HEAD Magazine

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Editor’s Letter

“Life is occupied in both perpetuating itself and in surpassing itself; i f a l l i t d o e s i s m a i n ta i n i t s e l f, t h e n l i v i n g i s o n ly n o t dy i n g. ” Simone de Beauvoir

A magazine is a manifesto; a philosophical, emotional curation of contemporary times. It is both celebration and critique, a literary and visual voice. It is original expression and it is a physical, cultural communication.

So why have we reached the age where magazines communicate the best blow job techniques in ten easy steps? Why are we being fed unattainable, superfluous avant-gardism every six months? Why are there mediocre blogs?

I watched Paris is Burning, I re-watched the old daysof headyc o u t u r e a n d m o s t i m p o r ta n t ly, I l o o k e d a r o u n d at m y c l o s e s t f r i e n d s , o u i n t i m a c y, o u r e x p e r i e n c e s , o u r j oy s , o u r t e a r s .

And it struck me that nobody was writing about this.

So here we are. Unabashedly raw. Unabashedly emotional, hedonistic, v u l n e r a b l e , g l a m o u r o u s a n d m o s t i m p o r ta n t ly, p a s s i o n at e . I t i s t i m e to celebrate this. Not scoff at it. And certainly not to advise us against it.

I learnt that it does not suffice to hate and merely criticise, but to create if we really want to celebrate that which surrounds us and makes us what we are; that we must create in order to effect change and express that which lies within us. In order to challenge, we must articulate. Politically speaking, it is about doing; about taking action through creation and emotion.

That is why this magazine is a varied concoction of themes, subjects and what might be deemed controversies. Provocations, rather - we aren’t here merely to be titillating (although there are some tits).

Each and every piece has been commissioned for a particular reason.

Illustrations by Rebecca French are testimony to an artist’s hard work and willingness to challenge herself and others - as is Andreas Georgiu’s artwork. Jennifer Brough turns her literary prowess to a creative writing piece that haunts. All three works show that we must never, ever forget the power that art has on t h e c o l l e c t i v e c o n s c i o u s n e s s o f s o c i e t y.

The interview with the incredible trio of Rambert’s dance piece ‘What Wild Ecstasy’ is an exploration of three talents coming together to create an explosion of colour: vibrant and so fused w i t h i n t e g r i t y, s c i e n c e a n d m e n ta l e n e r g i e s t h at i t s ta n d s a s a b o m b a s t i c s t o r m i n t h e a g e o f m o d e r n i s t m i n i m a l i s m . S i m i l a r ly, the work of Michael Howells and his immeasurable imagination in the world of fashion, film and art is one to be heralded. His couture collaborations with John Galliano and Dior allowed us to dream and to enter into sublime spheres of fashion where merely looking bred eternal inspiration. These interviews are conversations in awe, for each individual, at the top of their respective field, has the power to transport us into the sublime, and that is rare.

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Ben Evans takes a brave step and confronts the issue of racism in fashion, taking on the phenomenon of the six-month fashion g i m m i c k w h i c h h a s c o m e t o p r e va i l i n t h e i n d u s t r y. Ly d i a S .

Walker also puts herself in a controversial and contentious position, delving into the issue of rape in art and film and whether it can be justified. To these writers, I am eternally grateful for having the courage to ask such big questions of their own selves but also posing them to the outside world with such intelligence a n d c r e d i b i l i t y.

The photographic spreads, so phenomenally captured by Bryan Huynh, a r e a c e l e b r at i o n o f t h e b o dy, i t s s t r e n g t h a n d s i m u lta n e o u s v u l n e r a b i l i t y, i t s s e n s u a l i t y a n d l u s c i o u s n e s s . W e a r e a l l c a p a b l e of feeling this, whoever we are and whatever size, age, sex or race.

Fashion is there to inspire and we, the wearers, are the ones who m a k e i t r e a l a n d c o m p l e t e i t t h r o u g h o u r p e r s o n a l i t y. I t h a n k t h e models and the photographer for both their passion and desire t o e x p r e s s p h y s i c a l ly.

