beginning from the rear or ass demon
19 Aug 2009 2 Comments
in narrative Tags: anal health, carol queen, gay, health, michelangelo, pleasure, queer, radical muffins love art, radical muffins love pleasure, sexua, sexuality, wome, women's rights
After a fraught week, my beautiful friend Maria and I decided to spend a Friday afternoon licking our wounds in the marble womb of the Metropolitan Museum of Art off Central Park. The steps were thronged with tourists. I scooped Maria out of the crowd and arm-n-arm we ascended into the venerable halls of esteemed artists. The cherry on our culture sundae: Michelangelo’s first painting.
The priceless piece, a diminutive copy of a German print titled “St. Anthony Tormented by Demons,” has undergone painstaking, expensive renovations. We slid through the cluster of serious faced admirers, huddling around the painting in a small gallery. The haloed Saint is encircled by demons, brilliantly fish scaled and monsterous; the first kinda looks like it is humping his leg, and the last…
I slid out of the crowd towards the back of the room. Reunited with Maria and whispered aside, “Did you look at that last demon?”
“Oh yah- I looked at that demon three times and thought, ‘oh! he so went there!’”
At which point, we had to leave the room, collapsing in hysterical laughter against each other. Because that last demon can only be described as the Ass Demon, with a winking, gaping pink butthole worthy of all the gay porn in LA.
Perhaps he was just faithfully copying the original print, but I prefer to think he understood the taboo confronting his audience. It’s profoundly satisfying, imagining an adolescent Michelangelo meticulously painting each wrinkle around the anus, cracking himself up with the audacity of it. This is the spirit of the same genius artist who would later defy Church law by secretly dissecting cadavers to learn muscle structure to paint the truth of the human body.
And part of the truth of the human body is a zillion pleasurable nerve endings in all our pink parts, including our assholes. The great equalizer, I believe Tristan Taormino once called it.
Yet the taboo remains, tangled up with fear of gayness for many men and out of bounds, seemingly irrelevant, for many women. Of course, the whole shebang is associated with poop, so it can be literally dirty, which is high on the ookie scale for many folks. The good news, my friends, is that this is nothing a shower cannot remedy, and for the fastidious, enemas.
When the behind has been ignored as a potential erogenous zone, the pleasure from touching, rimming and penetration can take us by surprise. Ladies- spread the good word – it’s not just about the prostrate! Anal play also tends to require a slow hand (or tongue or toy) and a level of relaxing and presence that can be intense in bed.
While there is a lot to be said for normalizing (liberating!) anal sex for the masses, the transgressiveness of the act can be a turn on. Exploring new or disputed territory with a partner makes us vulnerable together, and the trust, gentleness and desire we can show each other through this process…also a big turn on!
So – look to the old masters for inspiration. Begin by looking the ass demon in the eye with Michelangelo then check out some of these excellent resources:
- Luscious, stories of anal eroticism Edited by Alison Tyler Forward by Tristan Taormino
- Anal Pleasure & Health: A Guide for Men and Women by Jack Morin
- Bend Over Boyfriend video by Carol Queen
And add your own to the list, por favor!
PS…the secret is lube lube and more lube.
art is good for everyone – go see some
05 Apr 2008 2 Comments
in narrative Tags: Brooklyn, craft, debt, etching, free stuff, Gen X, history, koi, local, martin luther king, new york city, radical muffins love art, sexual freedom, sexuality, spring, vox pop
at the coffee shop, under the watch of the statue of liberty chained outside in the grey, inside, ‘gypsy woman’ plays its tail end, repeating and repeating the phrase, fade out. I eat the frosting, yellow as my legal pad and lemony, off the edge of the wrapper. There’s fine lime green sugar glitter on the naked cake. The art is beautiful, fantastic.
Three pieces are made with compiled circular stacks of scrap paper. Topical relief maps of circumscribed, decontextualized, sliced pieces of images and ideas: tickets; documents; receipts; doodles; magazine pages; reports; letters.
In the centre of the wall display, a huge sweeping carp in fierce black etching on pink glass.
She has a lily pad green, jelly belly green head, and is orange & fuchsia with turquoise spots along the body, with feather-like, frond-like tail and fins. She begins at the tip of the tail at the halfway point up the left-hand side of the frame then curves along down into the corner along the bottom edge and up the right-hand side with the tip of the fin curving up over her head, curving in filigree delicacy at the halfway point of the top silver edge. She has stars and butterflies in her body. Glamour fish taking up the entire frame.
To her right: light boxes. Wooden frames backlighting monochromatic canvases in cerulean, kelly, and canary.
Then—the piece de résistance of wit—ink drawings of radical animal pairings. A grizzly bear embraces a great white along her great belly, and says: I love you Eloise. A shriek mouthed baboon, braced on her hands with her ass in the air, faces a motley pack of beasts, including a bear, jackrabbit, mongoose, and great heron. She says, I am woman enough for all of you. The bawdy mongoose and penguin you have to see for yourself.
