The Interior Decorator Who Saved Civilization

BAKER STREET

by Eric J Baker

Sexy, hunky, gay Brazilian male models.

PFC readers may have noticed we’ve been dressing up our stories with pictures of them lately. I was not consulted on this editorial decision. Frankly, it’s crass and base and probably other adjectives that end in an “s” sound and connote bad behavior on our part. It also means additional page views for this blog, so I am all for it. In fact, this is a story about man’s body and what it represents in art and film. How’s that for selling out?

Again, we apologize to Baker for having gayed him last week with a picture of a shirtless hunk in his post. However, our page views are up 25% this week, so if we have to start inserting images from The Big Penis Book to bump it to 50%, we will. To make it up to him, this "Death of Cleopatra" by Rixen is the best picture we could find of a shirtless Ancient Egyptian woman, which both complements this article and reestablishes Baker's heterosexuality.

To begin our manflesh journey, we must first travel back in time to the days of the ancient Egyptians, makers of ugly statues. These folks were superstars when it comes to iconographic images: Pyramids. Sphinxes. Hieroglyphics. Gold sarcophagi. Seriously, no one rocks a gold sarcophagus like an ancient Egyptian. But their freestanding sculpture is a different story.

Representations of man in free-standing sculpture before the 5^th century B.C.E. are far more interesting as archeological artifacts than as works of art.