This painting by Edouard Manet disgusted the patrons and critics of the Paris Salon of 1865. Entitled Olympia, Manet depicts a prostitute in full nakedness, candidly giving the viewer face. A face devoid of 19th century fluff and instead replacing it with a self awareness of the transaction about to occur, this awareness coming through with a fragile stoicism and little tenderness. The problematic case of prostitution during 19th c. Paris is well known and this painting does nothing to hide that. Olympia forces the decidedly male viewer to acknowledge this issue and his own previously passive stance of the exchange of sex and money, the attachments of class and health, social status and the physical body.

'"We shall define as prostitute only that woman who, publicly and without love, gives herself to the first comer for a pecuniary remuniration; to which formula we shall add: and has no other means of existence besides the temporary relations she entertains with a more or less large number of individuals. ' From which it follows--and it seems to me the truth--that the prostitute implies first venality and second absence of choice. Ah! I know very well that by thus restricting the scope of the word, we end up reserving all our indulgence for those women-without-virtue who are the most fortunate, the privileged, the inexcusable, and at the same time we sanction the existence of a sort of proletariat of love over whom can be exercised with the impunity all kinds of harshness and tyranny." -Henri Turot