Tag: sexuality

SLUT.

On July 8, 2013

Here I am, almost seven months since my last blog, writing about the word “slut.” It’s strange, what passes for writing inspiration these days, especially since I promised in the past I’d be doing less personal-life-issues blogging. But, this word, and its usage, occupies a strange place in my mind.

Perhaps I’m blogging about this now, at this time, as I undergo some radical life changes, assessing and re-assessing the role authenticity plays in my life, and how sexuality is key to embracing that authenticity in a more complete and satisfying way.

Sex columnist Dan Savage’s response to a young woman being called a “slut” hit some buttons, mainly because I have been called the same thing, by a woman who is friends with my mother, no less. it wasn’t said in front of me, and perhaps I wasn’t meant to ever know of it, but, it didn’t surprise me, to once again be called “slut,” especially by another woman.

In dealing with female friends in the past, I used to feel a particular pressure to cover up, dress down, go shapeless, never be too revealing. That was thanks to a youthful lack of self-confidence in my appearance, but it was also a way to fit in with my chums’ idea of how females “should” look: no bare shoulders, no decolletage, always tasteful and subtle. There was still glammy makeup and vampy nails, and a growing passion for lingerie. Like the veiled ladies I used to see buying hoards of lacy knickers in Harrod’s years before, I felt I had a fabulous secret to savor hidden underneath the high-necked velvet tops and long skirts.

Gradually, I began to bust out of the mold. I attended a concert in the late 1990s wearing a tight, low-cut, vintage halter-dress; the concert wasn’t great, but boy, did I feel good, powerful even. Such boldness complemented an already entrenched taste for literary erotica, sensuous writing, and the naughtier side of history. That’s to say nothing of how much bellydancing aided in recognizing and embracing what God gave me too. Such pursuits helped me gain the confidence to claim my womanly body as my own, to express the person it contains, outright, -through dress, through manner, through every single visual and aural element shrieking “AUTHENTIC” loudly, proudly, finally. I realized the absurdity in dressing -and thinking, speaking, choosing -just to make other people comfortable.

None of this is to say I don’t believe in work-appropriate wear (I do), or that I don tube tops and micro-mini skirts daily (I don’t) -in fact, I’m typing this in jeans and a t-shirt. But stepping out in public still, inevitably, frustratingly, invites judgment: Your jeans are too tight; your top is too low. (Never mind that I’m wearing bare-bones-makeup and tiny stud earrings.) Perhaps it’s the nature of human beings to judge, maybe it’s our madly media-heavy, super-connected world making things worse (those “things” mainly related to the business of cultivating female insecurity around looks). Maybe it’s that depressingly common female competitiveness rearing its ugly head. Does the awareness of such human fallibility make it okay to call someone a “slut,” a woman who’s taken years to come to terms with body, soul, flesh, spirit, and all the mixed twisted vital veins pulsating, glowing between them? Why this desire for a slut and a saint, at once? A vixen / mother? A seductress / soother? Peacemaker / homemaker?

Choice is a funny thing, and sometimes it’s in embracing choice fully we court the snap judgments and narrow perceptions of others. It’s stunning, and sadly unsurprising, to be called a “slut”in 2013. Dan Savage suggested such the use of such a term is rooted in jealousy: she’s getting laid, you’re not, how shitty. The reality is more simple than that, I think: even if you’re not technically getting laid, if you look like you could, conceivably, be perceived as somehow sexually desirable (and the assumption is almost always to men), boom, out come the knives. One has to, as Savage suggests, take the mindset of, “who gives a shit what those bitches think?” Right. But I wish they didn’t have to be bitches. I wish things weren’t set up thusly. I wish I could have more pity in my heart, more consistently, for those who close their minds and hearts to others. Walt Whitman puts it a bit more poetically in I Sing The Body Electric:

Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman,
The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk, tears, laughter, weeping, love-looks, love-perturbations and risings,
The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,
Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,
Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening,
The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,
The skin, the sunburnt shade, freckles, hair,
The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body,
The circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,
The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees,
The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones,
The exquisite realization of health;
O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
O I say now these are the soul!

(Photo of me from my Flickr photostream)

The Power And The Glitter

By Catherine Kustanczy

On May 7, 2011

In art, artwork, writing

There’s something deeply moving about seeing Gustav Klimt’s work in-person.

I missed that opportunity in Vienna years ago, but, thanks to the Neue Galerie here in New York, I got it lastnight. Shown as part of their current exhibition Vienna 1900: Style and Identity, the work, tastefully incorporating design, art, and various writings, is on view at the museum through June 27th.

After checking bags and jacket, I walked up the narrow, winding staircase (reminding me so much of the narrow passageway I climbed in Vienna, to see one of the flats Beethoven lived in) and, on the second floor, caught the unmistakable sight of Klimt’s signature golden swirls. I entered one gallery and immediately had to check myself. The portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (I) stood before me in all its glinting, glistening glory. I almost cried.

