The Crouching Woman

I skipped out of work on time and went to the Rodin Museum, which is a little jar of light up on the Parkway that has a small collection of sculptures by Aguste Rodin. I don’t know anything about sculpture and visual art tends to make me feel lazy and guilty, because I rarely want to stand around observing each work in all its depth and instead usually catapult through the museum looking for something to empathize with and be validated by. But I wanted to see the museum.

The Crouching Woman is framed by the eastern window, and she’s not fucking around. She’s on the ground like a frog with her head on her shoulder and her hand across her sternum. 

Pretty much everything I read about this statue calls it “erotic” and “sexually charged,” but (surprise surprise) I don’t really see that. It’s true that she’s crouching down with her cunt forward, but I guess that’s only erotic if she’s with someone. If she’s alone, it’s just being where it is. Don’t you ever sit like that when it’s summertime or you have dropped something behind the sink? She could just as soon be looking as a bobby pin as for a fuck, if you ask me.

Some people say that the statue has a kind of terrifying primal (and of course, erotic) violence to it. I’m not sure what’s so scary about her, except that she’s not sitting in a very nice statue pose, and that tends to have distressed people in olden times.

She’s holding on to her own ankle, which is such a dear gesture. As a lady, you are so alien in your own body all the time, constantly aware that it is not yours and on loan to you from men so that you can do some errands such as sleeping and cleaning out your refrigerator. There are the parts of you that are around so often that you almost forget that they are connected to the terrifying (and of course, erotic) structure that houses your soul. Your hands are so practical, your elbows sit on your desk and dinner table. It is easy to forget that they are sexual instruments until you see a helpful advertisement for a product that must be grasped by them or pass a nail salon.

But your feet and ankles are all the way on the other side of the broad teeming ocean and jungle land masses of your female body. That’s probably why it’s so weird to hold them, and so pleasant. It feels stolen, this intimacy between you and you. Although I’m sure someone could shatter this illusion for me, as of now I don’t believe there’s any man who would see me grasp my own ankle and think the gesture was meant to seduce or frighten him.

In the history of the sculpture a critic posits that she is holding her ankle as a reference to a saying commonly used among French prostitutes “prendre son pied” which meant, “make sure you get to have some fun, too.” Good looking out, 19th century French Prostitutes.

But the real thing that gets me about The Crouching Woman is that she was initially created as the counterpoint to The Thinker. She was designed to sit across from him on The Gates of Hell.

You know Thinker, right?

He, like, represents human consciousness and the ingenuity of mankind? You know that one sculpture of a naked dude that no one ever finds threatening or “viscerally sexual”? Perhaps you've heard of it.

Rodin himself said of the sculpture “he thinks with every muscle of his arms, back and legs...the fertile thought slowly elaborates itself within his brain. He’s no longer dreamer. He is creator.”

His nakedness is his humanness. It’s not sexual, who has time for that? Since when do allegories wear pants? The thinker is putting all of his bodily energy into his brain, concentrating it there and harnessing it into a control that mimics that of the Creator Himself.

Meanwhile, what’s my girl doing down on the floor?

I don’t know for sure, but I’m pretty sure it’s not what you think.

Unlike her counterpart, she is with herself. Her energy extends to the tips of her fingers. She is present in her mind but also in her heart, gut and cunt. Her hand touches her breast, where her heart is where the feelings that contort her emanate from. She grounds herself against the earth. She is asymmetrical but perfectly balanced. She is not comfortable but she is comfortable with herself. Her focus is inward, look at her head, down, and the way her she’s open and protected at the same time. The way she makes a comforting cradle for her head in her awkward posture. You can call her a sexual object all you want, but there’s nothing of that in the figure herself. You can be terrified by the visceral imperfect aliveness of her compared to johnny sit-and-think, but it doesn't look like she is interested in harming you. She probably doesn't even know that you are there. You’re probably not, anyway. You've never even heard of her. You're looking at The Thinker.