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Friday, May 25, 2007

We Make Art Not Sex: Rubber Lover

filed under: Smart. Safe. Sex., We Make Art Not Sex by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

(by Janaina Tschäpe, via sexblo.gs)

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Sex Positive Art Comes to Main Street

filed under: We Make Art Not Sex by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

Actually, Market Street, not Main, but in San Francisco, that is our main drag. So cheers to Tina Butcher (aka the bondage queen next door, Madison Young), owner and curator of the boundary-bursting feminist, sex-positive gallery Femina Potens, which has just signed a lease to take over a very prominent spot in San Francisco, which so blessedly happens to be the former home of leather shop, Image Leather.

Just a taste of the collision of art & porn with more to come [via] :

Imagine walking into an art gallery with a big fluffy, white mattress smack in the middle of the room. A thick red velvet rope and a scattering of “do not touch” signs surround the mattress. A few fellow art patrons shuffle around, regarding the works on the wall with thoughtful gazes. The wall text for the mattress reads “Sex.” The materials listed are “mattress, bodily fluids, naked bodies,” creation date: “NOW.” You have just entered the most recent sexual fantasy of Madison Young, San Francisco bondage and fetish model and, obviously, an exhibitionist.

Young sits in an old-school green and metal office chair in the office space of her art gallery Femina Potens. Fully clothed in a simple black dress with a soft baby pink cardigan, her cascading red hair glints in the late afternoon sun, her chair squeaks as she leans forward, excitedly describing a recent film shoot in which Young has sex in an art gallery. Her idea was to act out, in a public arena, the intensity and desire of new lovers in the very first week of a relationship.

“I wanted to show that point when you’re starving for each other. When you hardly get out of bed, falling asleep after fucking, only to wake up to fucking once again,” says Young.

Damn, is it a miracle to have sexy queer culture continue within those walls. And on them. And on the floors. And.

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Of Course MIT Hotties Do It For You

filed under: Do It for Science, We Make Art Not Sex by Melissa Gira | 1 Comment

The Times has been hardcore sexing itself up over the last few days, and their readers are already breathlessly responding:

“There’s a little bit of adrenaline, a puffing of the chest, a bit of anticipatory tongue motion,” said a divorced lawyer in his late 40s.

“I feel relaxed, warm and comfortable,” said a designer in her 30s.

“A yearning to kiss or grab someone who might respond,” said a male filmmaker, 50. “Or if I’m alone, to call up exes.”

“Listening to Noam Chomsky,” said a psychologist in her 50s, “always turns me on.”

No, that’s not over the latest spate of sex articles, but a survey pulled into one on the sociobiology of sexual desire.

Is it perverted to admit that the article itself is wet-making?

According to the sequence put forward in the mid-20th century by the pioneering sex researchers William H. Masters, Virginia E. Johnson and Helen Singer Kaplan, a sexual encounter begins with desire, a craving for sex that arises of its own accord and prods a person to seek a partner. That encounter then leads to sexual arousal, followed by sexual excitement, a desperate fumbling with buttons and related clothing fasteners, a lot of funny noises, climax and resolution (I will never drink Southern Comfort at the company barbecue again).

A plethora of new findings, however, suggest that the experience of desire may be less a forerunner to sex than an afterthought, the cognitive overlay that the brain gives to the sensation of already having been aroused by some sort of physical or subliminal stimulus — a brush on the back of the neck, say, or the sight of a ripe apple, or wearing a hard hat on a construction site and being surrounded by other men in similar haberdashery.

Your science may be suspect, Times (as The Stranger’s blog readers are having their own frenzy over), but your prose?

Pure porn for sex nerds.

Monday, April 2, 2007

fuckplays

filed under: We Make Art Not Sex by Lux Nightmare | Leave a Comment

Theater about sex tends to be hit or miss (and more often than not miss), so it was with some apprehension that I approached fuckplays (billed as “a voyeuristic journey through 8 playwrights’ most private places and a sincere examination of our most basic carnal desires”). I was, however, pleasantly surprised: the performance (jointly produced by Working Man’s Clothes and The Thursday Problem) turned out to be thoughtful, entertaining, funny, and quite smart.

The eight plays (selected from over sixty submissions) each attack the question of sex — how we view it, how we feel about it, and (most importantly) how we talk about it — from a different position, providing the audience with a wide range of commentary, critique, and views about sex. From a Monty Pythonesque scene featuring two Victorian gentlemen drinking tea and conversing about sexual frustration (”The Impotence of Being Ernest”) to the story of a Muslim martyr arriving in heaven to find his promised 72 virgins not quite as he imagined (”Arms and the Octopus”) to the tale of a ventriloquist and the woman in love with his dummy (”Wood”), fuckplays provides a fresh, creative outlook on sex, sexuality, and the way it interacts with our lives.

[Geoff (Steven Strobel) and Buckminster seduce the lovely Simone in “Wood.”]

fuckplays runs from March 28-April 27 at the Ohio Theatre and Galapagos Art Space. Tickets can be purchased at SmartTix. For more information, visit Working Man’s Clothes.

Saturday, February 24, 2007

Saturday Morning Video: Yoko Ono’s “Cut” Piece

filed under: We Make Art Not Sex by Melissa Gira | Leave a Comment

Beautiful: mod dresses, shiny scissors, and her. (much thx, ana) + update (as jo weldon, who used to do a “cut piece”-inspired act in the early 90’s as a feature dancer in strip clubs, and is currently blogging from the sex workers’ art show tour points out that the comments @ youtube are straying tantalizingly close to a very intellectual exchange on the nature of violence and women’s sexuality.)

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