https://medium.com/the-virago/banksy-is-a-woman-and-a-pissed-off-one-too-5777c0cdc2ce
https://freedium.cfd/https://medium...a-woman-and-a-pissed-off-one-too-5777c0cdc2ce
A father and son are in a car accident. Tragically, the father dies on impact. The son is rushed to the hospital, clinging to life. Upon arrival, the ER surgeon comes out. Horrified, they say, "I can't operate. This is my son."
How is this possible?
This riddle plays on a phenomenon I'm dubbing male myopia:
As for the riddle: The surgeon is his mother.
Even with the crutch, they still miss the enigmatic street artist's magnum opus—the subversion of male myopia itself.
Commons under CC-4.
The key is to look at it. Then—and this part's critical— think about it.
The message. The themes. The perspective. The lens.
The same mechanism that dismissed the mother as the boy's surgeon also precludes the possibility that Banksy is a woman, even as she paints heart-shaped balloons, ribboned gymnasts, and feminine touches into landscapes leveled by male-made ruin.
Never mind official anonymity and the heavy-handed, deeply feminine themes encoded in the art: Reputable sources like Wikipedia, the Smithsonian, and the BBC all write about Banksy with he/him pronouns with smug certainty.
For no logical reason, and in defiance of basic art literacy, half the world's population has already been counted out.
That's male myopia in action.
In Moritz vs. Commissioner, Ruth Bader Ginsburg dismantled dozens of discriminatory laws, not by challenging them outright with disproportionately affected women as plaintiffs, but by strategically selecting a rare, Trojan horse case in which a man was.
Ginsburg knew that male judges would only be able to see the problem if they could see themselves having it. Mortiz set the precedent for a broader legal argument against sex-based discrimination, one that paved the way to unravel dozens of gender-based inequities in U.S. law.
Harriet Beecher Stowe smuggled political critique into a genre invisible to masculine perception called "domestic fiction." (Good call, Stowe—no way in hell they're going to read that.)
Her book, Uncle Tom's Cabin —a scathing moral condemnation of slavery — flew under the radar, bypassing the usual male gatekeeping by a publisher who probably didn't read it. No one expects revolutionary heat to come from Little House on the Prairie.
Like Banksy, these women understood that male myopia wasn't to be grabbed by the horns. It has to be outmaneuvered.
In the art below, an angelic, Madonna-like woman offers her breast to her infant, the nipple a rusty pipe with dirty sludge coming out where the milk should be flowing.
Her expression is calm yet resigned, as if to say, "Hush, now. This is the world we live in. We have to make do." Even as her nose bleeds, she is patient, dignified, generous, soothing, offering what little she has. The Madonna isn't the problem — it's the toxic world she's forced to endure.
That toxicity seeps throughout Banksy's work, symbolized by gas masks and hazmat suits that shield her characters from a poisoned reality.
It's a searing indictment of environmental abuse, one that mirrors the sidelining and exploitation of Mother Earth, the Madonna, and women in patriarchal systems, all reduced to commodities and incubators, stripped of agency and value.
While it may initially read as a critique of capitalism, environmental degradation, and exploitation, Banksy's deeper thesis equates these forces with unchecked, too-emboldened masculinity.
In Banksy's art, we see a world where women, children, minorities, and animals cling to fleeting moments of beauty and joy, simply trying to survive in a world steamrolled by the ceaseless pissing contest of over-glorified masculinity.
Capitalism and geopolitical strife, in Banksy's worldview, is not separate from male toxicity: It is the poisonous byproduct of it.
Banksy equates war as a literal dick-measuring contest in a street mural. banksy.co.uk, Fair Use under U.S. Copyright law.
This is why Banksy often targets war-torn, abandoned places — sites gutted by relentless dick-measuring contests of unhinged, testosterone-fueled God complexes run amok.
In Banksy's world, men dominate, deceive, kill, colonize, and control. They're cast as predators, unable to recognize worth beyond their reflection, collapsing life into assets to claim and command.
