Tag Archives: stephanie

We Can’t Stop Looking at These Extremely Sexual Photos of Fruit

Mother Jones

Stephanie Sarley plays with her food. Then she posts it online. The 28-year-old Bay Area artist is known for her provocative pictures of fruit—which have caught on in a big way: She has 225,000 Instagram followers and counting. Sarley thinks a lot about censorship, copyright infringement, and what makes people uncomfortable and why. I caught up with her to talk about all of that, plus her can’t-look-away art.

Photo courtesy Stephanie Sarley

Mother Jones: How did the fruit art start?

Stephanie Sarley: It was a totally spontaneous occurrence. I had gone to my local market and got all this fruit and I brought it home and I just fingered at it. I filmed it and put it on Instagram and it was a total hit. The comments started rolling in and everyone was freaking out. I wasn’t quite aware of the impact it was going to have on people.

Photo courtesy Stephanie Sarley

MJ: Why do you think people react so strongly to it?

SS: At first I thought it was the image of the vulva and the vagina, it being surrealistic and also being semi-perverted. Maybe it makes them uncomfortable to see fruit in a way they don’t normally. The surprising thing was a lot of women got mad, as if I made them think about something they didn’t want to think about. And men also thought of it more objectively, or as only a gender thing. I got a lot of appreciation from people in the queer community as well. To be a provocateur wasn’t quite the intention of the project, but it’s totally fun and I’ve gone with it.

Illustration courtesty Stephanie Sarley

MJ: Tell me about when Instagram first took down your account.

SS: Right when I was starting to get more popular, before the fruit fingering started, I posted an image of a banana with a condom and pins in it. Within 10 minutes, I got shut down. I was devastated. I was just starting to get recognition. I had 10,000 followers. I was selling my book. Jerry Saltz had just started following me! So I wrote to Instagram to say I’m an artist, not a pornographer. And they wrote back: Your profile violated our terms of services; we took you down because your work is inappropriate. I disputed it over and over again. I kept writing them obsessively. I said, “I am an artist, so you’re not going to do this to me. You’re not going to censor my work.” I actually ended up getting my profile restored in under two weeks.

photo courtesy Stephanie Sarley

MJ: I’ve seen your work pop up in other places. How do you handle copyright issues?

SS: It’s a giant battle to reclaim my art. You know, the internet is a great platform for people who didn’t have the privilege to go to the best art school, but we need to create a safer environment for creatives who don’t want their stuff ripped off. I don’t have a credit card to rely on. People are stealing my art and putting it on their albums, meme-ing it, and I need to find a new way to approach it.

Photo courtesy Stephanie Sarley

MJ: What’s next for you?

SS: I want to move on to big projects in physical spaces. I plan to do more art shows. I’ve been studying art my entire life; I don’t want to be just one thing. I don’t want to be “the crazy fruit finger-er.” I’m not just a weird sexual fetishist on the internet.

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We Can’t Stop Looking at These Extremely Sexual Photos of Fruit

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Our Inability To Deal With Climate Change Is Going to Kill the Penguins

Mother Jones

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Move over, polar bears: It’s time for Emperor penguins to become the new poster children of climate change.

Recently, polar biologists at the University of Minnesota used satellite images of poop stains (scientists are nothing if not resourceful) to show that some colonies of Emperor penguins in Antarctica are uprooting historic nesting sites, possibly to escape warming temperatures.

Courtesy Stephanie Jenouvrier

Today, a new study in Nature makes an even more grim prognostication about the future of the species: Thanks to declining concentrations of sea ice, two-thirds of Antarctica’s Emperor penguin colonies could lose more than half their population by 2100. Across the entire species, that translates to a 19 percent drop. Some colonies are larger than others, so a 50 percent decline in one group might be only a few individuals, while the same change in a larger group could be hundreds.

Less sea ice makes it more difficult to access krill, the tiny shrimp-like crustaceans that are the penguins’ primary food source, said study co-author Julienne Stroeve, a researcher at the National Snow & Ice Data Center. “Then, there are these large mortality rates for the penguins.”

So just how many penguins are we talking about here? A satellite survey in 2012 pegged the total head count at 595,000 across 45 colonies. A 19 percent decline would reduce the population to 481,950, or a loss of 113,050 adorable birds.

Scientists have long known that animals at the poles are especially vulnerable to global warming, which is happening in the Arctic and Antarctica faster than the rest of the world. In the Arctic, disappearing ice and rising temperatures are pushing species of whales, seals, and bears to hybridize, jeopardizing their genetic health. In Antarctica, earlier research has found that ocean warming could reduce the habitat available for krill by 20 percent, compounding the sea ice problem.

Earlier this year we explained the dangers that climate change pose for baby Puffins in the Gulf of Maine.

Today’s study is just the latest reminder of the vital role ice plays in the Antarctic ecosystem. And there’s little doubt that Antarctica’s ice is in serious trouble: Earlier this year a trove of research emerged indicating that one of the continent’s major ice sheets is already in irreversible decline.

The map below, from the study, shows which penguin populations are most at risk. The purple-to-white color gradient shows changes in mean sea ice concentration between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (it’s a bit counter-intuitive; purple is the least decline and white is the most). Each colored dot is a penguin colony, with the color indicating the colonies’ projected conservation status (see key below) by 2100. You can see that the most-threatened populations (red dots) are those nearest to the white space where sea ice has declined the most.

Courtesy Nature

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Our Inability To Deal With Climate Change Is Going to Kill the Penguins

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