Klimt is, for me, one of those painters with such a singular vision and style, any amount of copying or imitation just comes off as hokey and dumb. The closest I ever saw was the costuming for Bram Stoker’s Dracula; Oscar-winner Eiko Ishioka really captured the rich, feminine, sumptuous beauty of Klimt while keeping an eye on his penchant for strong contrasts and soft shapes against strong ones. There’s a nod to outfits in the exhibit too, with dresses shown beside or near paintings -a nice nod to the role of fashion in culture. I was especially thrilled by the billowing white dress with cascading layers and complex, thick-thick textures; it reminded me so much of Ishioka’s design for Lucy’s wedding gown/shroud, that I half-expected Sadie Frost to come creeping around a corner of the wood-and-dark-rugged Galerie.

Seeing his work up-close and in-person for the first time, after having loved it for over 20 years, was a much more emotional experience than I anticipated -and the work itself flew off the canvas (or sheet) with a kind of casual ease I wasn’t expecting. Outside of a few early works that are featured, it all looks…like bleeding, breathing, blinking. Each work, whether painted in rich oil colors or drawn with pencil, looks like a vein that’s been opened. Something divine -and very powerful -pours out on those surfaces. And more often than not, it sees like it was women who inspires the most rolling, flowing, richly memorable moments.

Women play such a central role in Klimt’s work; powerful, beautiful, potent, and occasionally terrifying, they are, for me, the sun around which Klimt’s artistic output revolved. This sense of female power -and of the power of their sexuality, and his worship of the two combined -was intoxicating to behold. I was especially pleased to see a selection of his erotic drawings on display. As people shuffled by awkwardly, I stopped, and gazed. Klimt was capturing women in their most intimate moments, but there was nothing dirty or lascivious in his depiction. The mix of private and personal -and performance – is intoxicating. Hand-wringing about the line between high art and porn aside, it isn’t the guy drawing who has the power here -it’s the women with the sighing smiles. Patricia Boccadoro, writing at Culture Kiosk, correctly notes that

when one stands in front of these frankly very erotic drawings of young girls carried away by their own desire, eyes closed, lying on their backs with their legs wide apart and masturbating, they seem natural and are not at all embarrassing. …They are beautiful in their abandon, lascivious, but fragile and vulnerable, and one senses that the artist was touched by what he saw. There is nothing perverse or humiliating…

He was touched, but I sense, also turned on. And maybe, as The Economist wisely observed, that once Klimt was “(s)tripped of his wet palette and gold, it is the artist who appears naked in the images, offering a startling insight into (his) own private world.” The raw, honest vulnerability of eroticism has a power all its own, one we’ve yet to fully embrace more than a century later.

I thought about Klimt, and art, and powerful women a lot lastnight, as I walked by dozens of posters advertising Lady Gaga’s show on HBO and hundreds of push-up-bra’d-and-super-high-heeled young women, as I carefully weighed fattening dinner options and went out in a low-cut, slinky black dress, and as I pulled a sweater on and put on my flat shoes before getting on the subway. What constitutes female power? Is it bling? Boobs? Boys? On a larger level, is it okay to be perceived as purely a sexual being? Where’s the person beneath the parts? Does anyone care? Also, I keep wondering about the role of trust between an artist and muse -or, for that matter, being a man and woman. I’m not sure I’d ever be comfortable with any artist sketching me in so vulnerable a state but… that’s the power of these drawings: they betray an extraordinary level of trust that translates into a new, empowering form of male/female relating.

Seeing Klimt’s work up close gave me a whole new awareness of not only the shifting ground of artistry and the beauty of orchestrating its creation, but of the power I, as a woman, hold, and how easily, quickly, and thoughtlessly I give it away in little tidy parcels every day. I aspire to be Adele. I aspire to be as free as the women in those drawings. I want to vanish into Klimt’s beautiful, glittering world. Alas, I’m stuck with a sweater over a dress, navigating a maze of colorless subways in dirty, crazy, loud New York. At least the Neue is close by.

Sexy Queen

By Catherine Kustanczy

On February 12, 2010

In opera

The Valentine’s Day sillies are upon us once more. As a singleton who’s never really experienced the “romantic” connotations of the Hallmark Holiday, I take the whole thing in stride and tend to draw associations instead with the sticky-sweet days of childhood. Heart-shaped cookies and finger-staining candies, along with cut-outs and tacky cards -that’s Valentine’s Day to me.