Photo by GualdimG via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons License, CC-4; editorial commentary
Banksy's work never deviates from its indictment of (white) men as primary agents of systemic oppression, often depicted exerting power through control, surveillance, and violence.
Police, military, dictators, guns, bombs, and tanks occur in Banksy's imagery as tools of oppression, often juxtaposed to the wonder and innocence of childhood, the whimsy of Mario and the Wizard of Oz, and the delicate beauty found in everyday things by those left behind in the wreckage, just trying to go about their lives.
Meanwhile, women are depicted as cleaning up the mess. (Of note, when men are "cleaning," they are, in fact, erasing what is invaluable and irreplaceable.)
Sometimes, Banksy inverts the dynamics of oppressor and oppressed for the sake of drawing attention to the absurdity of it.
It is one-directional: There is no ambiguity about who the villains are in Banksy's universe.
Photo by Pawel Ryszawa via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons license; editorial commentary fair use
On Valentine's Day 2023, a mural was unveiled in Kent, U.K. that rattled the comfort of male myopia.
It featured a s housewife with a black eye and a missing tooth, closing a (presumably) dead man in a freezer. Her beaten face has a playful smile, her swollen-shut eye doubles as a wink—paradoxically upbeat framing of the loaded reality of domestic violence.
The message is fanged: Eliminate the threat.
Banksy's official Instagram account openly claimed the piece, dubbing it Valentine's Day Mascara. Few things flex masculinity harder than makeup, retro gender roles, and domestic violence.
VDM was an escalation of a long-time motif in her work, one that had jumped from animal to human. Banksy's go-to spirit animal symbol for women is big cats: leopards, lions, tigers: Collared and roaring, breaking out of their cage and stalking the viewer, a lion with the ringmaster's whip in its blood-spattered muzzle.
Banksy herself probably underestimated just how literally and absurdly the fallout of VDM illustrated the very point she's been making her whole career.
Within hours of its reveal, the local city council swooped in to "clean up" the scene, removing the freezer that held the installation's departed abuser.
The "clean up" of the freezer caught international attention, including that of the BBC, who reported: "Banksy published a picture of the work on his Instagram page on Valentine's Day morning, and many of the comments suggest he is referencing fighting violence against women."
("Suggest?" Gee… nothing gets by the BBC's world-class reporting.)
Despite the imagery, the overtly feminine title, and a message screaming otherwise, the BBC marched on with he/him pronouns — fact-checks and critical thinking be damned.
The tampering with VDM generated so much outcry, hours later, the city council returned the fridge. But shortly after, the city council removed the freezer again, and later replaced it with a different one.
What a pickle to be in! What was more offensive: an unflinching call to arms against domestic violence which claims the lives of 50,000 women annually, or muzzling the most iconic man in contemporary art?
Anonymity (sort of) saved the day, rallying the world to defend a woman's radical message without even realizing that's what they were looking at.
Eventually, Valentine's Day Mascara found its way into a museum — fractionalized into stock-like shares. The male myopia irritant was now optional to view and even better, profitable to a select few.
Banksy's male-myopia-is-capitalism point had obtusely made itself.
Case closed, Johnson.
It featured a gorilla, or guerrilla. Banksy's entire artistic career has been a decades-long covert operation in subversion. The gorilla, a massive, powerful, masculine animal, holds a pink mask over its eyes: the feminine lens.
It's a nod to her camouflage: A feminine worldview smuggled into culture beneath a masculine presumption that would have otherwise been fired on sight.
Likewise, the featured image of this article is Banksy's 2018 mural Blind Bonaparte — a double entendre of male myopia's lack of ability to see the destruction and harm caused to others through its own, ego-driven conquests.
But it doubles as Banksy herself, wrapped in the invisibility cloak imposed upon women under patriarchal religions that place men at the top. Only she's wielding it strategically — conquering masculinity's line of sight with uncomfortable truths it would rather not see.
When women lay claim, the applause dies. The art gets painted over. The BBC doesn't cover it. New art would be reframed as vandalism, sanitized, and painted over.
The message wouldn't be debated; it would be dismissed. The critique would shift from the art to the artist, from the political to the personal. It would be open season for ad hominem attacks, not on the work, but on the woman behind it.
