<\/p>\n
Sex <\/em>by Madonna, photographed by Steven Meisel, designed by Fabien Baron, Warner Books, 1992, spiral bound with aluminum covers, $49.95.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The official title, branded deep into the aluminum cover, is Sex<\/em> but the mylar wrapper is more accurate when it announces Madonna Sex<\/em>.\u00a0 Madonna Sex Fantasy<\/em> would be even more on target because, as the most famous woman in the world tells us right up front, “everything you are about to see and read is a fantasy, a dream, pretend….\u00a0 Nothing in this book is true.\u00a0 I made it all up.”<\/p>\n Whatever else you call this book (and lord knows people are going to call it all kinds of things for quite some time), don’t forget to call it original.\u00a0 Don’t forget to call it beautiful.\u00a0 Don’t forget to call it ambitious (I don’t mean financially), imaginative, creative, artful, and inventive.\u00a0 Don’t forget to call it complex, rich, multi-dimensional, and intricate.\u00a0 Don’t forget to call it groundbreaking, courageous, intimate, naked (I don’t mean skin), and (yes, no matter what the idiot critics say) honest.\u00a0 And, finally, don’t forget to call it subversive — seductive, sexy, compelling, liberatory, trans-rational — which is to say dangerous to the sex-repressive over-rationalized status quo.<\/p>\n There’s a lot to say about this book, a lot that is screaming and murmuring and whispering and sighing from the pages, a lot that is being studiously ignored despite all the titillated media clucking.\u00a0 But first, there are a few ground rules about looking at sexy pictures that we need to get clear:<\/p>\n First:\u00a0 It is easy to trash other people’s sexual imagery and imagination, but it is much much harder to come up with sexual imagery of your own, something that expresses something real, something right on, something new and true about sex.\u00a0 Everyone complains about sexual photos that are too stylized, too clich\u00e9, too stilted, too tame, too raunchy, too literal,\u00a0 or too contrived.\u00a0 To which one has to say at some point:\u00a0 Ok, so what would you<\/em> do, Mr.-Sexual-Sophisticate, Ms.-Watchcat-For-Internalized-Patriarchal-Values, if the camera were in your<\/em> hands, the subjects open to your<\/em> direction, the whole sexual perplex awaiting your<\/em> interpretation?\u00a0 What would you say to the world about what sex and what sex means to you?\u00a0 Would you let other people see what goes on in those inner recesses of your secret psyche?\u00a0 And how would you put any of this on film?\u00a0 Do you even have a clue about any of this?\u00a0 Does anyone in our culture of stunted and blunted sexual imagination have anything but the most primitive notion of how this would, should, or could be done?<\/p>\n Second:\u00a0 Most of us have been taught to examine sexual material with an eye to what we don’t<\/em> like about it, rather than to simply enjoy what appeals to us or turns us on.\u00a0 This is part of the general sex\/guilt\/shame\/bad\/everyone should want to do it like me thing which, more or less, has the entire culture by the balls, or let’s say, more universally, by the nipples (not the fun way).<\/p>\n Third:\u00a0 It requires tremendous courage to expose our most intimate sexual feelings, to make public that most personal, private, complex, contradictory, often shame-embedded truth about what really gets our juices flowing, beyond the protective lies of propriety, social acceptability, cultural convention, or political correctitude.\u00a0 Sex is, after all, so close to the center of who we really are — so individual, so tender, so raw, so subject to misinterpretation and condemnation.\u00a0 And, thanks to Point the Second above, going public in this way means that everyone is damn sure going to vent their accumulated sexual upset and confusion on you and your work.<\/p>\n That’s why so few people have chosen to make anything like a comprehensive photographic statement about what sex is about for them.\u00a0 Has anyone dared say, in pictures: This is what sex means to me; I want to show it to you rather than tell you about it?\u00a0 Ron Raffaelli did it with his book Rapture<\/em>.\u00a0 Michael Rosen did it with Sexual Magic<\/em>.\u00a0 I’ve done it (pardon the plug) with Erotic by Nature<\/em>.\u00a0 And now Madonna’s done it with Sex<\/em>, done it as a woman, done it as a woman who is unapologetically sexual on her own terms, done it mainstream, with all the media clout uniquely available to her, done it in the chain stores and the shopping malls, in Des Moines, Orlando, Phoenix and Boise — two million pounds of innovative, charged, imaginative\u00a0 sexual photography dropped on America’s doorsteps and around the world — Meese-proof, Helms-proof, Wildmon-proof, Dworkin\/McKinnon-proof.