by Jill Di Donato
In 1974, artist Lynda Benglis appeared in Artforum posing nude with a gigantic dildo shooting out of her crotch. Her taut, tan oiled up body— with rhinestone-studded sunglasses that cleverly obscured her eyes— (viewers’ land on the plastic veiny member: a trophy, a fetish, an objectification of male virulence at a time when postmodernism and women’s lib was in full swing) offended hundreds of subscribers and art critics alike. Art historian Rosalind Krauss publically denounced the ad for Benglis’ upcoming show at the Paula Cooper Gallery, as “vulgar,” and accused the artist, known for her latex pour technique, of mocking the aims of women’s liberation.
Forty years later, Benglis’ photograph would hardly cause a stir (though it might be censored on Instagram). The notion of gender fluidity has entered the homes of millions of Americans—if not through art, through the narrative and visual delights of pop-culture. There is nary an American who hasn’t heard of how Caitlyn Jenner was born in the wrong body, however glazed over by Hollywood magic that story has been delivered. Still, the mass media attention over the former athletic demi-god and Kardashian patriarch forced people to turn on their TVs and let the narrative of gender transformation into their homes. The response? The conversation Jenner honed in on about gender appropriation and/or transformation is not, as Rosalind Krauss argued forty years ago, an assault against liberation—women’s or otherwise, but rather an endorsement of it.
But then again, we’re not talking about phallic aspirations. We’re talking about the inverted dildo. The sociologist in me will point out that the majority of sex reassignment surgeries are predominantly male to female. This more current data holds up to previous findings as reported in the 1994 DSM (IV) reporting that male to female sex reassignment surgeries are three times as common as female to male surgeries. Respectively, there is also a more documented historical background of male to female sex reassignment. These statistics interest me for many reasons, and though I posit socio-economic conditions play key factors, I’d like to imagine it’s the body electric of the female nude that draws men to want to become women.
Let’s imagine, for a moment, that the anxiety (a human condition often misread and incorrectly construed) women feel over their bodies is not forbidding jitters to conform to a hegemonic Aphrodite, but rather the reverberations of misunderstood pleasure. What a thought!
When it comes to cultural zeitgeist, transformation, specifically in the language of gender fluidity, will define the year 2015. Of course, the Greeks and Gloria Steinem were way ahead of us, but never has the ability to caterpillar from male to female (in a physiological as well as sociocultural sense) been as topical in the collective conscious as right now. In the halls of academia, I debate a sophomore in my writing class about whether or not “they” can be used as a singular pronoun (for people who identify as gender-fluid, the answer is yes she tells me). A trip to Gunnison Beach (it’s nude) shows me what post-op breasts look like on a recently transitioned female (waifish mosquito bites) and to be honest, I’ve seen dicks on the subway and dicks on Gansevoort Street; I’ve seen tits in strip clubs and in mainstream media, but never have I seen public nudity of the post-op trans community, in a state of such unencumbered nature, devoid of fetish. The crisp Atlantic waves crashed at the shore and the aura that unfolded as we sipped Modelo Especial Cheledas from 24 OZ cans was filled with joy.
**
About five years ago, I had the opportunity to speak with Gloria Steinem after a talk she gave at Baruch College. My Jewish godmother, Judi, a Second Waver who collaborated with Black Panthers and was part of a secret-op that uncovered data that showed male CUNY adjunct professors were paid more than their female counterparts—this resulted in a lawsuit spanning 20 years, but that ended with equal pay in the CUNY system—anyway, Judi, who’d been a part of this secret-op, brought me as her guest to a post-talk champagne lunch to meet Gloria. Well-coiffed, wearing false eyelashes and formfitting black, the Ms. who’s made millions off the syntax of feminism allowed me to ask her one question before she dug into her tuna tartar. As a young journalist—not nearly as well groomed as the legend who stood before me—I could only think of something that sounded like it came from a sociology class. But alas, it was my one question and I can’t ask for a do- over, so I’ll mine it because, wtf, it’s what I’ve got. I asked what she saw as the future of Fourth Wave Feminism. Considering my question for a moment, she ran her nails, almost talon-like, manicured with stiletto French white tips through her hair, and reminded me about Tiresias.
There's a Greek myth that goes like this: On a mountaintop in the Peloponnesus peninsula of Greece, a man, Tiresias happened upon a pair of copulating snakes. Fascinated by what he saw, he stayed on the mountaintop for hours, watching them. After a while, the snakes sensed his presence and attacked him. Tiresias killed the female snake with a powerful blow. For this act, the gods changed him into a woman. Tiresias became a priestess of Hera, living as a woman for seven years. During this time, she married and bore children. When one day she went walking on the mountaintop, she discovered another pair of copulating snakes. This time Tiresias killed the male, and the gods changed him back to a man.
Because Tiresias had lived both as a man and a woman, he could offer the gods unique insight. For this reason, he was called in by Zeus and Hera to settle an argument: who enjoys sex more, men or women? Tiresias replied that women receive the greater pleasure. "Of ten parts a man enjoys one only."
Though it might behoove me to go on about the tenfold pleasure of the female sex, I’m going to move away from this discovery. Ms. Steinem brought up the story of Tiresias as emblematic of the final frontier in the fight for equal rights between men and women. Feminisms—as the Third Wave taught us—allows (note my use of feminisms [plural] as a collective and thus singular noun) for intersectional points of view when it comes to dismantling the myriad deleterious effects of patriarchy. The one phenomenon millennials face that has eluded generations past, is the en masse fluidity in gender—both in representational forms, through such signifiers as art and language, but also through biology, as understood with sex reassignment surgeries.
Not one to pit substance against style—for me, such merging is an alchemy that keeps me sated in the bleakest emotional recessions—I’d like to start speculating just what about the female form is so aesthetically appealing. The form, and as such, I mean the female body—as spectacular and problematic it may be in modern culture—is an undeniable locus of power. So why then, does she remain the second sex?
In thinking about all this, the three to one male to female sex reassignment ratio really stuck with me. All this time I thought I’d been living as the second sex. Her power (the second sex has been established as female) is elusive, ephemeral, static, and oh so reliant on an X factor—that final ingredient that can, once-in-a-relished-while, turn superstructures on their heads.
That X factor a woman can possess that can make her Wonder Woman is what all ambitious women and sexually fluid men want, isn’t it?
**
It’s late August in Brooklyn. There’s a profusion of water bugs on the sidewalks. I don’t know why I’m calling them water bugs. They’re cockroaches—except they’re the gigantic kind, and they roam the avenues amongst Park Slope pedestrians getting gelato. It’s humid as fuck and I’m not going to lie, looking at the vile cockroaches scuttling along while I contemplate beauty gives me morbid curiosity. Yes, I’m musing from a point of privilege, and somehow, it’s necessary to disclose that when talking about issues like beauty and aesthetic experience, because people fighting for their lives don’t have the luxury to be so shallow. I pull out my phone and check Instagram. An advert for an art show opening tonight at Max Fish (the new Max Fish as 186 Ludlow became 120 Orchard) called Girls, Girls, Girls appears in my feed. Richard Kern, Alessandro Simonetti, Kareem Black, Ricky Powell and other photographers known for shooting hot chicks gets me to leave Brooklyn for the night, to go and interview dudes who shoot nudes and other stunning women in various states of power. I do want to figure this out: what’s so alluring about the female body?
