{"id":429,"date":"1992-11-13T00:00:35","date_gmt":"1992-11-13T08:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/eroticbynature\/?p=429"},"modified":"2015-01-12T16:45:56","modified_gmt":"2015-01-13T00:45:56","slug":"comes-naturally-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/1992\/11\/13\/comes-naturally-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Reactions to Madonna’s Sex; Vanity Fair’s Hot Ads; Danielle Willis at Climate Theatre; Mark I. Chester’s SEXART Salons (Comes Naturally 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Reactions to Madonna\u2019s\u00a0Sex<\/i><\/span><\/strong><\/h1>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n

I\u2019m trying to resist, but I can\u2019t sit here putting a column together, not this week, without saying something about Madonna, about Madonna\u2019s book\u00a0Sex<\/i>\u00a0(Madonna Sex<\/i>\u00a0as it says on the mylar wrapper).<\/p>\n

Madonna Sex<\/i>\u00a0is an important book, don\u2019t let anyone tell you different. It\u2019s imaginative, adventuresome and aesthetic, as well as outrageous \u2014 and it puts radical sexual fantasy up for discussion in mainstream America as never before. I\u2019ll get to talk about the book in detail in a review next week, but something\u00a0has<\/i>\u00a0to be said right now about the response \u2014 no, the\u00a0reaction<\/i>\u00a0\u2014 to this book in the media. It\u2019s all so damn predictable that I suppose I should be inured by now, but I am, once again, amazed to see how consistently stupid, blind, presumptuous, adolescent, and catty mass culture becomes when it has to deal with someone who wants to say something real about sex.<\/p>\n

Anyone who wants to say something truthful and undiluted about sex is, by definition, unconventional. Anyone who wants to reveal something about who they really are sexually has to be willing to shock the sensibilities of all the people out there who never tell the truth about sex, to themselves or to anyone else. \u201cNice\u201d people have a whole list of silly little codified ways they allow themselves (and each other and, if they had their way, the rest of us) to look at sex, to think about sex, to talk about sex. Locker room humor is allowed and encouraged, as are makeup room titillation, the National Enquirer,\u00a0People<\/i>\u00a0magazine reports on the dalliances of celebrities, talk show masturbation (the under-the-table kind) about how BIZARRE and STRANGE and UNUSUAL and WEIRD some adorable-horrible-omigosh perverts are. Also allowed in post-sexual-revolution America is the sedate and sensible sexual advice of the likes of Dr. Ruth and Abby Van Buren, focused for the most part on how to avoid the many lurking DISASTERS that lie about two inches under the supposedly blinding glare of raw pleasure if and when we dare give our any-but-most-conventional sexual desires just a little bit of breathing room.<\/p>\n

The message of accepted and acceptable sexual discourse is monotonous and monolithic: sex is fascinating and awful, compelling and dangerous, universal and bizarre. Please also check cross-references under disease, insanity, obsession, sin.<\/p>\n

But every now and then somebody comes along with something to say about sex that cannot be easily strapped into these straitjackets of confusion and fear. Something that\u2019s disarmingly truthful and personal, human and real, straightforward and complex. Guess what, boys and girls: The truth about sex (anyone\u2019s<\/i>\u00a0truth about sex) is inherently shocking to people who are determined never to tell the truth about sex, never to know about anyone\u2019s sexual reality other than their own. It is indeed unusual and therefore shocking for someone to talk or write or create photo images about sex that are unapologetically strong and complex. It\u2019s shocking to walk into a brightly-lit room when you\u2019ve been wandering around in the dark for your whole existence \u2014 just take a look at the face of any baby being born.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, the particular slants on sex of those writers and photographers whose particularly quirky\/courageous personalities lead them to expose their sexual realities to the cold winds of public scrutiny often go beyond the limitations of conventional sexual discourse. We are not used to seeing the psychosexual stirrings of someone different from ourselves. And lord knows, when we get down into the inner workings of sexual desire, we turn out to be very unique and very different from each other indeed, universal themes notwithstanding.<\/p>\n

So somebody \u2014 in this case, Madonna \u2014 comes along who talks about sex in a way that breaks the social codes, and the entirety of mass culture from the New York Times to\u00a0USA Today<\/i>, from PBS to Geraldo, spasms into shock.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like when all the aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins fall silent at Thanksgiving or Passover when Aunt Sadie arrives in a red dress, dragging along that no-good new husband of hers, the one who has her laughing all the time and acting like she\u2019s 25 again, a woman of her age! Well, ok, I suppose this is not news. And Madonna knows what she\u2019s going to be up against as surely as Aunt Sadie does. And Madonna, like Aunt Sadie, knows that as long as you\u2019re going to be vilified for being sexual, you may as well get off on being a renegade. I\u00a0will<\/i>wear the red dress to the family gathering if I want to. I\u00a0will<\/i>\u00a0put the s\/m photos in the book right up front, if that\u2019s where they belong.<\/p>\n

