Children not Welcome

Double Mastectomies and Trigger Warnings at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

I lived in Bristol for thirty years, and I still have family there. Bristol Museum and Art Gallery is a world of delights for children. We spent many hours there when our four children were small. It was a place of refuge on wet days during the long summer holidays.

A few weeks ago, I spent a wonderful afternoon there with one of my little granddaughters. Through her eyes, I rediscovered all over again a child’s sense of discovery and curiosity as we gaped at the dinosaurs, the mummies and the painted gypsy caravan, and did the quiz designed for children to find objects in the different galleries.

That is why it’s hard for me to adequately express my dismay at the Museum’s latest exhibition, Gender Stories, designed to run from 31st May to 2nd October—all through the summer holidays when thousands of children visit the museum. I’m not currently in Bristol so I haven’t visited the exhibition, but I have been following the publicity.

The magnificent entrance hall is adorned with two giant murals of female torsos with double mastectomy scars.

Here is some of the blurb from the Museum’s website:

These may be appropriate questions for an adult workshop on gender, but they are utterly inappropriate in the context of a public museum that is one of the city’s main attractions for families with small children. It is one thing to break the shackles of gender stereotyping for children, and I’m all for that, but it’s quite another to impose adult narratives of sexuality and gender on children’s perceptions of bodies, relationships and identities.

There have been complaints, including a demonstration outside the museum when one woman who had had surgery for breast cancer bravely showed her scar:

(I have a similar scar from a lumpectomy, though my lump turned out not to be malignant).

Some of the protestors put a message on the wall under one of the murals:

I complained to the museum, as did many others. In response, they have put a “trigger warning” on their website:

So, folks, if you’re in Bristol with little children during the school holidays, the museum is recommending that you stay away.

To expose young people to images that suggest girls are right to hate their own bodies, they are right to regret being born female, they are right to seek radical surgery as a “cure” for being women, is to perpetuate the same old misogynistic prejudices that have been the scourge of women since Eve ate the apple. Footbinding. Clitoridectomy. Corsets and chastity belts. Double mastectomies. Every culture has its way of destroying the sexual female body and its functions and capacities.

EDITED: I have removed my correspondence with Bristol Museum. I used an expression in my letter to the museum that has offended some people. I have no desire to cause gratuitous offence, and the substance of my objection to this exhibition stands without the correspondence.