<\/p>\n In Sex<\/em>, Madonna lays herself and her sexuality on the line, for all to see.\u00a0 I say that she does it for real, as much as any artistic statement is for real.\u00a0 In this book Madonna, once again a performance artist, uses photographer Steven Meisel to bring her sexual vision to the page:\u00a0 This is me, this is mine, this is my tit, this is my mouth, this is my cunt, this is my energy, this is my heat, this is my desire.<\/p>\n Whether Madonna’s idea of sex aligns with yours or mine, her vision — both sexual and artistic — is without a doubt a whole lot more imaginative, provocative (in the best, creative, sense), and just plain interesting than anything else that’s come down the mainstream American sexual pike in quite some time.\u00a0 Despite the raised eyebrows, the how-dare-you’s, the giggles and the sneers of every single mainstream review I have seen, I want to tell you there’s a lot going on between these metallic covers, a lot that is going to bring new levels of sexual awareness, sexual inventiveness, and sexual possibility into the minds and bedrooms of many millions of people.<\/p>\n “This book is about sex.\u00a0 Sex is not love,” Madonna begins, throwing the first iron into the fire.\u00a0 This is the first axiom of the new sexual awakening, and one that is especially important for women to both say and hear.\u00a0 The sex-in-the-context-of-love battle has been fought and won.\u00a0 Now the issue has become sex on its own terms, desire as an independent variable, valid and important no matter how it combines or fails to combine with love, for women as well as for men.<\/p>\n Madonna’s second axiom for the sexually creative is another basic:\u00a0 Fantasy is different from reality, imagination is separate from practice.\u00a0 “Nothing in this book is real,” Madonna advises.\u00a0 “I made it all up.”\u00a0 Do we believe her?\u00a0 Yes and no.\u00a0 Yes, she wants us to understand that she is presenting this material as a series of fantasies.\u00a0 But to make the photographs she must enact the fantasies, and even though some of the photographs are distractingly “for the camera,” I read most of them as real, in the sense that I believe the people in the photos are playing for real, are engaged with each other, are carrying out much more than a charade.\u00a0 But more about that later.<\/p>\n On page five we are introduced to Dita, the mistress\/sorceress\/magician for what is to be our transformative journey:\u00a0 a stunning portrait of Madonna as masked enchantress in studded leather bra and panties, quiet and hot, sensual and sexual, light and dark, the middle finger of one hand sucked deep into her mouth, while the other dabbles with her cunt.\u00a0 She promises unabashedly, “I’ll teach you how to fuck.”\u00a0 We are only on page five, we are not messing around.\u00a0 If this book is not necessarily about love, it is about power.\u00a0 It already has power, the power to take us into the other world, the world of the psyche, the world that operates by the rules of eros, not the rules of reason.\u00a0 Abandon complacency all ye who enter; ye shall not leave unchanged.<\/p>\n Without blinking an eye Madonna\/Dita takes us directly into s\/m — s\/m that is hot, powerful, mindbending, vulnerable, playful and (thank God!) not stupid, stylized, or simple-minded.\u00a0 The photos shift nicely between Madonna as top and bottom, between the mental roller coaster of dominance\/submission and the physical exploration of pain and sensation.\u00a0 The use of contact sheets — thirty pictures on a page — allows multiple glimpses of the energy of each scene, creating a movie out of still photos, a sense of flow, a chance to see the energy build and subside, shift and transform.\u00a0 This smile, again and again, slightly different each time.\u00a0 This pose shifting, frame after frame — the hardness rounding, the vulnerability growing, the tension stretching, the movement between awkwardness and grace, confidence and uncertainty, focus and dispersal.\u00a0 It works.<\/p>\n We see Dita tied to a chair, tormented with a knife at her throat or her cunt, sometimes playfully, sometimes seriously, by two women with shaved heads, piercings, tattoos, amulets.\u00a0 “There is something comforting about being tied up,” Madonna annotates.\u00a0 “Like when you were a baby and your mother strapped you in the car seat.\u00a0 She wanted you to be safe.\u00a0 It was an act of love.”\u00a0 The two women blindfold Dita, tease her, slice her body suit open with the knife.\u00a0 They pull her hair attentively, lovingly, hoist her up by her bound wrists.\u00a0 One devours Dita’s body with hands and mouth while the other kisses her passionately, then the two mug together for the camera as innocently as any loving couple might pose for family snapshots.