But the final blow, the one that really gets me the most, is when the sex pundits, the good people turn it all around and want us to believe that it\u2019s Madonna\u2019s fault that they\u2019re shocked at her unapologetic sexuality. They want us to dismiss her, telling us that all she\u2019s doing is\u00a0trying<\/i>\u00a0to shock us, you know, for the money, for the attention, for the disgusting rudeness of it all. \u201cJust trying to press people\u2019s buttons,\u201d says Michiko Kakutani in\u00a0The New York Times<\/i>. \u201cIn your face, raunchy, dirty, too much sex to make it erotic,\u201d says Suzan Bibisi of the\u00a0Los Angeles Daily News<\/i>. \u201cSilly, pathetic, distasteful, offensive, rather dreary tripe,\u201d says Deirdre Donahue in\u00a0USA Today<\/i>. Even Pat Holt of the\u00a0San Francisco Chronicle<\/i>, the one reviewer to give Madonna even a little credibility, comes around to dismissing the book as \u201camateurish,\u201d \u201cnarcissistic,\u201d disrespectful of Linda Lovelace, and even environmentally unsound.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like when we say that gay men are\u00a0flaunting<\/i>\u00a0their homosexuality, shoving themselves in our faces, when they have the nerve to kiss or hug or look lovingly into each other\u2019s eyes on a public street. Or when we condemn teenagers for shocking us good adults when they so \u201cbrazenly\u201d act and dress and dance out the miracle of their blossoming sexuality \u2014 what parents, teachers, and guidance counselors almost universally trivialize as \u201craging hormones.\u201d Or when we say that women are just\u00a0asking for it<\/i>\u00a0(rape or sexual harassment) when they act, dress, walk, or talk in a way that celebrates that they are indeed real live sexual beings. Or when we whisper to each other how terrible it is that Aunt Sadie is always out to upset the entire family.<\/p>\n

Whenever somebody says, \u201cHere I am in all my sexual glory, here sex is with all its magnificent turmoil,\u201d the entire culture \u2014 left, right, and center \u2014 joins together to cast the blasphemer from the temple. It happened to D. H. Lawrence when he told\u00a0his<\/i>\u00a0truth about sex. It happened to Henry Miller when he told\u00a0his<\/i>truth about sex. And it\u2019s happening now to Madonna as she tells us, more directly than ever before,\u00a0her<\/i>\u00a0truth about sex.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not asking anyone to agree with or to endorse Madonna\u2019s particular sexual hot spots. What sex is about for Madonna is likely to be quite different from what sex is about for me, or for you. What sex meant to Henry Miller, growing up in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn and knocking around the low-rent studios of pre-war Paris, was certainly different from what sex means to me, fifty years later. But there\u2019s something inspiring and very personally confirming whenever\u00a0anyone<\/i>\u00a0tells their truth about sex, no matter how quirky or narcissistic or mother-driven or even misogynist that truth might be.<\/p>\n

Because Henry Miller wrote about his wonderfully vibrant, vagabond, chaotic life, because he left the sex in when everyone else was carving it out, because he didn\u2019t make sex\/life pretty or sensible or what we now call politically correct, because his writing eventually eventually eventually was published and even more eventually became available in this country, because through him the flower of sexual truth popped up one more time through one of the cracks in the concrete laid over the earth by the Grand Civilizers \u2014 because of all this, this particular adolescing boy, trying to how to hold onto his sex\/life spirit while drowning in the deathliness of 1958-America, got to trust a little more of what he was feeling \u2014 in his body, in his heart, in his skin, in his cock \u2014 even when everything and everyone around him was telling him he was crazy.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s probably not an exaggeration to say that Henry Miller saved my life, back then. I went from\u00a0Tropic of Cancer<\/i>\u00a0to Miller\u2019s letters to Lawrence Durrell, to anything autobiographical about Miller that I could find. This lusty, lively, exuberance-uber-alles<\/i>\u00a0man was my erotic inspiration, my hope, my evidence that it was possible to coalesce one\u2019s existence, one\u2019s identity, around the core life energy we so narrowly call \u201csex.\u201d And if Miller did this for me, he did it for thousands of others too, even as the other sexual writers and artists do it, one by one, even as Madonna is now doing it, not for a handful of people who find their way to obscure bookstores, but for the millions who pass through the large chain bookstores and watch MTV. Her particular message is different from Miller\u2019s or Lawrence\u2019s or Marco Vassi\u2019s or Susie Bright\u2019s or mine, but the more basic message is all the same: Sex is. Love it. Embrace it. Empower yourself with it. Don\u2019t let anyone take it away from you. Don\u2019t let anyone tell you it\u2019s not important.<\/p>\n

Subversive? You bet. And Madonna doesn\u2019t have to spend 25 years in limbo, as Miller did before he become legal. The Most Famous Woman in the World is in a position to be a sexual revolutionary\u00a0and<\/i>\u00a0be mainstream. Smart, female, sexual, savvy, and beyond Their control. Maybe there\u2019s going to be a New World Order after all\u2026.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n

