30th Serious Compacts Salon Challenge - Gender

drd1135

Zen Snapshooter
Location
Virginia
Name
Steve
Greetings, boys and girls. Our last Salon Challenge dealt with one of the most fundamental and mysterious concepts of the physical world, i.e., time. This time we’ll move over to the social scene. The subject of the 30th Salon Challenge will be “Gender”. During the last 60 years or so, the term gender evolved from a simple grammatical distinction to a very fluid view of an intrinsic yet elusive aspect of our humanity. Images in this challenge should make the idea of gender jump to mind, whether it be as definitive views of masculinity and femininity or juxtapositions and challenges to our conventional views of these distinctions. It’s tricky but you folks are a creative and thoughtful lot and should have fun with this one. I personally have high hopes for a few humorous entries.

This challenge will run three weeks from today, October 24, through Monday, November 14 at midnight your local time.

Da Rules:

1. Either take pictures that match the nominated theme or select some from your portfolio. You must be the photographer that created the images in order to enter it.

2. Only one entry per salon, please. If you want to withdraw an entry and replace it with another, that is OK, but you must make it clear in the post containing your replacement pictures that this is what you've done. You can add or change the title and add to the edit line to let everyone know.

3. The decision of the curator at the end of the challenge is final - don't give him/her a hard time about it: this is just a friendly photochallenge, after all!

4. The person who submitted the chosen picture will assume the responsibility of curator for the next Salon Challenge and as soon as possible post a message in a new thread in the PL Photo Challenges forum, with details of the new theme. Don't forget - that opening message must include a copy of these instructions, which also double as the rules.

5. The curator cannot enter his or her own salon.
 
OK, I will boldly go where no one has yet gone:

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pink_studebaker by D Payne, on Flickr
 
Great theme!
You'd never get three boys to voluntarily hold hands
Not in the Western world, but in North Africa it's the most normal thing in the world. Probably because the taboo on homosexuality is so strong that no-one could even think of there being a gay connotation to men holding hands.

I had a pretty good trawl through my photos trying to find SOMETHING that represented gender. This is as close as I can come, although to be honest, I think maternal instincts can be feminine or masculine (although I have yet to hear of a man nursing his young).
I had a VERY vivid dream once, in which I was nursing a baby. I can report that it felt strange but good:wtf:
 
When I think of gender, lately at least, I think of the fact that, being a man, I often shave, or more precisely, go through a ritual of shaving off parts of my facial hair that grow in a regular way. Which, at least, for the most part, is a ritual that women don't share. We - males, men, les hommes, los hombres, whatever the word is in your language - have had many rituals involving beards, mustaches, soul patches, sideburns, mutton chops, the list goes on. You - women I mean, girls, mujeres, les femmes - have your own rituals. And, yes, some feminine rituals or practices have often fascinated me - as, I can only imagine, some male ones might fascinate or intrigue some women.

The young and whip-smart daughter of good friends of mine created some inventive tiny finger-puppets - and gave one of them extensive hirsute facial growth - so much hair that it's impossible to say where the face stops and the beard or mustache or simply simian excess begins. Those are words and descriptive adjectives, and like Bender in Futurama, you can take 'em or leave 'em - but I've always loved this photograph. And it does for me at least speak to the issue/s of gender/s. So it's my entry...for now.

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Finger Puppet
by MiguelATF, on ipernity
 
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