No one would pause to question or fact-check the claims, just as no one ever fact-checked if Banksy was a man back when they were the most renowned and celebrated contemporary artist in the world.
And before long, the art was never art at all.
Banksy, like many women, knows something that gets lost in the periphery of male myopia: Ego leaves fingerprints, but vision leaves imprints.
As with the best of surgeons, true success is measured by what lives on.
It's not submission—it's a masterpiece in transcendence.
https://freedium.cfd/https://medium...a-woman-and-a-pissed-off-one-too-5777c0cdc2ce
Banksy Is A Woman—And A Pissed Off One, Too
What the world mistakenly assumes about Banksy is the art's most profound message.
A father and son are in a car accident. Tragically, the father dies on impact. The son is rushed to the hospital, clinging to life. Upon arrival, the ER surgeon comes out. Horrified, they say, "I can't operate. This is my son."
How is this possible?
This riddle plays on a phenomenon I'm dubbing male myopia:
Male myopia is observed from the centre of the universe, the arbitrator of reality, not just its own, but that of others.
As for the riddle: The surgeon is his mother.
The Subversion of Male Myopia
Male myopia is why Banksy remains anonymous. If not, nearly half the world's population would've gone blind to the sharp critiques and social commentary in an instant.Even with the crutch, they still miss the enigmatic street artist's magnum opus—the subversion of male myopia itself.
Commons under CC-4.
For supporting evidence, go straight to the source: Banksy's art.
The key is to look at it. Then—and this part's critical— think about it.
The message. The themes. The perspective. The lens.
Themes and Subjects in Banksy's Art:
- Innocence of children against the backdrop of war, destruction
- Human-like animals
- A mother breastfeeding polluted breastmilk
- Toxic environments
- Women cleaning up the mess, supporting loved ones
- A rioter throwing not a Molotov, but a bouquet of fresh-cut flowers
- Motherhood, the Madonna, the Divine Feminine
- LGBTQ love
- Domestic violence
- Men controlling, oppressing, and exploiting
See Yourself, If You Must
Banksy bypassed male myopia that would have by default regulated her art's reception to "cute vandalism."Banksy strategically leans into the myth of masculinity because she understands the rules of the game. Under the assumption of manhood, her art is genius. Under the truth of womanhood, it's vandalism with hysterical, dramatic, and offensive messages.
The same mechanism that dismissed the mother as the boy's surgeon also precludes the possibility that Banksy is a woman, even as she paints heart-shaped balloons, ribboned gymnasts, and feminine touches into landscapes leveled by male-made ruin.
The Ego Stakes Claim
Banksy strategically uses the blind spot to reverse-engineer the problem.Predictably, ambiguity calcified into assumption. As Banksy likely knows, masculine energy is quick to stake a claim, signing its surname to the birth certificate as the mother, still panting from delivery, wipes blood, sweat, and amniotic fluid off her body.
Never mind official anonymity and the heavy-handed, deeply feminine themes encoded in the art: Reputable sources like Wikipedia, the Smithsonian, and the BBC all write about Banksy with he/him pronouns with smug certainty.
For no logical reason, and in defiance of basic art literacy, half the world's population has already been counted out.
That's male myopia in action.
Seldom Make History
Banksy isn't the first to smuggle a feminine message from the periphery of male myopia to get them to see what they otherwise wouldn't.In Moritz vs. Commissioner, Ruth Bader Ginsburg dismantled dozens of discriminatory laws, not by challenging them outright with disproportionately affected women as plaintiffs, but by strategically selecting a rare, Trojan horse case in which a man was.
Ginsburg knew that male judges would only be able to see the problem if they could see themselves having it. Mortiz set the precedent for a broader legal argument against sex-based discrimination, one that paved the way to unravel dozens of gender-based inequities in U.S. law.
Harriet Beecher Stowe smuggled political critique into a genre invisible to masculine perception called "domestic fiction." (Good call, Stowe—no way in hell they're going to read that.)