There’s a tremendous pressure on female singletons, particularly in North America, where V-Day is taken quite seriously. (That, incidentally, is culturally interesting; I don’t recall the same kind of pressure when I lived in Dublin and London, but then, back then I romanticized everything, turning every day into a kind of maudlin V-Day fest, complete with sappy poetry, long dresses, and plenty of chest-heaving for so-close-so-far Byronic, tortured-artist-lovers. Oh, youth…) Year-round Valentine pressure is everywhere in popular culture: witness the phenomenons of Bridget Jones, Sex And the City, and any number of treacly pop hits.

Lastnight’s episode of 30 Rock featured a defensive Liz Lemon (Tina Fey) trying to find someone to give her a ride post an impending dental surgery. The snag? The surgery fell on Valentine’s Day. In the great tradition of ladies who doth protest too much, the indefatigable Liz huffed and puffed about in hilarious, if equally sad, fashion, loudly proclaiming her independence. Only later, deep in the throes of whirling post-surgery hallucinations, did she acknowledge that she wanted to be loved. It got me thinking: do women need Valentine’s Day to assert their desire for love and acceptance? Following that, do men need the pressure of what V-Day represents to show these things? It all feels deeply unfair -and stupid.

The Toronto-based Erotic Arts and Crafts Fair blends like childlike whimsy with a decidedly adult ethos. As its name implies, the fair is a celebration of sex, but not in that tawdry, vulgar way as paraded around so many so-called “professional” conferences. The fair, on since 2007 and founded by members of the excellent Come As You Are, is Canada’s only craft fair dedicated to romantic, sexual, and erotic expression, and features a variety of crafts -not just rude knitwear and dildos (though they’re presented too, if you’re interested). Books, buttons, jewellery, corsets, slippers and one cleverly-named change-purse feature as well.

Along with being a fun way of celebrating sexuality, the fair also serves as a great way of connecting people -including many single women, who come in nervous and sometimes shy, and leave, laughing. There’s no pressure for coupledom, and the whimsical, fun feel of the fair imbues a kind of fun, carnival-esque atmosphere. Also, the event nicely builds community through the sharing of artistic ability, something vitally important in the Queen Street West area (which is rapidly becoming a bourgeois hipster haven, eeek). If you’re in the neighbourhood tomorrow (February 13th), pop in the Gladstone Hotel anytime between 12 and 8pm. Single or coupled, I guarantee you’ll walk out with a smile.

Sex Advice? Ask Grandma

By Catherine Kustanczy

On August 13, 2009

In video

I smiled when I saw this:

The description had worried me somewhat; would it be patronizing? Idiotic? Mean-spirited? Would it make this poor grandmother look ridiculous and outdated in a “pooh pooh, look at my granny” way? Turns out, none of the above is applicable. This is a loving, respectful tribute, and indeed, very playful… dare I say frisky.

I grew up not knowing either set of my grandparents, so I tend to live vicariously through other peoples’ -in person, or, in this case, online. Believe it or not, this would be just the type of thing I’d want to discuss with my baba. Absolutely love it. Well done.

Totally unrelated: I just came home from watching Billy Bishop Goes To War, with Eric Peterson and John Gray. J’adore. More tomorrow. Segue: I’m sure their grandmothers -Bishop’s included -would have more than a few interesting, playful insights to share. Who knows, perhaps they did… really, there must be a play in this somewhere.

Hey Joe!

By Catherine Kustanczy

On May 21, 2009

In opera

Yesterday I was out all day doing video shoots for upcoming theatrical productions in Toronto. One of the interviews revolved around a soon-to-open Soulpepper production of Joe Orton’s satirical play Loot.

What I’ve always found so interesting about Orton is the way his work has aged since he wrote it; some of his lines are still as stinging and nasty as ever, while other stuff -dialogue, ideas, concepts -really aren’t so shocking in the twenty-first century. In a contemporary sense, Orton’s play, which features two burglars who try to hide a corpse (among other farcical elements), doesn’t seem all that surprising or shocking. Indignities to a human body? Whatever. Some might be outraged, but it doesn’t last. Go to any number of weird news sites; they’re not hard to find. Some of the stories might be kind of icky (for instance, anything involving corpses tends to provoke a sour face) but the ease with which to find such oddities has made our collective sense of outrage over such a thing much less pronounced.

Still, there is something to director Jim Warren‘s comment that Orton was “an anarchist” -and it wasn’t just the fact Orton and partner Kenneth Halliwell had a predilection for defacing library books. Orton may have been writing in an England that was brutally classist and deeply homophobic, but in this age of smugness about our perceived permissiveness and laissez-faire-anything-goes attitudes, there’s a real smack of hypocrisy and meanness. Carry Orton’s ideas through on sexuality, and apply them to, say, older people (“Grandparents have sex lives? Eww! Disgusting! Gross!“), and you still find the same boring close-mindedness as existed in 1960s England. Viewed this way, Orton is more fresh, daring, and possibly anarchist than ever.