<\/p>\n In other scenes, Dita sternly whips a woman in a long latex dress, has her leg paddled by a man who watches her face carefully for reaction, pulls a fierce-looking motherfucker to lick her ankle while she holds him on a short leash.\u00a0 In a multi-photo sequence, she drips hot wax playfully and carefully on the biceps and chest of a leather-vested man in restraints, who later all but goes down on her.\u00a0 In one particularly stunning photo, she takes a man’s nipple ring in her teeth, pulling on him while looking him right in the eye.<\/p>\n Given that these are scenes with relative strangers, there is surprising intensity in these photos.\u00a0 People who become curious about s\/m for the first time from these pictures, or who use these pictures to nurture a preexisting curiosity, will be led to think of s\/m as serious, focused, attentive sexual play.\u00a0 The energy in the photos is complex, subtle, emotional, theatrical, gender neutral.\u00a0 If the photographs don’t have the emotional depth of Michael Rosen’s Sexual Magic<\/em>, they do carry a sense of invitation, permission, encouragement, exploration, and experimentation and, importantly, consensuality.\u00a0 “The difference between abuse and S&M,” Madonna comments, “is the issue of responsibility.\u00a0 [S&M is] always a mutual choice.\u00a0 You have an unstated agreement between you that this is [your] dialogue.”<\/p>\n Sex<\/em> goes on to explore a wide spectrum of sexual possibilities, issues, and themes, many (but not all) controversial.\u00a0 Gender blur, cross-dressing, homosexuality, cross-generational sex, multiple-partner sex, bisexuality, even running naked in the streets, are all included.\u00a0 The loosely defined chapters, with their individual styles and messages, together become a multi-layered tour of the various dimensions of the sexual psyche, at least of Madonna’s sexual psyche.<\/p>\n And Sex<\/em> includes some of the most imaginative erotic and sexual photography that mainstream America has ever seen.\u00a0 Many of the individual, full-page photos are beautifully lyric portraits:\u00a0 lovely to look at, powerful, full of feeling, sensual, sexy, and often provocative in their content.\u00a0 The collaged pages, superimposed images, and images superimposed with text have a different impact — scrambling the brain, inundating the viewer with multiple impressions, as if to say that the cumulative effect is more significant than any of the individual shots.<\/p>\n A lovely, warm full-page photo of Dita tenderly kissing the upper lip of a lovely young feminine-looking boy with long dark curls.\u00a0 Dita applying lipstick to another while she holds his chin lovingly in her hand and he looks intently into her eyes.\u00a0 A page with 36 photos of Madonna in a long sequinned gown cavorting with half a dozen g-stringed gay male dancers.\u00a0 A dancer in a tuxedo kisses her while another holds her long-gloved arm to his crotch, while two others laugh, while another licks the thigh of yet another.\u00a0 (Oh my!)\u00a0 Four hot, provocative photos of two nude men in passionate embrace, ending with one on the floor, arched back from his knees while the other presses onto him with his full body, his neck in his teeth.\u00a0 “The least offensive men I’ve been with in terms of their sexual politics and how they view me as a woman,” says Madonna, “have been men who have either slept with men or at least kissed or held a man once.\u00a0 It opens up your thinking.\u00a0 You don’t think that women are less than you are.”<\/p>\n A wonderful photo of Dita straddling a mirror, watching herself masturbate.\u00a0 Two tender photos of Dita being caressed by a much older man, photos that raise the entire taboo issue of father-daughter attraction, and not simple-mindedly.\u00a0 Dita with two other women (including Isabella Rossellini in drag), holding each other, kissing, rolling in the sand.\u00a0 A playful, for-effect-only shot of Dita on all fours, all but nude, straddling a belly-up dog with its head between her knees.\u00a0 The list goes on and on….<\/p>\n Given that the book has no genital sex, no cunts, and one lone exposed cock, the heat that these photos offer is impressive.\u00a0 The heat comes from the facial expressions, from the body postures, from the quality of touch, the quality of contact between the various hands, mouths, and bodies.\u00a0 Madonna\/Dita is certainly lovely, as are most of the other people who grace the pages, and yet the focus is not on the beautiful people, but what they are doing with each other.\u00a0 These are pictures with beautiful people, not of beautiful people.