Can men paint nude women?

Well, of course they can, but should an artist who happens to be a man in all good conscious paint a picture of a naked woman?

“The question of the moment has become: Is it still an artistically justifiable pursuit for a man to paint a naked woman?

“To answer this question, I reached out to a number of prominent male artists known for doing just that (as well as for painting nude men). But most of them — including Currin, Carroll Dunham, Jeff Koons, and the young Mexican-American painter Alex Becerra (some of whose nudes are drawn from escort ads) — declined to talk about their work’s relationship to the current social climate. Presumably, they worried about unintentionally saying the wrong thing that would then echo endlessly across social media, damaging their reputations. For emerging artists, there is the fear of a possibly career-derailing gestalt fail. “I’ve been in conversations with other [male artists], and they were just like, ‘I quit working with the figure. I’m only doing abstract work, because I don’t want to touch it,’ ” says Marty Schnapf while walking me through his recent solo show “Fissures in the Fold” at Wilding Cran Gallery in Los Angeles. He thinks we could be living through “a new Victorian age” — or at least that’s his explanation for the mixed responses he’s received for his gender-confusing neo-Cubist nudes, which play out sexualized fantasies in hotel rooms and surrealist swimming-pool dreamscapes, and evoke Joan Semmel’s erotic works from the 1970s. …”

http://neveryetmelted.com/2018/04/21/the-female-nude-problematic-in-the-age-of-metoo/

Most of the men “declined to talk about their work’s relationship to the current social climate.”

Sooo, in this age of increasing liberalism, it is evident Cole Porter was wrong. Anything does not go. For centuries political and social liberals claimed artists should paint and sculpt whatever came to mind, especially if works of art took on the establishment. Now, no sexualization of women! No nudes! Cover the naked!

What if a woman paints a nude woman? Is that okay?