Post Punk Kitchen Forum

We all know this picture, right? A couple being reunited after the war, it's so beautiful, so romantic, blah, blah, blah . . . or is it? It turns out, they didn't know each other. The sailor was drunk, and he forced himself upon the nurse, who really wasn't too happy.


Just look at the way his arm is wrapped around her neck. Yikes.
http://cratesandribbons.com/2012/09/30/ ... es-square/

This is so interesting. I never looked at the picture that way before.

This is yet another example of how the ppk stretches how I view the world.

oh man. now i see how stiff she is. her left hand is in a tightly clenched fist, and her jaw looks like it's pulling away. yuck.

I know...I never looked at it critically until I first read an article about it a few weeks ago. Definitely a good lesson in how we so often see what we want/are told to see.

Yeah, but look at how shes dressed, she obviously wanted it...

She's a nurse, she was asking for it. All nurses are sluts!

I guess it is what I always thought it was, a returning sailor grabbing a girl and kissing her. I never thought they were a couple, I just figured she was in the crowd.

And I was thinking about it, I swear I've seen representations of this in the past and they were always strangers. Even Simpsons had an episode with Bart as the sailor, grabbing a random girl and kissing her. So I'm a bit surprised that this is a surprise. I guess that makes it worse in that it is iconic despite people seem to thinking it wasn't consensual.

I had always understood them to be strangers "overcome with the moment" so to speak....

damn, yeah, this kind of blows my mind. I never looked at this photo very closely.

It's interesting because I had always thought of them as strangers "overcome in the moment" but never thought to really look at the woman's body language- your focus is just on the man.

My focus was never even on the man, it was on the sentiment (?) I always saw the image as a whole, plus I have always been led to believe that women were so patriotic and simple minded back then that they would kiss every sailor they saw just because they deserved it.... I was very naive most of my life lol...

But, look at how aggressive his posture is... the tendons are flexed in his right hand because he is holding on to her and his left hand is trapping her face so it cant turn away.

And how much of our life is shaped through the male gaze. I've looked at that picture (having read that they were strangers) and thought "I don't think my response would be to french a stranger, no matter how happy I was." But I still accepted at face value that that was what was happening because that is what I was told.

The first time I had ever seen this image was as a painting under a bridge in a park I grew up near. The artist had painted the woman in a more acceptive and embracing way, and this is how I saw the image frequently while growing up because the only place I had ever seen it was as a painting under the bridge. The way the photo was explained to me was that everyone was so happy and joyous that people were just going around and kissing each other. After that, I really only saw the photo maybe one more time (as an actual photograph) in one of my photo books and didn't really pay much attention to it because by that time I already knew what it was (or so I thought).

I'm a little bothered by the fact that I never really looked at the actual image critically.

And I agree that maybe the idea is that people were so exuberant that they didn't mind being kissed.

Before I read your text beneath the photo I thought his arm around her neck looked aggressive.

ew... her body language is obvious indeed. The point is indeed some kind of rape culture.
I wonder: have people always assumed she was consentant? ...or would it be more exact to say that the question had not been raised?

The conciousness of women's desire and/or integrity (...to be kissed or not to be kissed -OR TO KISS) is so recent that it might even be anachronical to apply the concept of sexual violence to a forced kiss in the XX century.

Well I think for one that the question was never asked but also that this picture has been stylized and I can really only remember seeing it mostly in its stylized forms with the women with her hands around the guy.

Looking at the picture itself critcally, the thing that is really concerning is the guys aggressive stance and although we don't know the guy or his history, I wouldn't be surprised if this was his first timed doing such a thing.

i never noticed the strangle hold he had her in until now.

wow.

And I meant to say, I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't his first time doing such a thing.

I think the faces of the other people in the crowd also affect how we interpret it at first glance. Everybody around them is looking at them and smiling or laughing. I've seen another version of the photo -- taken by another photographer at a slightly different angle -- where you can see another nurse next to them, close enough that it seems likely that she was walking with this nurse, and she's smiling, too. With all the people in the photo looking like they think this is OK, it's easy for people looking at the photo now to react like the people there were reacting.

(edit: the other photo I was remembering wasn't taken by a different photographer; it was taken by the same photographer a few seconds later. And the other nurse wasn't as close to her as I remembered, either.)

You can see the other photos at http://cratesandribbons.com/2012/10/05/ ... nceptions/ . By the third one, she really looks like she's pushing him away.

I think in one of the interviews with the sailor's wife (fiancé at the time), she said that Greta wasn't the first woman he tried this on. After the news got out that the war was over, he tried to kiss a couple women before he got to her.

My mind literally just got blown. I had no idea.

yeah, he was rampant that day. the photographer was following him around
http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2012/ ... ct-sheets/