The naughty bits
Sir: I did not respond to the first attack made on my drawings in the Independent by Vicki Woods last September. although it combined ignorance of their content with a libellous innuendo about my own motives for executing them. Since she has come back with yet another ill-informed assault, ('More sex, please, we're British,' 6 April) I must now be permitted a reply.
The 'lubricious' depictions of nudity to which she objects are commissioned to fulfil briefs which involve detailed medical accounts. The only way it seemed to me possible to illustrate such pieces with dis- cretion and artistic integrity was with art historical themes. Hence, the 'naughty bits' of a male nude which Ms Woods cites in the vasectomy article are, in fact, a side view of Michelangelo's David. The 'phallus with an Assyrian head on top' which she pruriently sees as being a bad dirty joke on the subject of painful intercourse is actual-
ly a Greek herm from the National Museum in Athens, a classical symbol of masculine sexuality. The woman child abuser gazing at the 'fleshy baby's bottom and putto-like thighs' is looking at a real rococo putto who is the traditional symbol for innocence provoking eroticism. And one that she did not mention, just for good measure: an article on vaginal thrush was illustrated by a depiction of the marble carving of the Aphrodite of Syracuse.
I am sorry that Ms Woods does not agree with me that classical figures are the most tasteful solution to illustrating pieces which involve accounts of human anatomy and disease (preferable to graphic photo- graphs, surely). But then, perhaps she is the sort of person who goes into the Greek rooms of the British Museum for a good snigger.
Michael Daley
15 Cape! Road,. East Barnet, Hertfordshire
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