Tablet ran a story (not yet on the paper’s website) about a dispute between Benham Studio Gallery (one of Seattle’s top photo-art galleries) and Patricia Ridenour (one of Seattle’s top art photographers).

Ridenour made a series of 18 (fantastic) female and male nudes, in poses inspired by famous old paintings of women. About half the images include nude male figures in various states of repose. Benham displayed the pix in its front room for two weeks. But some customers of Benham’s portrait-photography service apparently expressed discomfort at the explicitness level of some of Ridenour’s works. (Hey, isn’t that what art’s for?)

One particular image, based on Manet’s painting Olympia but featuring a particularly endowed specimen of masculine desire, turned off so many portrait customers that owner Marita Holdaway felt she had to do something.

Just before the official opening of the show on Feb. 7, Holdaway moved Ridenour’s works to the gallery’s back room. Ridenour thought this was an act of censorship, publicly asked Holdaway about it at the opening reception, then personally took her pictures off the back-room walls.

The Tablet piece tried to interpret this unfortunate series of events as an example of a woman’s troubles trying to confront a male-dominated art establishment–even though both parties in the dispute are female, and Benham (which has shown many male nudes in the past, albeit mostly by gay-male photographers) is more of a feisty indie space than the center of art-world power.

Anyhow, a third woman, fashion-boutique owner Darbury Stenderu, has adopted Ridenour’s show and is displaying it at her store, 2121 1st Ave. Rather than simply denouncing ad-imagery, it posits an alternative vision, a healthier way to look at people and life. I didn’t see it as a work of confrontation but of celebration, of a woman daring to proclaim to the world that she actually likes men and men’s bodies, and wants to retroactively give them the loving display art’s historically awarded only to female figures. Female artists deserve the right to express their loves and desires and joys (toward themselves AND toward others) AS loves and desires and joys.

And you don’t have to be male to find that weird–or even disturbing to your preconceived gender-role ideas.

That’s because an artist like Ridenour faces two, equally restrictive, gender stereotypes–the older one that says women aren’t supposed to espress their sexuality, and the newer one that says women can like sex, but only in lesbian or self-directed contexts. In this restrictive worldview, anything a woman says about men is expected to be critical, even vengeful. Anything less than total negativity toward a woman’s Other was dismissed, in this ideology, as a mark of weakness, of subjugation to male dominance. (Not much different from the previous stereotype, in which a woman who “put out” was condemned as “loose.”)

The Tablet reviewer, Karla Esquivel, appears to have bought into the modern stereotype, by proclaiming Ridenour’s clear adoration of male beauty to really be a righteous attack on what ’70s critics used to call “The Male Gaze.” In the Weekly’s piece about the fiasco, Ridenour said she intended the show to confront both viewers’ body-image notions and the ever-somnombulant succession of “sexy” images in advertising. She did this by employing that one visual element (the male body, without the disarming justification of gayness) already identified as a symbol of threat by many females and some males.

I say “some males,” because millions of men under 35 have come of age with hardcore porn, and have spent some of the happiest moments of their adolescent and early-adult lives with images that included other men’s erections in full view.

And I, for one, am not afraid of the female gaze. In fact, I kind of like the idea that a non-gay male such as myself could conceivably be so pedestaled, openly craved for.

(Which leads to an even more provocative notion: What if the way men depict women in art has really, all along, represented (at least subconsciously) the way (at least some) men wished they would be seen by women?)

But going back to Ridenour’s work, it could very well have a therapeutic value. By showing explicit, photographic phallic imagery in the context of familiar PoMo deconstruction, she might help viewers (of whatever gender) overcome their fear of the phallus; helping, in a small-scale and personal way, to contribute toward a healthier sexual outlook toward themselves and others.