(All of the links to specific images are NSFW)
Maybe you’ve heard about this show called Masters of Sex? Maybe you have a fulfilling, active life and watching successive hours of television just can’t be jammed into your busy schedule.
Me, I’ve had a lot of free time over the last couple of weeks. After I caught up on Survivor, HIMYM, TBBT and my weekly dose of lactose coated Glee, I sought recommendations from friends as to what could take up 6 hours without requiring too much from my exacerbated neurons. Thanks to my Tequila Sister, I dedicated two full days to The Only Way Is Essex, which will get it’s own spécial dédicace this week while the Smartarse suggested Masters of Sex. What magic, what bliss; a whole 4 days filled with a mix of bad accents, fake tans and electrode monitored female orgasms.
Masters of Sex, like pretty much anything worth watching these days, is a TV series produced by an American Cable TV channel, in this case, Showtime. It stars Michael Sheen (Twilight’s nastiest vampire) and Lizzy Caplan (Bachelorette’s nastiest bridesmaid) as Dr William Masters and Mrs Virginia Johnson the first people to medically study the human sexual response. All translates from geeky-science-ese to “watch a lot of people masturbate and have orgasms while recording their neurological and cardiovascular activity to ascertain what makes people come”. Which in any language, makes for a very compelling little TV show. Even more compelling, Bill and Virginia, were real people, it all really happened.
The show could be loosely described as Mad Men mixed up with Game of Thrones; a costume drama set in the 1950’s, superbly acted, featuring complex interpersonal relationships, retina-scarring blood and guts, punctuated with people shagging every ten or so minutes. What’s not to love?
More interesting to me is the idea of studying orgasms; the actual science-y bit of the show is fascinating. They talk about Freud, they have a room full of fancy machines that trace out brain waves and heart rates, they practice on prostitutes and there is enough sexual tension between Lizzy & Michael to power a small village. And did I mention people shag a lot?
Juiced up on 1.21 gigawatts of my own sexual tension, I paced a ditch into the floorboards of my flat, I scrubbed and polished every flat surface, I cried and I laughed until finally, powered by the need to quell my frustration, I went to an Art Gallery.
The Musée d’Orsay in Paris, a former railway station and home to most of the paintings ever painted by a French Impressionist, is the current home of an exhibition dedicated to the naked male form, Masculin/Masculin. An entire floor of paintings, sculptures and photographs of naked men (nudes for the initiated) spanning the years from 1800 to the present day…and it is art…will someone take my money?!
The temporary exhibition traces the history of artistic expression of male nudes through various themes, the Hero (my personal favourite), The Athlete, Man in Nature, Man in Pain, Man as an Object of Desire, etc. There was Lucien Freud, David, Rodin and a duo of French artists I’d never heard of called Pierre et Gilles.
Their work, mostly from the last ten years, reminded me of Renaissance Raphael pe-jazzled with a bit of David La Chapelle. One image in particular features on the exhibition poster, and another, Vive La France, was my personal favourite of the whole exhibition. Naked or nude, their play on the red, white and blue of the tricolore and the cultural kaleidoscope of modern France was, to me anyway, beautiful.
Pacing around the rooms, I teared up more than once (always happens), I learned about how Nazis used male nudes to propagate the notion of the perfect Aryan male, I learned about why Greeks and Romans fancied nude man marble more than they fancied nude women statues and I learned that a leather strap, dagger, leaf or drape will cover any manner of penis. I was perplexed to discover that, generally speaking, female nudes of any era give you full nipple and vagina action while the manly variety prefer to keep their modesty hidden behind a strategically placed scabbard.
I wonder how big of a scabbard would be required to hide a Kim Kardashian? Or simultaneously hide all the Kardashians?
Well this week, we learned that Kim don’t need no scabbard; she has a perfectly sized Kanye to cover up her lady bits while she rides her motorbike, without clothes (which is very irresponsible for a new mother who should be protecting herself with, at the very least, a crash helmet), as the latest Windows screensaver scrolls past behind her.
