“The modern idea that the female nude implies the existence of a predatory male gaze was not first thought up, as is often imagined, in the feminism of the 1960s. As Part One will explain, what is believed to be the very first life-sized statue of a female nude in classical Greece – a fourth-century BCE image of the goddess Aphrodite – provoked exactly the same kind of debate.”

“The modern idea that the female nude implies the existence of a predatory male gaze was not first thought up, as is often imagined, in the feminism of the 1960s. As Part One will explain, what is believed to be the very first life-sized statue of a female nude in classical Greece – a fourth-century BCE image of the goddess Aphrodite – provoked exactly the same kind of debate.”

— Mary Beard