The man beside me is happily doing a crossword. It’s gloomy out, he excuses himself over the phone. I am disgusted with CNN, he adds.
It is just the same story over and over again, you wait for something new to come on and it never does. Pause. I hate that show. All they do is talk about what they are going to show you.
The shop’s paper guide to this art show, Brooklyn Art Movement, identifies the papers in the constructed art as recycled bills and the titles: Debt Consolidation, United States of Debt, and Original Debt (I think then the shape of this piece is an apple).
The Fish: Sexual Freedom. She’s made with spray paint over marks in glass made by Edder Muniz. One of the women working described him as the beautiful guy with dreds who comes in all the time. He’s so beautiful that if he was a woman he’d still be beautiful.
The light boxes are titled Enthusiasm, Shoji, and Tokonama. They are by Julie Renee Williams. She also has a richly pink one—Naked Faith. Naked faith was tucked around the corner.
The bawdy beasties are by Mike Freiheit.
The whole collection –the other woman at the counter says—not to be obvious, but it is so Spring, with all these colors.
And light & wit. Amen.
two things to read (that I did not write) and two to eat (that I did create)
18 Jun 2007 Leave a Comment
in narrative Tags: aids, radical muffins love art, sexuality
Sex, Striptease & Feminism
by Sarah Katherine Lewis, posted Tuesday, 8 May 2007
A popular narrative about sex work, earnestly discussed in Women’s Studies courses throughout the nation and represented in countless “I stripped my way through college!” memoirs, is that adult labor is automatically, and by definition, feminist.
The argument goes like this: By using sexual stereotypes professionally, by “owning” them (using them consciously), and by “subverting” them (choosing which stereotypes to exaggerate and which to discard), a sex-working woman is participating in a feminist reclamation of both personal and economic power.
Her deliberate use of gender-drag turns wearing a g-string and gyrating on stage – or behind glass – from an act done merely to pay her rent into a strong, assured and transgressive statement more akin to political performance art.
You can’t objectify me – I am objectifying myself, shrewdly and self-consciously, in order to obtain power through money, and control through being considered sexually desirable.
It’s almost as if sex work is the most feminist thing a women can do – because if women are objectified every minute of every day against our will and without any personal benefit, why not grab the reins on that process and make a decent living wage at it?
If women’s bodies belong to everyone, some feminists argue, why not be the ones to profit from our own bodies instead of being consumed for free?
If we’re going to be forced to sell regardless, we may as well name our own prices and take comfort in pocketing our own net gain.
It beats working a minimum-wage job forty hours a week while performing a second, unpaid, full-time job as visual erotic entertainment for society at large, simply by existing as a female in the world. Why not demand payment for that second shift?
And, as it turns out, that second shift pays far more than minimum wage – and all you have to do to claim your paycheck is to agree to perform a ritualized acknowledgment of your status as entertainment by revealing your body or performing sexually.
Goodbye polyester smock and plastic nametag – hello tuition payments!
[To Read the rest of this fantastic article - at least to " There is nothing more objectifying than poverty." - please visit: http://edstrong.blog-city.com/sex_striptease__feminisism.htm.]
Young Women Re-Craft Feminism as DIY Project
By Courtney E. Martin – WeNews correspondent
NEW YORK (WOMENSENEWS)- Two young women- strangers – sit across from one another on the subway knitting brightly, multi-colored scarves on the F train heading into Brooklyn.
They give one another knowing smiles and one removes her earphones. “So where do you get your yarn?”
Knitting, crochet, quilting, weaving, silk screening, sewing, book making, scrapbook making and amateur interior design have hit the big time among many young women.
According to the Crafts Report, a trade magazine based in Iola, Wis., almost half of crafters in the $13 billion-a-year industry are under 45 years of age and two-thirds are women.
Boutiques selling handcrafts, craft fairs and Web sites such as GetCrafty, KnitHappens, Craftster, ChurchofCraft and Knitty are measures of a boom.
What’s going on?
Homemade wares were once the key to survival, but as industrialization replaced locally produced goods, they became basement hobbies by the 1950s, largely sequestered off in a cultural corner.
But in an era of rising anxiety about the effects of globalization – on everything from the economy to social cohesion to the biosphere – many young women in their teens, 20s and 30s are joining a push to make things local and more personally connected. And for many of them knitting and stitching is the way in.
“There’s something undeniably empowering about saying, ‘I made that,’ whether the finished product is a crocheted tea cozy, a water bottle chandelier or a rig to connect your iPod and a car stereo,” says Julia Cosgrove, managing editor of ReadyMade, a Berkeley, Calif., magazine chock full of craft project ideas. “The DIY movement offers its members the utmost independence, so it’s no surprise that feminists, who had long fought for independence and equality, should find a home within its confines.”
[To Read the rest of this fantastic article, please visit: http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/3061/context/archive.]
