Pre-Raphaelite Beauties with Machine Guns
Aug. 26th, 2008 11:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sharplittleteethBoing Boing linked to this amazing photo essay:
Rachel Papo's Serial No. 3817131
It documents the everyday lives of young women in the Isreali Defence Force.
The photos are beautiful. But there's something sad and disturbing about seeing a young women standing on her bed beneath a poster for The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind wearing full battle fatigues, or another talking sadly on her mobile phone with an assault rifle beside her.
It's not that I think women don't belong in the armed forces, or anything like that. It's that they have to be there - because military service is compulsory in Isreal, and because young people need to be forced into being soldiers because the political situation is so fucked up.
"My service had been a period of utter loneliness," writes Papo in her Artist's Statement, "mixed with apathy and pensiveness, and at the time I was too young to understand it all."
And yes - some of these women have faces that would make Dante Gabriel Rossetti weep. But those Boing Boing commenters frothing over the pictures like they were soft porn? Epic fail, dudes. Epic fail.
Rachel Papo's Serial No. 3817131
It documents the everyday lives of young women in the Isreali Defence Force.
The photos are beautiful. But there's something sad and disturbing about seeing a young women standing on her bed beneath a poster for The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind wearing full battle fatigues, or another talking sadly on her mobile phone with an assault rifle beside her.
It's not that I think women don't belong in the armed forces, or anything like that. It's that they have to be there - because military service is compulsory in Isreal, and because young people need to be forced into being soldiers because the political situation is so fucked up.
"My service had been a period of utter loneliness," writes Papo in her Artist's Statement, "mixed with apathy and pensiveness, and at the time I was too young to understand it all."
And yes - some of these women have faces that would make Dante Gabriel Rossetti weep. But those Boing Boing commenters frothing over the pictures like they were soft porn? Epic fail, dudes. Epic fail.
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no subject
Date: 2008-08-27 02:53 pm (UTC)