My avatar is a clip of my latest painting, which is my first foray into full color in nearly 6 years. I wouldn't call it successful by any means, but it's a start and I hope to work in full color from here on, in paint anyway. In going back to color, I awkwardly revisited an old struggle of mine, between the impulses to be loose and gestural, and tight in rendering. The battle is uncomfortably evident on the canvas. I hope to sort it all out in subsequent work.
The painting was exhibited last month in a group show and here is the statement I wrote on request of the organizer. It too is not up to par, but not absolutely terrible either.
Here's to more successful creative work in future!
The Doubleness of Sex For Women
It's nearly 30 years ago now that I read an essay by feminist author Joanna Russ, from her collection,
Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts, entitled
Pornography and the Doubleness of Sex
For Women. The phrase,
the doubleness of sex for women, stayed with me all this time. Indeed, I often
hear it echo in my mind when I'm working on sex or sexual abuse related imagery, which in my case, is
rather frequent. Russ says,
"Sex is ecstatic, autonomous, and lovely for women. Sex is violent, dangerous, and unpleasant
for women. I don't mean a dichotomy (i.e., two kinds of women or even two kinds of sex) but
rather a continuum in which no one's experience is wholly positive or negative, and to which
different women will give very different weightings."
Russ did an excellent job of outlining the pitfalls in various, and sometimes competing, feminist
approaches to sex and pornography, which she argues can arise from these differential experiences and
their interpretations. What struck me most however, was her description of how culture affects
experience in the bedroom. How intimate can we get with those who would be our oppressors, or after
sexual trauma, or having internalized our objectification, or in the face of the many fearful possibilities
that sex can entail? Much has changed since she wrote her essay, but some basic realities remain, and
old ideas we thought long vanquished have found new breath.
There is a great push backwards, made up of what seems like an odd confluence of processes, from
actual backlash to the various inevitable products of hyper‐consumer culture, where every tiny impulse
is measured and exploited to the greatest degree. Even as women make great strides in academia and
the workplace, and in some cases begin to out perform men, we see a renewed and growing pressure
on them to dress and behave in ways that accentuate their status as sex objects. The concurrent growth
of porn into what is now banal ubiquity has an alarming number of women seeking, of all things,
cosmetic genital surgery.
The concentration of wealth and power in our increasingly unregulated corporatist system, the
attendant, further destruction of community and non‐material social values, and the extinguishing of
voices that can't be exploited in the marketplace or for the political benefit of those who control it, all
provide fertile ground for the right, and it is newly reinvigorated. We're having to re‐fight old battles,
but on a different field, one where the old stark lines between the sexes are intersected with a host of
other classifications. Many young men perceive that they are victims of the system too, and openly
resent women who dare to draw attention to the unique inequities we still face as females.
Despite years of feminist activism on rape, the sexual abuse survivor movement, and the resulting social
gains and institutional changes, rates of child sexual abuse remain pandemic, and 99% of all rapists go
free. The doubleness of sex for women obtains, and perhaps is just as complicated, but in different
ways, than it was thirty years ago. Our battle for physical autonomy and sexual agency continues,
against a system that exploits some of the worst aspects of patriarchal culture, and nearly everyone and
every thing, for the sake of profit, and its unfortunate child, the rise of a reinvigorated right.