<\/p>\n The text that threads through the photographic material, often superimposed over the photos to veil their sexual content, is similarly varied.\u00a0 A series of light, raunchy, adolescent letters from Dita to her boyfriend, describing “outrageous” sexual encounters.\u00a0 Two more developed fantasy stories, standard porn fare, though well enough written.\u00a0 The story of a man in a clothing store dressing room, getting sucked by a believably reluctant yet avid salesgirl, is a lovely if conventional fantasy, with good energy, real tenderness, humor, and grace — a steamy, innocent tale on a par with any of the new collections of “women’s erotica.”<\/p>\n And much of the sexual commentary is on the mark as well.\u00a0 Take this evocative description of sexual awakening, for example:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n “When I was a child I used to sit on the toilet backward and wait for the burning sensation between my legs to go away.\u00a0 I did not understand that if only my finger had found its way to my pussy the aching would have subsided.\u00a0 That all the twisting and pulling and rubbing and scratching of my arms and my legs would not satisfy my hunger.\u00a0 That the wetness in my underpants had nothing to do with my mother overdressing me.\u00a0 But as a child I did not have the words to ask, so I stayed on fire and burning, tormented and yearning until that glorious day when finger found flesh and with legs spread open and back arched, honey poured from my 14-year-old gash and I wept.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Or this invocation for all the girls and women (not to mention the boys and men) who think there is something ugly about women’s genitals:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n “I like my pussy….\u00a0 I always taste it and smell it.\u00a0 It’s hard to describe.\u00a0 It smells like a baby to me, fresh and full of life.\u00a0 I love my pussy, it is the complete summation of my life.\u00a0 It’s the place where all the most painful things have happened.\u00a0 But it has given me indescribable pleasure.\u00a0 My pussy is the temple of learning.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There are a couple of clunkers that brought me up short, notably Madonna’s comment that “for the most part if women are in an abusive relationship and they know it and they stay in it, they must be digging it,” and the final chapter of Dita’s correspondence with Johnny, where she discovers him having sex with another man and reacts almost violently.\u00a0 But most of her comments are just good sense, good education for all those proper Americans.<\/p>\n Most of all, the entire book, in both form and content is a call for sexual creativity, exploration, and imagination, all of which are in painfully short supply, not only in the marketplace of sexually explicit material but also in the minds and practices of most individuals.\u00a0 Make it up as you go along, Madonna is saying, play with this, try that.\u00a0 Keep what works, toss what doesn’t.\u00a0 Breathe.\u00a0 Dance.\u00a0 This is your<\/em> life, your<\/em> body, your<\/em> self, your<\/em> sex.<\/p>\n In this way, Sex<\/em> becomes a call for sexual self-empowerment and sexual self-determination.\u00a0 Looking at sex in this way is what is truly radical these days, the heart of the new sexual openness that is taking hold despite the politics of sexual repression.\u00a0 Millions will hold onto more of their true sexual selves for Madonna’s encouragement, even as millions of others will find the very concept of unfettered, creative sexual exploration disgusting.<\/p>\n In one piece of revealing dialogue, Dita’s psychiatrist asks her if she has ever been mistaken for a prostitute.\u00a0 “Every time anyone reviews anything I do, I’m mistaken for a prostitute,” Dita\/Madonna answers plaintively.\u00a0 Madonna, for one, continues to be willing to take the heat, to keep being and celebrating who she is, sexually most of all.\u00a0 Perhaps her book will help the rest of us do a little more of that as well.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Spectator<\/em>, November 20, 1992<\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 1992 David Steinberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/p>\n Sex by Madonna, photographed by Steven Meisel, designed by Fabien Baron, Warner Books, 1992, spiral bound with aluminum covers, $49.95.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The official title, branded deep into the aluminum cover, is Sex but the mylar wrapper is more accurate when it announces Madonna Sex. Madonna Sex Fantasy would be even more on target because, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-essays","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1366\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}