oh my god <3

Yes lol. I probably should have colored it but so lazy...

so lazy that you colored it anyway :V

it looks good tho

mantis folks are serious business.

Litrally nothing is more serious than mantises.

where is the Baxter report you are filling my shoulderpads with rage you have no idea

is that a framed penis

the mantis clearly has good taste.

It is a totally classy picture.

Of a penis.

okay

I can do this

The penis is an artistic statement about standards of sexuality and beauty. It is not nontraditional for offices to have landscapes or still-lifes hanging up in them; among the latter would be images of flowers. Flowers are thing of beauty and importance to both chordate and arthropod societies. For chordates it is usually employed in images of purity and natural beauty, but its more vernacular connotation is with courtship and sex. For insect cultures, the flower is the source of life, the focus of work, that which is sought after. For the mantis, in particular, the flower is the point of ambush, the location of food, the place where life and death is decided daily. Compared to the more frivolous importance of flowers in the lives of chordates, the flower clearly should be the domain of the insects.

Popular mammalian society, however, has hijacked the flower-discourse. Mammalian interpretations of flowers flood the world, and even insects grow up internalizing the mammalian view of flowers as things of courtship and sex. The flower itself is the reproductive site of the plant, and this discourse of sexuality--mammalian and chordate sexuality in particular--has hijacked what should have been the most important symbol to insect culture.

As a satire against this view, the mantis here has decided to hang up an image of decidedly mammalian genitalia. The threat implied by this takes multiple forms: With sex seemingly the focus of mammalian life, having gone so far to hijack the insect symbol of work and appropriated it for sex, the mantis ironically strips the flower of its metaphor and depicts it as what she views it to be when distilled to its mammalian essence: a penis, erect, waiting. any who are offended by it are, therefore, offended by the focus of mammalian life itself. if the penis is not worth displaying, then the mammalian associations of the flower are admitted to be obscene in turn. Secondly, it is a broader statement about appropriation itself. As mammalia has taken the flower symbol for sex and turned it into a thing to be display openly, the mantis has taken the mammalian analogue and put it up for similar display. Both tines of the mantis' fork, then, are decidedly set to pierce the mammaliachratic hegemony.

there

I did it

:I

clap clap clap also here is the report you requested

my hands are claws i cant hold these papers at all

also I would never put a picture of flowers on my office wall

would probably opt for something more meaningful in a personal way to me :V

like a sort of painting of shared cultures in the shape of a turnip V:

GODDAMN that is like, tripple classy. I'll have to put a picture of an aedeagus in the background next time just to see what you come up with.

I already got something ready to go for that :I

most chordates who look on it hardly know what it is and some even imagine it is some ~weird insect thing~ maybe some kind of cultural symbol or shape who knows! they all are very polite and compliment the mantis for her taste in art and they hold very serious discussions about the economy while bug genitals stare down at them and no one ever calls the mantis on it because most of them don't know what it even is. those that do don't want to bring it up because they either are afraid of pointing it out and maybe possibly being wrong, or because they like to think themselves as being "in" on the joke even when the joke that is being played is still being played on them

in such a way are the battles of offices carried out

an analogue would be a mammal having a three-foot tall statue of a dick sitting on their office table

they bring colleagues in and he speaks to them of the powerful metaphor of masculinity and need to prove oneself that it represents

and they all nod and agree at the heavy symbolism of giant penises

and he is just trolling them and seeing how many of them he can get to touch it

The lesson here is that if you are a professional, have at least one piece of genital art. Why is it that an oil painting or statute of a nude or topless woman is considered artistic, but a naked man makes people uncomfortable? Another instance of objectification. Women are things, and we expect that pretty women will be viewed as things, but the male deserves privacy. His exposure, especially of the source of his 'authority' is shameful - he is not a base creature. He is a man, clothed and civilized. Or penises just look gross. Probably the second one. It's not like the statues and paintings have detailed genitals or exposed labia or anything.

Both this and the mammal dick, then, basically serve the same function and operate similarly to our Care discussion. Your opponent, a person that you must deal with in a formal, structured setting, is distracted and offput by something that (especially in the case of the mammal dick) makes them shameful or uncomfortable. They cannot focus. Do they say something? Do they ignore it? Is she making fun of them, or are they just too unsophisticated to understand the art? Would it be insulting to point out the nature of the image?

Avoiding impropriety keeps them off guard, makes them easy prey. So, the mammal penis is much more effective against the general mammal. The aedeagus would be singularly effective against the people who think they "know" bugs. The kind of person that someone would send over specifically to deal with a mantis. There, too, they are outclevered by dick pictures.

I love this way of thinking and also the other comment here I am not responding to and also the comment I already responded to in Care which mostly follows the same vein except I am running out of coal to mine here because I can't think of any way to go further in this

in lieu of conversation let us be stunned into socially-conflicted silence by this statue of a penis:


8====)


:O shocking

:G
I am also shocked by this penis statue.

Okay just one more thing. Do you think it would be more or less effective if there were a sheet over it, so when you look you see it, and the way the sheet is falling it's pretty obviously some kind of phallus, but you can't be sure that's what it is without looking, which, of course, you don't want to do, and are you just being crude and juvenile by thinking it looks like a penis and why would somebody have a penis statue, etc. etc. etc.

I think you can bring a whole nother layer with the sheet, making it like an onion. An onion made out of penises.

It would have to be a really thin sheet, put kinda close over the thing, though, or otherwise it might just look like any small statue with a sheet over it; it could as easily be, like, some little Greek hero statue, or maybe even a bust.

Covering it might come off as an admission as to the vulgarity of the penis, however, and weaken your position! You go so far to have a penis in your office, but then at the last moment cover it up so no one can see it! It speaks of non-commitment and insecurity in your actions. Such would be a possible downside to such a thing!

Hmm.. that is good point. Genital office decorations are complex. Pitfalls wait for the unwary at every turn.

The Social Negotiation of Bronze Dicks:

An Exploration of the Politics of the Penis in the Office Environment

a collection of academic essays

Hurr now I colored it a little.