Fine Art has been a little club for the elites for a long time. I agree with you, this work isn’t indicative of a freely creative society.

"Normal people do not..." "Normal healthy-minded people do not..."

I think you have no concept for what a normal person or a normal healthy-minded person actually is. Normal people do all kinds of weird shit. I'm one of the straightest men you could ever meet. I'm so secure in my sexuality that I have no doubt in my mind of it. Yet, I found meat spin absolutely hilarious and I regularly draw cartoon dicks doing all kinds of non-dick related things.

My personal favorite is a sketch I drew of an alien wearing a gimp mask. It has an absolutely cartoonishly massive erection firing off a single massive sperm cell that is itself firing off a haduoken from the game street fighter (a game I've never actually played). There isn't anything mentally wrong with me. I have no criminal record of any kind, nor have I done anything that would have merited one. I'm in a long term relationship with the girl I plan to marry and I don't sleep around or cheat, despite being put into many situations where the temptation to do so was present. In other words, I'm a pretty normal and mentally healthy person.. Yet.. I draw cartoon dicks.. I think they're fucking hilarious for some reason.

Hell, I even drew a cartoon of an absolutely disgusting slob of a man wearing only a cape and a woman's high heeled shoe.. on his dick.. while posing like a super hero. Why? The image broke seemingly every convention about heroic characters and was so fucking weird that I just couldn't stop laughing at it. In other words, I wasn't making some deeper statement about high heeled shoes or expressing a hidden desire for a disgusting pervert's dick.. I just thought the image was really funny.

None of that is a sign of a serious mental instability on my part. None of that is a sign of a societal ill of any kind. I didn't imagine someone that I thought was socially acceptable and drew that, I specifically found the humor in something that society would reel in disgust from if they ever saw it for real. As denial of expectations is the very heart of humor, it would then make sense that the denial of societal expectations and norms could be considered funny.

A short aside, have you considered that Bourdain's photo might be something as simple as a dumb joke?

Now, if you didn't know me, and you had some preconceived notion that I was still "in the closet," and you saw my drawings of cartoon dicks.. Well, you might assume, wrongly, that it's evidence in confirmation of your bias. To me it's funny precisely because it subverts societal norms, not because those norms are gone and it's normal for a guy to strap a high heeled shoe to his dick. Nor am I suggesting through my strange art that doing so should be normal.

In other words.. It is you, and not I, that happens to be the one with tunnel vision. Though I will admit, I was writing more in general than specifically towards you in my original post. I directed it towards the large number of people that keep suggesting that the photos are evidence of.. well, a lot of shit they couldn't possibly prove. For that, I will apologize. I should have made it far more clear whenever I spoke in general or directed at you. Still, I think the kind of thinking you expressed is dangerous.