Slobodan Milosevic

Idi Amin

Saadam Hussein

Chairman Mao

Augusto Pinochet

Joseph Stalin

Adolf Hitler

The photographs to the left are part of a photo essay titled “Potency” by Nina Maria Kleivan. Its intent is to question how innocent children become pinicles of evil. The photographer is the daughter of a a member of the Norweigian WWII resistance who eventually was captured and placed in a German concentration camp. As a child her anger at what her father suffered was so intense that she carried around the name of one of her father’s prison guards in hopes of one day killing him. As a new mother she was struck by the innocence of children and then by the seeming innocence of dictators. “When all you see is a picture, Stalin could’ve been anyone’s kind grandfather. You can’t see the millions of people on his conscience or what a paranoid, dreadful human being he was.” she tells HaAretz.

Evil doesn’t always “look evil”. We come to associate the dress of Hilter or Mussilini or Idi Amin or Sadaam Huessein with evil because of a life long chain of choices. Those choices lead to personal actions and even world events that define a person. The actions and their outcomes, not the clothes make a dictator or a rapist.

Yet when we as a society finally acknowledge evil, we tend to look at the outside. The characteristic dress of the perpetrator becomes the symbol of evil and the process by which evil comes to be is lost. We forget that any of us, making the a certain chain of choices in a certain social context could be perpetrators of evil. In Klevian’s words to HaAretz:

We all begin life the same. We all have every opportunity ahead of us. To do good, or inexplicable evil. You need to be conscious that your actions have consequences that impact on your fellow human beings. The people I let my daughter portray didn’t give a damn about the human cost, the casualties, their thoughts caused. The responsibility is yours alone. You can’t throw it away – as a parent, as human beings – and say that you just followed orders.

Klevian raises important questions: where does evil come from? How does innocence become a symbol of evil? Unfortunately, much of the on-line debate has centered on whether a mother should or should not dress her child up in the clothes of dictators. When all one sees is a picture of a baby, it appears that all one sees is the baby. The child succeeds as a symbol of innocence, but fails as a symbol of choice.

We lose the tension between the grandfatherly picture of Stalin and the mass graves of the Stalinist purges carried out on his direct command. The clothes of an adult Hilter or Milosevic represent their choices because adults are actors in control of their life. Infants do not choose their clothes. At best their clothes represent the choices of their parents and the influence those parents will eventually have over the child’s life.

So is this an essay on the role of a parent in shaping a child’s moral identity? No, because at some point children become adults. They become moral agents in their own right and responsible for their own choices. The evil that so apalls us is the product of adult choices. Evil parents don’t always raise evil kids. In fact, childhood experiences of evil can bring out the best in human beings rather than the worst.

Dressing the child in the clothes of despot also fails as a symbol of the danger of following commands. Childhood in fact represents the one stage in life where following commands may lead to more rather than less morality. Most of society sees a child’s ability to follow commands as an essential step in moral training and development. How many times does a child share food or toys because their mother or father insisted that they do? Some children are naturally generous and outgoing. Others need to be encouraged.

Furthermore, the despots portrayed in Klevian’s photos were the ones who issued the commands. They were in full control of their moral agency and chose to use it to draw lines between friend and foe. All who supported them lived. All who opposed them were candidates for death. Of course they looked like kindly grandfathers. To the people they saw as friends, they were.

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Susanna and the Elders

Judith Beheading Holofernes

Self Portrait

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 – 1652/1653) was the one of the most important early Baroque women painters and the first woman ever to be admitted to the esteemed Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence. She was a contemporary of Galileo and counted herself among his friends.

She is particularly well known for her portrayal of women. In Susanna and the Elders she defies the then current tradition of portraying Susanna as a seductress. Instead Susanna is clearly intimidated by the attention of the elders who look upon her with whispers and accusatory words. This is arguably the first painting in history that portrays unwanted sexual attention through a woman’s eyes.

Her painting of Judith’s slaying of Holofernes portrays the same scene as a well known painting by Carravagio, but shows much more powerful women. Carravagio’s Judith appears almost afraid of her own sword and her accomplice is an old woman who stands to the side. In Artemisia’s painting, Judith wields the sword with determination and her accomplice is her own age and bent over to help her.

Both painting were produced in the order displayed above at a particularly difficult time of her life. At 17 Artemisia’s father had tried to find a place for her to study at an artist’s academy but she was refused a place since she was female. Her father did not want her to stop painting so he apprenticed her to his friend, Agostino Tassi. Shortly after, she was raped by her teacher. Her father pressed charges and Tassi was tried and convicted for rape. A transcript of the rape trial exists to this day. Excerpts may be seen here. Shamed by the way the trial assaulted her reputation, Artemisia moved to Florence.

