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del.icio.usShe was lovely before she melted.
A naked snow goddess made a short-lived appearance on a Fort Greene ledge this week, arousing admiration among area neighbors, before finally succumbing to Tuesday’s above-freezing temperatures.
“Everybody was quite pleased,” said artist Michael Benjamin, of his neighbors’ reactions. “There weren’t any lewd comments. They said that it looked like art.”
Benjamin molded the sexy, two-foot tall snowwoman with his bare hands over the course of an hour.
The result: a glistening, squatting snowwoman, her knees parted, one arm stretched luxuriantly behind her back, her sparkling white breasts jutting into the chilly night air.
“Everybody always makes snowmen, but you don’t see too many snowwomen,” said Benjamin. “Springtime is coming — the time when one thinks about formliness.”
His curvaceous lady, like all of his artworks featuring beautiful women, is modeled on his wife — though she denied a resemblance.
“She said to me, ‘My butt is not that big!’” said Benjamin.
The question remains: could Benjamin be onto something? Could his paradigm-shifting sculpture snowball into an all-out, feminist snowwoman-making movement?
He hopes so.
“I think we all would like to see more snowwomen,” he said.
He might be onto something.
Melody Drnach, vice president of action for the National Organization for Women, said NOW officially refers to so-called snowmen as “snowpersons.”
“They’re so androgynous,” said Drnach. “[The term ‘snowman’] goes back to the issue of why we still say ‘fireman’ and ‘policeman.’ It just goes back to the patriarchy.”
And hasn’t our society moved beyond that? For Pete’s sake, Hillary is running for president!
“If you were talking about a group of kids playing in the snow building snowmen, snowwomen, snowdogs, a snowfamily with two moms, that would be a lovely place to be in our world,” said Drnach.
©2007 The Brooklyn Paper
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