User:Sj/Design chats/Bodies

Reminder: This is a wiki! Edit and refactor at will.

Project: Serving knowledge needs about bodies, including anatomy, sex and sexuality
Teams: Commonsists, artists, CDNs
Chats: Commons scope, fellow-traveller projects; old conversations with Bishakha and WB

Images and videos of sex, nudity, and sexual characteristics are by far the most popular uses of Commons as a standalone repository of free knowledge (separate from embeddings of media in other projects, which is 100x more popular again, with a much longer tail). There are also few sources for freely-licensed images of them, as they have both the standard copyright restrictions and additional personality rights and identification restrictions. Our community includes a number of photographers and illustrators who have filled in the gaps for articles on sex and sexuality, but they get less attention, less diversity of contribution, and the contributions are lower quality than for other popular topics.

Print reference works on the topic were relatively through the 1980s but at least in English seem to have disappeared or stopped being updated since then, so there isn't an obvious reference standard for our communities to live up to.

We should consider how we are serving this audience, how they could be better served, and what is in scope.

Examples

Body atlases

We Are Beautiful (category on Commons): An on-point example; a project started to capture a range of body types to counter the lack of diversity and sexualization of the body in most popular media, including ads, fashion, and other pornography. The initial project was ended (indicating public opposition? lack of interest?) and it was renamed Hidden Beauty and rehosted by a new group to keep it online. The project consists of 3d .stl files and images of prints of those files, drawn from a few dozen human models. The project was interesting, and is hosted on commons, but was extremely incomplete: models drew from a small range of body types; the modelers stopped after making torsos, genitals, and a few hands.

Model families for games: Game and virtual-reality engines have a wide range of body templates; surely some of these are or could be made freely licensed. A thread to pull on.

Body Worlds: A highly detailed display of preserved human and animal bodies. Discussed in scholarly literature (clinical detachment and anatomical awe) for being different from every other public treatment of the body.

Anatomy

Atlas of the Body (Time/Rand): A popularized anatomy book. Made once in 1980 from a small range of body types, not updated.

Gray's anatomy and modern updates: Hardly changed in a century, limited in the range of body types and conditions shared.

Sexuality

Encyclopedia of sex and sexuality (2021): A two-volume text encyclopedia

The sex atlas, Haeberle (1982): A one-volume illustrated encyclopedia, mainstream at the time

The Kama Sutra, Vatsyayana (2-3c CE): Still among the most popular works in many languages on "sexuality, eroticism, and emotional fulfillment"; categorized as erotica in many libraries (and in [s:Category:Erotica|wikisource]!), having plenty of erotica and no other references on sex and sexuality.

Other

There is limited general coverage.

Standardization of body ideals: A few probes of the standardization of bodies in public media have been made by the ad industry itself ([1])

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