
Andrews concluded by reminding Post readers that Mrs. Trump has posed nude for photos that made tabloid newspapers:
It’s important to note, though, that one of the women in Trump’s life, his wife, Melania, was also pulled into this shaming-via-nudity tactic that’s been used in this election when the New York Post published a fully nude photograph of her on the front page with the all-caps headline reading, “The Ogle Office.”
Inside its pages were more explicit photographs of the woman who might become the nation’s first lady.
