Flesh and Bone

AJ and I attended "Bodies... The Exhibition" the other day. Here are some thoughts:

Most of the bodies on exhibition are male, which created a bizarre "hanging penis effect" that everyone was tactfully avoiding. I guess it had something to do with the placement of the testicles. Who knew?! Somehow the "scientific" nature of the presentation lent the male nudity respectibility, so I can't count it as exploitation. (I am always on the lookout for more male nudity as a signpost of equality.) On the other hand, this may be exploitation of another kind:

While the exhibit's representatives claim that all of the bodies were obtained through the Dalian Medical University Plastination Laboratories in China, human rights campaigners point out that Dalian University "[has] had been previously implicated in the use of executed prisoners for commercial purposes".[1] If the bodies are those Chinese prisoners whose bodies were used without their consent, it may be a violation of human rights and of Chinese law. (Wikipedia)

But they are only bodies, flesh and bone made into life-sized, primary-colored key rings. Cotton candy circulatory systems, underwater life, bizarre sea creatures with huge human eyeballs.

AJ found the fetus exhibit the most interesting. A woman with the front of her body sliced off to reveal a fetus curled inside. I remember long ago in Guanajuato, seeing the mummified remains of women and babies who had been exhumed because of unpaid cemetary taxes. There's some sort of corellary here.

We are born into this body and then we die, and between those points we cause so much commotion! But in the end it's just flesh and bone.