Back in my childhood, Crayola made a crayon labeled “flesh”. I found them slightly disturbing, because I thought that wasn’t the color of my skin, or of my friends’ skins, so what was I supposed to use them for? Today, I am enlightened.
There’s a controversy roiling the taxonomic world. They are trying to rename a particular bird, the Flesh-Footed Shearwater, because a) it’s a good idea to root out names based on historical prejudices, and b) speaking for myself, it’s kind of a creepy name. This proposal has stirred up many objections, because there are always people who think it’s just fine that we assume the color of our should be the default, so when they renamed it to Sable Shearwater, after it’s feather color, the ridiculous outrage of course bubbled up to the top.
But I learned something in the multitude of excuses that the conservative reactionaries offered. This is delightful reasoning.
Skin is the membrane that contains and protects flesh and it varies in colour. Flesh is the soft substance consisting of muscle and fat that is found between the skin and bones of an animal or a human and it tends to be uniform in colour.
No one explained this to me as a child! We were apparently supposed to use those Flesh crayons to color in our drawings of flayed people. I could have done that. I would have brought home lots of art of my parents and brothers and sisters to tack up on the refrigerator, and I could have helpfully explained that that is my family with their skin peeled off.
Crayola canceled/renamed their Flesh crayons years ago. Maybe they should bring them back for Clive Barker fans and Catholics who want to illustrate the way they treated heretics historically.
Of course muscles have blood vessels so would take on their color.
The idiot might just have a point.
If you wear human skin, you’re Buffalo Bill. If you eat human flesh, you’re the late, great Hannibal Lecter.
“He wants to have you for dinner,” I’m told by a lunatic on TV
Hence red meat (eg beef,) and white meat (eg chook) .. Oh wait..
Umm. :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_meat#Definition
A-n-y-w-a-y..
@ Walter Solomon : “Why not both? asks the Taco girl* & all of a sudden there’s a really disturbing mental image that I don’t need AI to paint in my head..
.* See : https://www.perthnow.com.au/news/offbeat/taco-girl-mia-agraviador-from-old-el-paso-advertisement-appears-on-instagram-ng-b881598328z
Also.. Yikes! That many years ago? You’re shittin’me…
Did they consider consulting Jerry Coyne first before engaging in this sort of performative wokeness (sarcasm tag)? He’s so busy on wall-to-wall Israeli apologia and hem-hawing Kamala Harris that this name change issue might hopefully fly under his reactionary radar.
Somehow, I assumed this story would be about far-right conservative outrage just from the title. Perhaps because it mentioned crayons, and these conservative complainers are ones who I suspect of being crayon eaters.
Crayons, paste, the stuff coming outta Trump’s bckside..
One of those things is even worse than the other, oneof those things does not belong (in the White House) ..
Well, at least it’s consistent with another discontinued color — Blood Red.
It was interesting how many of the complainers illustrated the problem with “flesh” colored, by obliviously snarking that we should then have to change the names of blackbirds and other species they named (I forget already) that used “white,” “red,” “brown,” or “yellow” in their names. That’s the reaction of someone who thinks “flesh” is one color and that color is white.
I had similar thoughts about that crayon, as nobody has a skin tone that color. It takes layers of spray tan to achieve the look of a grungy oompah-loompah.
Fleisch is the word for meat in German. I’ve never seen meat in that shade either, though rotting salmon is a close match to the crayon.
It takes a bit of google-fu in order to see what their legs and feet look like. Most images do not show this at all. So how useful a diagnostic could it be?
Now all y’all got those larger box of crayons but I remember there being big fat crayons in a box of eight. Human beings (obviously!) do not match the white or black crayons. So I a triply-recessive (that is to say, melanin-deprived) child, colored my family in in brown.
I got in a lot of trouble for this.
I’m old enough to remember when Crayola called that particular color, “peach”.
Crayola changed the name of that colour -flesh – to ‘peach’ in 1962, so they were a long way ahead of the curve. Although they didn’t introduce a wider variety of darker skin tones until the 90s, I would say that was still ahead of the curve.
In good medium on canvas art you lay down the underlying flesh and blood vessel colours first, then apply skin colour with translucency to get a natural appearance. Regardless of the skin being whate, tan, umber, ochre, reddish or olive.
The silliest freak out over a proposed renaming I’ve encountered was when a guy came across some news that Mexico was considering changing its name. Cue a rant about how no one could tell him to stop calling it Mexico, etc. etc. Had he bothered to actually read the article he linked to, he might have noticed a couple things.
First, that what they were considering changing was the formal name of the country. The day-to-day name of “Mexico” wasn’t going to be touched.
Second, that the change was going to be from “Estados Unidos Mexicanos”, (United Mexican States), to… wait for it… “Mexico”.