The Vancouver Maritime Museum has an exhibit which opened this month, Tattoos & Scrimshaw: the Art of the Sailor, which has generated a surprising amount of controversy. It seems that some of the scrimshaw on display features explicit erotic scenes. Ann Pimentel, a Vancouver mother and schoolteacher, has complained vociferously, charging that some of the scrimsaw is “whale bone porn.” As reported by the National Post: “Ironically, Ms. Pimentel’s one-woman crusade has created more interest in the VMM show than the museum could have mustered on its own.” Even Stephen Colbert has weighed in on the topic.
Thanks to Irwin Bryan for pointing out the story.
That woman is an ass!
Stone age dildo found.
They were really small back then.
Stone Age phallus found at Israel excavation site
Some remarkable traces of Stone Age life were unearthed recently in northern Israel, including a pit of burned bean seeds and a carving of a penis that’s more than 6,000 years old, the Israeli Antiquities Authority (IAA) reported.
http://science.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/27/17488028-stone-age-phallus-found-at-israel-excavation-site
This woman’s ridiculous indignation is excellent publicity for the exhibition. I live in France and do not frequently have my radar trained on British Columbia and might not have been made aware of this Vancouver Marime Museum scrimshaw and tatoo exhibition had it not been for this…
It reminds me of the publicly raised indignation, about 12 years ago, of a junioe-school teacher in Florida who took her class to visit a foreign square-rigger that was calling in I do not remember which port of that state. Again, no warning signs, and the minds of the little kids she was in charge of were instantly corrupted and permanently damaged by the sight of a bared boob. Yes, that windjammer had a filthy figurehead and it had not been covered with a tarpaulin; anyone on the quay could see it. The teacher lodged complaints all the way up and they ended up making the news around the world…
Nice touch adding the Colbert Report! I loved it!
I did an off-hand google search for Ann Pimentel after reading her yelp rant – she’s listed at a BC elementary school, but she’s not a schoolteacher, she’s a ‘learning assistant’ to schoolteachers.
Normally, not a big deal, but as she specifically stated she was a schoolteacher at a BC school in her posts, I guess ‘honesty’ isn’t up there on her rather strange list of priorities, which includes taking toddlers to a museum exhibit they were much too young to enjoy or appreciate, never mind the explicit imagery which they most certainly would have not picked up on anyways – somebody probably had a balloon or something which they were watching while mom dragged the poor kids around some boring adult place instead of something fun and age-appropriate.
It’s a little scary that this woman is entrusted with early-childhood education at all, frankly..!