Her book, Uncle Tom's Cabin —a scathing moral condemnation of slavery — flew under the radar, bypassing the usual male gatekeeping by a publisher who probably didn't read it. No one expects revolutionary heat to come from Little House on the Prairie.
Like Banksy, these women understood that male myopia wasn't to be grabbed by the horns. It has to be outmaneuvered.
Banksy (and God) Is A Woman
In Banksy's universe, the divine feminine is driven to submission at gunpoint.In the art below, an angelic, Madonna-like woman offers her breast to her infant, the nipple a rusty pipe with dirty sludge coming out where the milk should be flowing.
Her expression is calm yet resigned, as if to say, "Hush, now. This is the world we live in. We have to make do." Even as her nose bleeds, she is patient, dignified, generous, soothing, offering what little she has. The Madonna isn't the problem — it's the toxic world she's forced to endure.
That toxicity seeps throughout Banksy's work, symbolized by gas masks and hazmat suits that shield her characters from a poisoned reality.
It's a searing indictment of environmental abuse, one that mirrors the sidelining and exploitation of Mother Earth, the Madonna, and women in patriarchal systems, all reduced to commodities and incubators, stripped of agency and value.
While it may initially read as a critique of capitalism, environmental degradation, and exploitation, Banksy's deeper thesis equates these forces with unchecked, too-emboldened masculinity.
In Banksy's art, we see a world where women, children, minorities, and animals cling to fleeting moments of beauty and joy, simply trying to survive in a world steamrolled by the ceaseless pissing contest of over-glorified masculinity.
Capitalism and geopolitical strife, in Banksy's worldview, is not separate from male toxicity: It is the poisonous byproduct of it.
Banksy equates war as a literal dick-measuring contest in a street mural. banksy.co.uk, Fair Use under U.S. Copyright law.
This is why Banksy often targets war-torn, abandoned places — sites gutted by relentless dick-measuring contests of unhinged, testosterone-fueled God complexes run amok.
The Architecture of Oppression in Banksy's Universe
Elementary-level analysis of Banksy's art reveals more than just a feminine viewpoint — it points to a woman profoundly critical of a world built to the liking of male myopia.In Banksy's world, men dominate, deceive, kill, colonize, and control. They're cast as predators, unable to recognize worth beyond their reflection, collapsing life into assets to claim and command.
Photo by GualdimG via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons License, CC-4; editorial commentary
Banksy's work never deviates from its indictment of (white) men as primary agents of systemic oppression, often depicted exerting power through control, surveillance, and violence.
Police, military, dictators, guns, bombs, and tanks occur in Banksy's imagery as tools of oppression, often juxtaposed to the wonder and innocence of childhood, the whimsy of Mario and the Wizard of Oz, and the delicate beauty found in everyday things by those left behind in the wreckage, just trying to go about their lives.
Meanwhile, women are depicted as cleaning up the mess. (Of note, when men are "cleaning," they are, in fact, erasing what is invaluable and irreplaceable.)
Sometimes, Banksy inverts the dynamics of oppressor and oppressed for the sake of drawing attention to the absurdity of it.
It is one-directional: There is no ambiguity about who the villains are in Banksy's universe.
Photo by Pawel Ryszawa via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons license; editorial commentary fair use
Testing the Limits of a Disguised Feminine Perspective
Banksy has tested just how hard "he" can push feminist perspectives undercover.On Valentine's Day 2023, a mural was unveiled in Kent, U.K. that rattled the comfort of male myopia.
It featured a s housewife with a black eye and a missing tooth, closing a (presumably) dead man in a freezer. Her beaten face has a playful smile, her swollen-shut eye doubles as a wink—paradoxically upbeat framing of the loaded reality of domestic violence.
The message is fanged: Eliminate the threat.
Banksy's official Instagram account openly claimed the piece, dubbing it Valentine's Day Mascara. Few things flex masculinity harder than makeup, retro gender roles, and domestic violence.
VDM was an escalation of a long-time motif in her work, one that had jumped from animal to human. Banksy's go-to spirit animal symbol for women is big cats: leopards, lions, tigers: Collared and roaring, breaking out of their cage and stalking the viewer, a lion with the ringmaster's whip in its blood-spattered muzzle.
