Avoiding eye contact and crouching with her legs together, the demure Aphrodite's naked pose in the Venus de' Medici ironically draws attention to the areas she is trying to hide, her breasts and genitals (fig 1). The futile attempts to hide his anatomy would be meaningless if it were not for the contrasting counterpart of the prudish, the male contrapposto pose, shown in figure 2. The naked male stands in a confident upright posture with his head held high and his penis proudly exposed. In ancient Greece, a man's penis was a symbol of his strength, intelligence and authority, while pudica, “pudendus”, in Latin, means female genitals and shame. According to Etienne Walla, a legal expert, and Elisha Renne, who has a Ph.D. in Anthropology, evidence suggests that the Greeks thought that a woman's menstrual cycle showed that it was "incomplete". Imperfection fixed only when penetrated, femininity was a defective and therefore shameful form of masculinity (Walle, Renne 58). Ancient art forms advertised recurring messages that upheld social standards, and for the prude's self-centered male audience the comfortable loose attempts to hide her genital disgrace gave them a sense of superiority while her unknowing gaze created a voyeuristic experience. Despite the Greek depiction of second-class women, the influence of Aphrodite's modest demure pose in the Medici Venus had an unmistakable prevalence in art history as a point of reference for later classical sculptors and one of the most copied Greek statues in the world. world. Not only did art influence their social ideals, but it ultimately incorporated powerful preconditioned notions about gender into modern Western societies. To show the far-reaching negative consequences of Greeks' unequal treatment of women, ... half of the document ... ... in contemporary advertising parlance.” Feminism and Psychology 18.1 (2008): 35-60. International Women's Studies. Web.Gill, Rosalind. "SEXISM RELOADED, OR IT'S TIME TO GET ANGRY AGAIN!" Feminist Media Studies 11.1 (2011): 61. GenderWatch. Web.Kates, Steven M., and Glenda Shaw-Garlock, “The Ever-Tangled Web: A Study of Ideologies and Discourses in Advertising to Women.” Journal of Advertising, 28.2 (Summer 1999): 33-49. JSTOR. Network. September 29, 2011.Lipton, Eunice. “Representing Sexuality in the Biographies of Women Artists: The Cases of Suzanne Valadon and Victorine Meurent.” The Journal of Sexual Research 27.1(1990): 81-94. JSTOR. Network. September 20, 2011.McCarthy, David. "Tom Wesselmann and the Americanization of the Nude, 1961-1963." Smithsonian Studies in American Art, 4.3/4 (1990): 102-127. The University of Chicago Press. JSTOR. Network. 20 September 2011.