I figured I owed you all an Aphra Behn update. I was reading some of her “Love Letters to a Gentleman” this morning:

I cannot help…wishing you no mirth, nor any content in your dancing design; and this unwonted malice in me I do not like, and would have concealed it if I could, lest you should take it for something which I am not, nor will believe myself guilty of. May your women be all ugly, ill-natured, ill-dressed, ill-fashioned, and unconversable; and, for your greater disappointment may every moment of your time…be taken up with thoughts of me (a sufficient curse), and yet you will be better entertained than me, who possibly am, and shall be, uneasy with thoughts not so good.”

Hey, we’ve all been there.

I went to see a movie with my friend Leo* last night: The Oh in Ohio–with the incomparable Parker Posey, the deliciously over-ripe Paul Rudd, the delightful Danny DeVito, and even a surprise appearance by a blonde, pussy-empowering Liza Minnelli! And this film was all about the power of the pussy. Its moral seems to be that you’ll find the female orgasm where you least expect it. And that if you live in Cleveland, Ohio, your choices are probably somewhat limited. Parker Posey’s were limited to Paul Rudd, Danny DeVito, and a French Tickler.

Ah, the sexes!

The Dig has a profile of Jesa Damora’s “Corner Pocket Art” in this week’s issue. Damora has been doing six foot by six foot drawings of men’s balls lately. Ray Hainer, the Dig’s art guy, says it’s like “seeing the balls of God.” Damora says it’s an exploration, at least in part, of vulnerability. I have written about balls before, here, and have long argued they needed an iconography of their own. But I’m not sure I was serious. Not this serious, at least.

You know, it used to be that porn imitated art. First it was Saving Private Ryan, and then it was Shaving Ryan’s Privates. It was American Beauty before American Booty. Not the other way around.

Now art imitates porn. I mean, remember a couple years ago, a New York photographer named Ashkan Sahihi, had an exhibition called “Cum Shots,” that took the city by storm? It was a series of routine headshots in front of a Sears portrait backdrop, only his subjects’ faces were covered in semen. Like so:

It was apparently some sort of comment on the commodification of cum. The idea hit Mr. Sahihi a year and a half before, when all the sudden he noticed that “popular culture is getting more and more saturated with pornographic imagery whenever something needs to be sold.” Astute observation.

“My point,” he went on, “was not to claim that pornography or sexual self-empowerment were ‘bad’ or ‘immoral,’ just to say it’s everywhere, and our acceptance of it is a pose. If you told some of the same people who wore pimp-and-ho clothing that you support gay marriages or gay adoption, they’d be up in arms.”

When asked how a load in the face communicates this, he answered, “Semen is a life force. But in pop culture, any sort of sexual activity leading up to ejaculation is portrayed without the life force. Semen really is the beginning of everything, but in most of the images we’re given for sexual entertainment, it’s the end of everything.”

Oh, Ok. Asked if he liked porn, he replied, “I did visit sites. I have no problem in admitting that some of the things I saw — not necessarily the bukkake [which I have just learned is a Japanese word for a sperm shower] I saw — were extremely exciting…. One image really stuck with me in my head, but also in my lower chakras. And it was of somebody who I do not find very attractive. I came across an image of Paris Hilton getting out of her car, and you can see her very, very unattractive pussy. And that image — the horniness we have toward celebrity culture — gave me a mental hard-on. The picture pleased me as a photographer, too: everything was in there, from the little pack of Marlboros, to the question ‘Was she aware?’ to the car she was driving, to the fact that I thought she had a really unattractive pussy. That image was one single boner for me.”

Glad to know I’m riding the zeitgeist.
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*Not his real name.