Feminine Appeal

OK, I’m reading Susan Kandel’s art review over a cup of coffee (“Visions of Seduction, Repulsion,” June 9). I’m sitting in the breakfast nook, my decidedly generous tush in a pair of decidedly generous rumpled sweat pants, my middle-aged bosom a lot farther south than in the accompanying illustration. The snide descriptives--”pathetic,” “absurdly bloated,” “less failures than mutants,” “overstuffed,” “with their massive thighs . . . (they) wholly elude the reach of the pornographic”--keep piling up, and I’m starting to wonder exactly what is being reviewed here: the artist’s creative expression or the presumed prior gustatory offenses of the models?

I don’t know much about art, but the pictured woman looks OK to me. I’ve actually seen reproductions of some famous old pix of women who expressed a variety of body types, many of which were not only considered erotic in the good old 15th Century but still somehow manage to stir men’s souls today.

A suggestion (food for thought?): “Fat” is not a pejorative, simply one of the Creator’s many options. Look around, Ms. Kandel: I’m everywhere.

CAROL MACKINTOSH

San Diego