Day 343: Artists Seem Fascinated by Women Who Are Fasciated By Themselves

Having googled "mirror + art" about three dozen times since the beginning of this project, I've grown fascinated by the fascination male artists have for women who are fascinated by themselves.  Oh, I should have spoken more clearly: there are a heck of a lot of paintings and photographs out there featuring women staring at themselves in the mirror.  Is it simply that men like looking at women, and women like looking at themselves?  I imagine that these dude artists were all like, "Hey lady, can I paint you?  What pose could you hold for hours?" and all the women decided they could look into a mirror for hours.  I give up. What do you think?  Here are some examples:


Italian Renaissance

Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror  (1515) Giovanni Bellini 

Impressionism

Woman Before a Mirror (1877) Edouard Manet  

Post-Impressionism

Nude standing before a Mirror () Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Surrealism

Pablo Picasso (1932) Girl in Front of Mirror

Boterismo

Fernando Botero (1986) Woman in Front of a Mirror

While all of the above paintings are all certainly important works, none of them speak to me the way this piece did when I saw it for the first time.   I was taking  my first Women's Studies class in college, and was starting to contend with my own body image issues.  I was thinking a lot about our culture and its effects on women, but only beginning to take seriously the ways that women oppress each other. This photograph and its message blew me away.  

Mirror, Mirror (1987) Carrie Mae Weems

Thoughts?  Comments?  Anybody else kind of blown away?  Who answers when YOU ask the mirror "Who's the finest of them all?"