PORN

Yesterday I watched a documentary on Netflix called The Price of Pleasure.  (Hmmm, I just wrote "The Price of Porn - shows what I really think.)  Here's Netflix's write up about it:

Interviewing scholars, industry insiders and consumers, this probing documentary delves into the effects of pornography on one's sexual identity and relationships, as well as its influence on business and American popular culture overall.

Cast:

Matthew Tennie, Gregory Mitchell, Stephanie Cleveland, Gabrielle Shaw, Eli Schemel, Gail Dines, Damone Richardson, Ariel Levy, Brandon Iron, Robert Jensen, Joanna Angel

Director:

Miguel Picker, Chyng Sun

I watched it as I painted so I listened more than watched, only glancing up every once in a while for a few seconds.  I don't think I could have watched the whole thing.  The images, though they blocked out the breasts, penises, and vaginas, were still graphic and disturbing.

I have watched a few porn flicks in my life, but only a few.  I watched one with a former partner - that didn't turn out so well - and 2 with groups of women as we critiqued them and made fun of them and laughed until we got bored and turned them off to talk about more interesting real life stuff.  So I am not a fan of porn.  This documentary certainly cemented that feeling.

The film was truly disturbing to me.  First of all, it was the images - there have apparently been "advances" in the world of porn since I last dipped into it 15 or so years ago.  Now, according to researchers who have subjected themselves to watching 200 of these films and cataloging the content, 87% of the scenes contain violence towards women in them.  And they  mean VIOLENCE - rape, anal rape, forced sex, gang banging, S&M stuff I couldn't even have imagined in my wildest dreams, not to mention calling the women demeaning names, etc.  Apparently (and I realize I might sound completely uninformed and naive as I say this stuff having just learned about it, but that's true - I have been naive and uninformed) there's something called ATM (not the machine where you get money).  It stands for anus to mouth - the man comes into the woman's anus then puts his penis into her mouth to have her clean him off.  I can't begin to imagine doing that.  I also can't understand how that might be considered a turn on.  So many of the scenes they showed or alluded to were bestial, cruel, vicious.  I don't understand what's happening.

I learned from the film that more money is spent on the porn industry than on football, baseball AND basketball combined.  900,000,000 films are watched each year.  That's an average of 3 per person, man, woman, and child, in the USA each year.  It is big business. And it's no longer some slimy business which people are embarrassed to be a part of.  Instead, women who are in the movies become superstars and go around on DVD-signing tours.  There are trade fairs for porn where women are up on platforms which put their vaginas right at eye-level for the men with their video cameras to film them.  Live.  In person.  Or where women are bound and gagged for men to film them.  The filmmakers showed the men who were ogling the women.  They were normal-looking guys with an irrepressible hunger in their eyes.

They interviewed a young woman who took part in Girls Gone Wild.  I don't really know what it is, but I think camera crews descend on FL and other Spring Break hotbeds of wildness and film girls going wild.  The camera crew of GGW visited one young woman in her hotel room and asked her to act sexy, etc.  Who knows what she did.  Then the producers of this film asked her why she took part in it.  She looked at them like they were brain dead, "Why wouldn't I take part?  It's not like I want to be a politician or something one day."  As if the only thing that made sense was to take part and be famous for a time on camera.

Another young woman who graduated from Rutgers started her own porn film company and made films starring herself.  She talked like she liked the attention she gathered as she walks down the street, men hooting and hollering and whistling at her.  They showed a scene from one of her movies.  Her face was on a chair while she was clearly bound and being entered from behind while her head was being held in place by her hair being pulled.  Her face was contorted in pain and agony.  It did not look to me like she was acting.  Perhaps she was.  But I felt pain and agony watching her.  I can't understand how that could be a turn on for someone.  I wanted to go into that room and pull the SOB's off of her and protect her from such violation.  Yet she talked about her part in it as if she were empowered and getting the best of the men, beating them at their own game.  I don't get it.

More tomorrow.

The first time ever I saw my you-know-what

When I was 16 or 17, I read Everything You Ever Wanted To Ask About Sex, but were afraid to ask which encouraged me to explore my own anatomy. I felt a lot of resistance, but finally my curiosity got the better of me. It felt a little bit like going to see The Exorcist - I knew I was in for some terror that would scare the shit out of me, but I hoped I could take it.

I went over to my dresser and picked up the hand held mirror which my great aunt had bequeathed to me when my great uncle died - it had been in the family for generations and was a beautiful porcelain piece, painted daintily with purple violets, with a matching brush and comb. I wondered if it had ever been used for this purpose before. What would my Aunt Estelle think? 

It was 2 AM, and I hoped and prayed no one else would be awake to surprise me in action. I was terrified my mother or father would just know what I was doing and would come in on me and yell at me for how terrible I was being. But even then, at that young age, I was a courageous person, so I lay down on the floor where I had a good hard surface. My heart pounding, I pulled my underpants down.

All the way.

Off.

My face was flaring red. I held the mirror "down there". I didn't want to look. I wanted to look. I couldn't stand to look. I was afraid of what I would see. It would be so gross. It was wrong to look, wasn't it? What would my parents say if they caught me looking? What would they say???