A week later, the world is still spinning as we collectively attempt to decipher the hidden significance of what will go down in history as the most appalling music video ever made. Are Kimye highlighting the plight of the endangered wild horse and bald eagle? Are the rolling clouds a comment on climate change? Did the tourism authority of Yosemite National Park sponsor the video? Are they both so much cleverer than the rest of us that we just can’t figure out the metaphysical subtext? Is she wearing SPF 30+? And what the actual f**k with the bouncing? We know you aren’t really in a national park Kimye; you don’t leave your house without a paparazzo or seven to document your every move.*
You might have read this far down the page and wondered, have two full days of TOWIE dulled the fabric of her mind to the point that she can write about a witty cable TV series, a properly official art exhibition and a couple that reality TV spewed onto our collective consciousness and still have a point?
Inconceivable! … well actually no, here it is.
I’ve spent a good part of this week questioning my own values concerning erotica and sexual imagery. What is sexually explicit? What is erotic? What is demeaning to a man, or to a woman, and what is not? What distinguishes the male nude and the female nude? What is nude and what is naked? Who on this earth (or Mars or Venus) wants to see a Kardashian nude, naked or otherwise?
Masters of Sex is, quite simply, brilliant. Understanding the origins of an orgasm empowered our bra-burning sisters of the sexual revolution to ask for what they wanted, and get it. Without the groundbreaking work of Masters and Johnson, we may all still be faking it or feigning headaches so we can get back to watching the Pride and Prejudice in peace. While the sex is often graphic, I find the images of obstetric surgery far more uncomfortable to watch. More importantly, the sex has a point; the sex scenes are essential to the telling of the story.
The Art Gallery filled with ten-foot tall paintings of naked men didn’t offend me at all; in fact it barely registered on my own imaginary Masters & Johnson electrograph. I’m not sure why, but I suspect that as soon as you throw a Roman God allegory at a painting, nakedness, nudeness and pornography evaporate. A golden helmet, a pair of winged boots or a sword disgorging a dragon renders a bare chest and butt cheeks invisible. Besides, I was actually inside the Musée d’Orsay, so I knew I was studiously observing artistic bottoms and penises, rather than ogling smutty bums and dicks.
A naked woman sitting astride a motorbike while her male companion is dressed, who then overtly pouts at the camera as she auto-caresses her shoulders; the sheer obviousness of a naked KK is not in any way, shape or form erotic, it is not sexual, it is not titillating, it is misplaced, it is facile and it is silly. This week I’ve learned that I’m more offended by silly than I am by naked. I could care less about boobs, bums or bits; as the spectator, I ask only to be treated with respect and intelligence.
A final observation.
Gustave Courbet painted the Origin of the World in 1866. Today, it occupies the only place on an entire wall, centre-stage, as you enter one of the halls dedicated to his oeuvre on the ground floor at Orsay. The day I was there, so were half of Paris’s junior high schools. Adolescent males were pushing against each other, against me and against a couple of little old Americans, to cop an eye of the giant vagina wall. The painting has attracted a fair amount of criticism and equal amounts of praise; no one can truly decide if it is art or erotica. I’m not about to be that person, but I will assert that it hangs on display in France’s second most visited art museum not too far from Monet’s Waterlilies, Whistler’s Mother or Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. This image is not hidden behind a cigarette stained velvet curtain in Pigalle.
Among the final images displayed in the Masculin/Masculin exhibition is The Origin of War by Orlan. As soon as I saw it, I recognised the reference to Courbet and laughed. This particular image, an intricately detailed study of a flaccid penis, was arguably the most explicit of all the sexual imagery I was faced with this week …and it made me laugh.
*It is worth noting that despite my endless days spent doing not much of anything; I have not resorted to watching KUWTK. TOWIE, at the very least, is British, so it is marginally more highbrow than anything fabricated in Los Angeles, at least as far as scripted reality goes…which is about as far as the distance between my right hand and a glass of Pinot Noir after 5pm on a Friday.
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