Imagine you decided to tell the story of your sexual assault in an effort to help protect other members of your community. Now imagine someone took your story and turned it into a play. Just how long do you think this play would stick around before going down in flames? Six weeks and counting — and no one seems to care that these accounts belong to real people who never gave their consent for them to be dramatically read on a stage before hundreds of people. Why do you suppose that is?
Most of us have met a doll-collector. It’s possible some of us have even met those who customize their dolls, spending hours to create them to the specifications that possess their imaginations. The collectors I know keep their dolls in immaculate condition, in cases like prized art, but there’s a subset who have taken it a step further with photography, turning their creations into an erotic wonderland.
French-born photographer Ingrid Berthon-Moine likes to look at men “the way they look at women.” She took her lens to the museum to explore the work of classical Greek sculpture, which focuses so heavily on anatomical detail and found herself drawn to to the scrotum. Berthon-Moine titled her series, which focuses entirely on the testicles of statues Marbles, cropping them to produce an effect somewhere between medical imagery and landscape portraiture.
We are the star stuff we’re made of. We are the genes in us and the society that raised us. We are our relationships, good and bad. We are our joys and our trauma. We are our inspiration and our fears. When we walk through fire — and make no mistake, divorce, like any loss, is a furnace more life-altering than even love — what are we doing if not participating in a rite of passage? Would you tell a young Samoan who just got his pe’a that he’s being dramatic about becoming a man?
This fall, Finland’s postal service Itella Posti Oy will showcase gay bondage in a series of stamps celebrating the “confident and proud homoeroticism” of the pornographic artist Touko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland. Despite living in a place celebrated as the land of the free and the home of the brave, I’ve never seen anything like it — and in association with the postal service? It’s enough to make Anthony Comstock roll in his grave.
The 46-year-old Grégoire Guillemin is the strategic planner and creative director at Infoflash, a French communications agency, but he’s best known as Léon, the creator of a series that gives viewers an inside look at the everyday lives of superheroes and arch villains. It’s a seamy spin on Lichtenstein — recast inside a comic nerd’s biggest fantasies — and, simultaneously, touchingly mundane.
For decades, governments and groups have worked to inform the public about sexually transmitted infection, often resorting to terrifying imagery. The ads might have brought people’s vulnerability into the forefront of their minds, but they dehumanized and reinforced stigma against people living with sexually transmitted infections. When New York photographer Andrea Brough decided to do a photo series narrating the story of a couple grappling with a positive test result, she wasn’t thinking about the history of sexual health ads. She only knew one thing: she didn’t want to be preachy.
Pin-up girls. Sometimes you look at those beautiful images representing the desires of generations past and wonder what kind of models artists used that they could contort their bodies so. Well, I have news for you. Rachael Aslett figured it out, and she made a Tumblr as proof. It appears that Vargas’ muse might have had whiskers.
In 2022, the FIFA World Cup will be hosted at last in the Middle East and Qatar — the country that won the bid to host the tournament — has been hard at work building new stadiums. A few days ago, some of the plans by the design firm AECOM escaped, enabling the world to see what Qatar had in store for soccer fans the world over. The greatest minds in design, engineering and architecture are unanimous: there’s no greater structure than that of the human vagina.
Many women are working to take their bodies back by bringing representations of the female body to the public. In Africa, an artist has turned a former jail into a walk-in vagina. In the United States, another artist is using the rodeo to educate the public about the clitoris. In Australia, a student newspaper put 18 vulvae on its cover. The only thing more interesting than the art are the reactions the pieces have inspired.