The third painting, sometimes titled “The Angel” or “Allegory of Inclination”, is believed to be a self portrait. It was painted in Florence two years after the trial. In the painting she holds a compass and looks to the distance with both sadness and expectancy. The original painting was a full length nude, the drapery was added a generation later in the name of modesty.

There is no way of knowing what was in her mind at the time of these paintings, but three paintings together portray a journey from shame to empowerment to determined hope. The last is the painting of a survivor whose determination to follow her inclinations and look towards her source of meaning cannot be stopped no matter what sadness her artistic inclinations have brought to her.

An additional 31 paintings with biographical and artistic commentary may be seen here.

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It began with a guerrilla art campaign in New York in 1994. Today it is a three part fine art exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania running from February 17 through March 5.

Charles Hall, then a creative director at Chiat Day Advertising, threw himself a 30th birthday party. The next morning he found out that someone had tried to rape one of his guests. In response he designed a stickers with the slogan “This isn’t an invitation to rape me” and plastered them all over New York City.

But it didn’t stop there. He convinced a group of photographers to donate striking black and white photographs and arranged to have them published in mass media publications, among them Der Speigel, Elle, and Playboy. The stickers and ad campaign were eventually donated to Peace Over Violence (formerly the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women). It was used in anti-rape campaigns throughout the state of California. Posters and stickers based on the original ad campaign were also sold at minimal cost to anti-rape organizations across the USA.

Each picture illustrated a different circumstance where people tend to excuse a man’s behavior and see it as “bad sex” rather than rape: marriage, sexy clothes, drunkenness, homelessness, kissing, and so on. The phrase “This is not an invitation to rape me” was included in small red print on each image. A sampling of the images are shown below. The full collection of stickers and images can be seen here.

Ellen Von Unwerth

Mario de Lopez

Tony Ward

Moshe Brahka

Scottish campaign

The campaign went international in 2007 when the government of Scotland asked Charles Hall to adapt the campaign to the UK market. For the revision, Charles worked together with Clifford Graham and Julie Cerise. Full color photographs replaced the original black and white images. On the new color images, the difficult-to-see red slogan was replaced with the same words in yellow framed by a pink tear drop.

The Scottish campaign ran in two phases, in the fall of 2008 and 2009. A website with interactive posters was created. The images were plastered on billboards and bus stops.  The campaign was warmly received by the advertising industry, feminists, and anti-rape activists, and even the Scottish trade unions. However, many of the comments left on the website and non-feminist blogs do raise doubts about how effective the campaign is at changing attitudes. One of the participants in the campaign, a rape survivor who had done voice overs and interviews for a radio and television component to the campaign recently went public with her identity. She protested the offensive comments left on the campaign website and also highlighted the need for additional efforts to change public attitudes.

Fox Exhibit Hall (Daily Pennsylvanian)

The University of Pennsylvania exhibit represents the next stage in the development of this campaign, both in terms of message and art. It attempts to address some of the limitations of earlier versions of the campaign.

To expand the range of artistic voices, students and artists around the globe were invited to contribute. Up until this point the artistic content has been limited by governmental concerns and the limits of popular media. By formulating this as an art exhibit rather than a public service campaign, the relationship between consent and sensuality could be explored in further depth and with greater artistic freedom.  A full list of artists on exhibit can be found here.

The new exhibit has three components: the first part in Fox Hall focuses on the connection between sensuality, relationship, and consent. The second part displayed on campus sidewalks and titled “The Joy of Consent” focuses on the positive value of consent. The third part of the exhibit, titled “I am the Me”, focuses on the variety of victims and potential victims. It includes self-portraits of victims and people who see themselves as potential victims.

Both the UK and US public service campaigns have been criticized for using only professional model-quality white women as potential rape victims. Unless ordinary people are seen as victims, people may not make the connection between their day to day interactions and the campaign message. Thus the first part includes male and non-white artistic models. The third component insures that ordinary people, and not just professional models are included as potential victims.

From "Joy of Consent" (Tony Ward)

A second criticism of the original campaign is its focus on the negative: it teaches what isn’t a yes to sex, but neglects to teach what is a yes to sex. Increasingly anti-rape advocates are feeling that “no means no” needs to be replaced with “only yes means yes”. Hence, the exhibit titled “The Joy of Consent”.

Photos of all three parts of the exhibit can be found on Facebook.

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