In 1902, Louise-Phillipe Hébert created the sculpture “La Fée Nicotine”, which you can find at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, in the Claire and Marc Bourgie Pavilion. This bronze epitomizes the seduction and addiction of smoking a pipe of tobacco. This beautiful, languid, naked woman, enwrapped in smoke, seems to hover just above the pipe’s bowl; she seems to entice you through her insouciance; she is neither subservient, nor directly seducing but rather, she seems unconcerned, uncaring of you the smoker and your addiction.
As a man, this image really speaks to me. The woman’s nakedness and her physical beauty hit chords at an animalistic and visceral level and I gestalt the image in an instant. This is a very effective.
Of course, it was created in 1902 when nicotine was benign and there was no guilt in exploiting the deep attraction of women’s bodies.
But time, knowledge, and consideration has changed our society; now-a-days this image would be called sexist and maybe even misogynistic.
So now, if Louise-Phillipe Hébert was going to create an equivalent image, in today’s our politically correct environment, what would be the image floating in the smoke? (You might even think the smoke could be marijuana.)
Because we now appreciate, support and identify diverse sexual identities, one single beauty would not suffice, no: we would need multiple, naked sprites in the smoke to produce the same level of visceral appeal for all predilections.
In this spirit of equal opportunity, at least one of the sprites should speak to you; at least one of these multiple sprites should stoke your animalistic desire; and no, they wouldn’t be interacting as an orgy, but rather in our PC environment, taken together, they would look more like a bored committee of nudists.