Banksy herself probably underestimated just how literally and absurdly the fallout of VDM illustrated the very point she's been making her whole career.
Selective Perception
The knee-jerk response to neutralize the threat to male myopic comfort was swift.Within hours of its reveal, the local city council swooped in to "clean up" the scene, removing the freezer that held the installation's departed abuser.
The "clean up" of the freezer caught international attention, including that of the BBC, who reported: "Banksy published a picture of the work on his Instagram page on Valentine's Day morning, and many of the comments suggest he is referencing fighting violence against women."
("Suggest?" Gee… nothing gets by the BBC's world-class reporting.)
Despite the imagery, the overtly feminine title, and a message screaming otherwise, the BBC marched on with he/him pronouns — fact-checks and critical thinking be damned.
The tampering with VDM generated so much outcry, hours later, the city council returned the fridge. But shortly after, the city council removed the freezer again, and later replaced it with a different one.
What a pickle to be in! What was more offensive: an unflinching call to arms against domestic violence which claims the lives of 50,000 women annually, or muzzling the most iconic man in contemporary art?
Anonymity (sort of) saved the day, rallying the world to defend a woman's radical message without even realizing that's what they were looking at.
Eventually, Valentine's Day Mascara found its way into a museum — fractionalized into stock-like shares. The male myopia irritant was now optional to view and even better, profitable to a select few.
Banksy's male-myopia-is-capitalism point had obtusely made itself.
Case closed, Johnson.
The Real Banksy
Reverse-engineering Banksy's true identity through the recurring themes in her vast body of work, a good estimation of the artist's profile includes:- Born a woman, possibly a POC
- Affiliation with Catholicism (current or former)
- Exposed to domestic violence, either by father or husband
- Close affiliation to children, possibly a former teacher; a mother
- Distrustful of men (whom she depicts as rats)
- Vegan (empathy for the exploitation of animals)
- Identifies with the LGBTQ community
- Cat owner and lover
Banksy's Self-Portraits
In 2011, a mural appeared in Bristol that may have been Banksy winking from behind the mask.It featured a gorilla, or guerrilla. Banksy's entire artistic career has been a decades-long covert operation in subversion. The gorilla, a massive, powerful, masculine animal, holds a pink mask over its eyes: the feminine lens.
It's a nod to her camouflage: A feminine worldview smuggled into culture beneath a masculine presumption that would have otherwise been fired on sight.
Likewise, the featured image of this article is Banksy's 2018 mural Blind Bonaparte — a double entendre of male myopia's lack of ability to see the destruction and harm caused to others through its own, ego-driven conquests.
But it doubles as Banksy herself, wrapped in the invisibility cloak imposed upon women under patriarchal religions that place men at the top. Only she's wielding it strategically — conquering masculinity's line of sight with uncomfortable truths it would rather not see.
To Be Seen or Heard?
As tempting as the reveal might be—a mic drop for women everywhere— I hope she never does it. The celebration would be brief, the erasure swift.When women lay claim, the applause dies. The art gets painted over. The BBC doesn't cover it. New art would be reframed as vandalism, sanitized, and painted over.
The message wouldn't be debated; it would be dismissed. The critique would shift from the art to the artist, from the political to the personal. It would be open season for ad hominem attacks, not on the work, but on the woman behind it.
No one would pause to question or fact-check the claims, just as no one ever fact-checked if Banksy was a man back when they were the most renowned and celebrated contemporary artist in the world.
And before long, the art was never art at all.
The Brilliance of Banksy
Banksy sidestepped the desire to be personally known and praised for her work (and realistically, to dodge the predictable poop-flinging). In doing so, her work became bigger than identity, louder than attribution, and far less fragile than ego.Banksy, like many women, knows something that gets lost in the periphery of male myopia: Ego leaves fingerprints, but vision leaves imprints.
As with the best of surgeons, true success is measured by what lives on.
It's not submission—it's a masterpiece in transcendence.