Vanity Fair\u2019s<\/i>\u00a0Hot Ads<\/b><\/p>\n

Trying to keep up to date on Madonna before the mylar hit the shelves, I had my eyes opened to\u00a0Vanity Fair<\/i>. I think I\u2019ve been cloistered away writing for too long. Who needs porn magazines when\u00a0Vanity Fair<\/i>\u2018s got Helmut Newton and Calvin Klein? A beautiful young woman sitting provocatively on her aging father\u2019s lap with her crotch exposed, while her near-naked mother watches, spread-eagled against the window? Move over Robert Mapplethorpe\u2026.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n

Danielle Willis at Climate Theatre<\/b><\/p>\n

Those of us who have the good fortune or the good sense to live in the Bay Area should thank our lucky stars at least once a week because we happen to have around us the most vibrant culture of sex-related art \u2014 photography, theatre, painting, literature, you name it \u2014 anywhere in the country, probably anywhere in the world. This is beyond an individual here, an event there \u2014 this is a culture, a pan-sexual subculture (which is what brought The Rev. Larry Lea to town to purge the heretics, whores, and hobgoblins a couple of Halloweens ago).<\/p>\n

I had the pleasure of going to see Danielle Willis\u2019s one-woman show at Climate Theatre, \u201cBreakfast in the Flesh District,\u201d part of the Solo Mio Festival. \u201cBreakfast in the Flesh District\u201d is a collection of Danielle\u2019s provocative writing, well organized, choreographed, and directed by Cintra Wilson. Danielle\u2019s poems, prosepoems, and stories are unexpurgated, in your face, life and life only, ain\u2019t it amazing-wonderful-horrible-funny-sad-exhilerating-depressing, ain\u2019t it most of all the TRUTH though.\u00a0 There are rants and rants, most of which I frankly find indulgent and boring, but there\u2019s something about Danielle\u2019s wit and intelligence that makes her a pleasure to listen to and, in this particular incarnation, a pleasure to watch as well. And she should bust up, once and for all, the notion that sex workers are nothing but mindless, pathetic, desperate lost souls. Her show has been extended indefinitely as the Friday\/Saturday night late show at Climate (415-626-9196), so see her while you can.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n

Mark I. Chester\u2019s Sexart Salons<\/b><\/p>\n

Art gatherings of a more specifically sexual nature have been happening with some regularity over the past year, thanks to the unflagging efforts of Mark I. Chester. Mark has put together an increasingly amazing series of \u201cSEXART Salons\u201d that have grown from a small, informal gathering in his home last February to become regular events around town with a growing and very devoted following.<\/p>\n

The salons began as opportunities for writers, dancers, visual and performance artists to \u201cexplore the wide range and diversity of sexual art. We are bringing together sexually explicit materials that deal with sex, sexuality, and eroticism in a direct yet sex-positive manner. Evenings may include readings of prose, poetry, theater, performance art, slide shows of sexual art, and anything else that hits the crossroads of sex, art, and theater.\u201d<\/p>\n

Initially the only way to attend a salon was to perform something yourself, but soon participants were encouraged rather than required to contribute publicly to the gathering. The initial open-stage format of the salons produced a series of unpredictable, sometimes magnificent, sometimes ludicrous, sometimes confusing, sometimes polished, sometimes amateur, always honest, always personal, always surprising series of afternoons and evenings. The salons have featured people who are well known around town (Pat Califia, Carol Queen, Jack Davis, Lily Braindrop, Joseph Bean, Frank Moore, Rainbeau, Ruven Hannah, Greta Christina) as well as people who are less well known or even entirely new to public performance. There have been readings of poems and short stories, spoken remembrances, improvisational dances, presentations of portfolios of photographs and drawings, demonstration whippings, ritual cuttings, on-stage phone sex and much, much more.<\/p>\n

Mark has a wonderfully inviting, enabling, encouraging presence as the emcee of the salons, creating permission for even the most shy to offer their creations to what has been a uniformly appreciative and generously accepting audience. The emphasis is on imagination and personal honesty rather than polished professionalism, although much of the material that has been performed at the salons would hold its own in any theatre or magazine, if sex itself were not such a taboo subject. The Salons are most significant, I think, because they provide a forum \u2014 dare I say an institution \u2014 that encourages rather than exiles specifically sexual creative work. And the bringing together of people from a broad spectrum of Bay Area sexual subcultures into a mixed-gender, mixed-preference, mixed-medium stew is significant in itself. We are truly blessed to have this on-going forum for sexual art, both as performers and as audience. The next SEXART Salon will be on Sunday, December 6th, at Eichelberger\u2019s Restaurant, 2742 17th Street, San Francisco. Doors open at 2:30, the salon starts at 3:00, and there is a buffet dinner from 5:00-6:00. Cost is $10, including the dinner. Reservations are advised. For reservations or more information, call Mark Chester at (415) 544-1136.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

November 13, 1992<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 1992 David Steinberg<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reactions to Madonna\u2019s Sex <\/p>\n

I\u2019m trying to resist, but I can\u2019t sit here putting a column together, not this week, without saying something about Madonna, about Madonna\u2019s book Sex (Madonna Sex as it says on the mylar wrapper).<\/p>\n

Madonna Sex is an important book, don\u2019t let anyone tell you different. It\u2019s imaginative, adventuresome and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comes-naturally","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429","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=429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nearbycafe.com\/loveandlust\/davidsteinberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}