I snuck a peek. One eye. Closed it again. I tried again. It felt so wrong to look. Oh, God. The book had said I was supposed to touch myself and open the "lips". Gross. Touch? I'd never touched myself down there. I had no idea what I was doing or what I would see.

Gingerly, I moved the mirror to my left hand, tried to adjust the angle, then used my right hand fingers to open the things they said were my lips. It felt so weird. So foreign. I was afraid of what I would see. I had no clue. It was fascinating, but gross. Tissue like none I'd ever seen before. Mauve blending towards red or towards my normal skin color. Folds.  Creases.  What on earth was beyond that? In that darkness? I lifted my head higher to try to see.

I heard a movement out in the hall. I dropped the mirror, pulled on my underpants and scrambled into bed as fast as I could, scraping my shin on the bedrail, stuffing the mirror under my pillow.

Nothing.

Silence.

Except for my heart pounding and my hypervenilating.

Stealthily I got out of bed again and put the mirror away and straightened up any signs of my criminal behavior then settled into my covers, processing hard and fast all I'd seen and felt and thought as I explored the nether-reaches of my most mysterious body.

Lots and lots of vaginas - NOT surgically altered!

Thanks to my friend Adele Castillo, I've found a couple of fascinating websites all about vaginas - well, vulvas, to be more physically accurate. 

In this blog, http://www.edenfantasys.com/sexis/adult-humor/cosmetic-vagina-surgery-0616111/, Jenny, aka The Bloggess, takes umbrage with the movement afoot to convince women that their vaginas need plastic surgery because they're too big, too lippy, whatever!  I agree with her 100%!  You go, girl!

Under the comments, there was a link to a website with photographs of women's vulvas.  Here's what the woman wrote about it: 

In Denmark we have the "Kussomat" (Pussyomat?) - a portable photo booth placed at selected places around the country. In the booth you sit in a special chair and have a photo taken of your pussy. The picture automatically uploads to a website "Woman, know your body" - now showing one more of all the wonderfully different pussies in the world! (Not safe for work!)

Can you imagine the uproar that would be caused if we had such photomats here in the US?  Maybe I should see about setting one up for my show Not Barbie, and see what happens.  I can hardly imagine women here being willing/able to show their private parts like that.

And then I am guessing you've already heard about the Great Wall of Vagina by UK sculptor Jamie McCartney.  This bold gentleman took plaster casts of 400 British women's vulvas and put them together as if they were tiles and is showing them all over the place.  Here's Saatchi Galleries description of his work:

Consisting of 40 casts of vaginas arranged in a grid, Design A Vagina is the third in a series exploring our relationship with our genitals.

Men tend to have seen more vaginas that women, who have often only seen their own and many have never looked that closely. Hence the exposure of so many, showing the variety of shapes is endlessly fascinating, empowering and comforting. For many women their vagina is a source of shame rather than pride and this piece seeks to redress the balance, showing that everyone is different, everyone is normal, and everyone is beautiful.


The title is a play on words, commenting on the trend for surgery to create the 'perfect' vagina.

It is certainly true for me that I haven't seen many vaginas or vulvas, as would be a more accurate term.  I haven't felt comfortable asking my models if they wanted me/would allow me to photograph their vulvas straight on and haven't had an idea in mind of what I would do with the images if I had them.

Maybe that'll be my next step.  I never know where my fertile imagination combined with curiosity and my feminist outrage will lead me next...

The Visible Vagina

My darlin' husband, ever on the lookout for things I can write about on my blog, found this exhibit in one of my art magazines:

http://www.davidnolangallery.com/exhibitions/2010-01-28_the-visible-vagina/

It's in NYC and is called The Visible Vagina.  It's a series of pictures done by both men and women on vaginas.  I think the artistic quality of the pieces varies - some I find compelling, others not so much.  I found it interesting to look at the pieces and to try to determine whether I thought they were done by a man or a woman.  I'm not sure why it was so evident, but I was usually correct.  I think there's more sympathy and understanding in the women's pieces.  The men's pieces were generally more about sex or perceiving the women as sexual objects - not so surprising, really - and quite interesting to see so clearly.

I also found that I was uncomfortable looking at most of the pieces.  Chris had sent me the link then came into the room when I was looking at the show.  I felt embarassed, like I had been caught doing something I shouldn't be doing - looking at representations of vaginas.  It was almost like I was caught looking at porn.  I realized that the discomfort I was feeling might be similar to what people sometimes feel when they look at my female nudes.  There was the voyeuristic part of me, wanting to see vaginas and what they look like to those artists.  There was the artist wanting to examine the pieces artistically.  And there was the mother, who would have been very embarassed if my kids had seen me looking at it - even though it was art.  I found myself questioning the intentions of the different artists - to thrill, to provoke, to inform, to offer beauty?  I felt some judgments when I didn't like the piece or if I thought the intention behind it wasn't pure (i.e. didn't go along with my intentions, most likely!)

It was an interesting set of feelings to experience.  I think it helped me understand some of the responses to my work better.  There are definitely certain boundaries that everyone has.  Mine may be further down the road than some peoples', but this set of pictures helped me recognize that I still have some places I'm not completely comfortable going!  Very cool!