The other articles are full-frontal, no-holds-barred jumps into the emotions of each and every single one of us - and sex. Nan Goldin’s photography is one of the main inspirations behind this magazine. Her life and art are one, and in turn, she has communicated universally a truth; she is a mirror of both the good and the bad. The pieces on masturbation and Grindr are not there to stamp a set opinion.

They ask questions that each one of us should, and they confess things that each one of us should feel brave enough to confess.

We have never been more liberated, and in turn, we have never been more confused. I cannot provide the answers to this (I am just as equally confused by and in love with sex), but through these articles I hope to show that it is ok to be both. I also hope that they make you think and, with these thoughts in mind, that they impact upon and inspire your actions.

Let us wholly submit ourselves to the senses, let us delve into complete immersion. For it is through these journeys that we challenge the head. Let us ask, let us think. Intoxication through emotion is the only way to deal with this crazy world we live in; i t i s f u n , i t i s r i d i c u l o u s a n d i t i s t h e b e s t way. I c a n n o t e x p r e s s how much I am indebted to all of the people around me for making me realise that seeing, being and feeling too much, is never enough.

So do and be just that.

Love, Bojana

“For there to be art, for there to be any aesthetic activity and observation, one physiological prerequisite is indispensable: intoxication…All kinds of intoxication… o f s e x u a l e xc i t e m e n t, o f t h e c o m p e t i t i o n , o f v i c t o r y, o f e v e r y e x t r e m e c o m m u n i c at i o n … ” Nietzsche

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8 - 9 , CONTRIBUTORS 1 0 , - 1 1 TO DO 1 2 - 1 3 , IS FEMALE RAP ENOUGH? 1 4 - 1 9 , “WHAT WILD ECSTASY” 2 0 - 2 3 , ART’S BODY ENERGY 2 4 - 2 5 , ALWAYS BURNING 2 6 - 2 7 , HEAD MONEY 2 8 - 2 9 , STATS 3 0 - 3 3 , W E F OPUL NA DC EL ?O V E I N A H O P E L E S S 3 4 - 3 7 , THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE 3 8 - 3 9 , ANNIVERSARY 4 0 - 4 7 , THE FIFTH ELEMENT 4 8 - 5 1 , NAN GOLDIN, AN ORAL HISTORY 5 2 - 5 5 , AESTHETIC SEXPLOITATION 5 6 - 5 7 , CHARM OFFENSIVE 5 8 - 5 9 , A FAIRYTALE TELLER 6 0 - 6 0 , FULL 7 0 - 7 1 , HEAD VOCABULARY 7 2 - 7 3 , SO NAUGHTY, BERLIN! 7 4 - 7 5 , ABSOLUTE

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Hi s Ea bAi - Da n n u a l ,

Editor-in-chief: Bojana Kozarevic

independent publication published by HED MEDIA, INC, London. 2012 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Art Direction/Graphic Design: Goraparasit

Printed by MJ Impressions, CENTRAL HOUSE, 142 Central Street, London EC1V 8AR.

Features Editor: H a n n a h B a n k s - W a l k er, Catherine Connell and Claire Louise Alexandra Stone

WITH HUGE THANKS TO: Executive Editor: Glyn Darcy Rive and William de Martigny Booth

Jasna Neba Marko Vesna George Andrew Tucker Paul Hetherington Penny Martin

Fashion Director: Bojana Kozarevic

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT, Visual Direction: Bryan Huynh

I N S P I R AT I O N A N D B E L I E F.

MASTHEAD 7

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CONTRI Rebecca French, Illustrator 23 and previously London based for five years, Rebecca recently gave it all up to backpack across America and then spent three months in Costa Rica.

Also having lived in Singapore for three years and travelling far and wide, she still cites London as the best city in the world. “I love museums featuring animals in jars and drawing people on the tube. And I couldn’t live without my Elk skull and Vivienne Westwood bag in my life.Is that weird?”

Rose and Nat, Writers C o n n e c t e d by a s o l i d f r i e n d s h i p, b l o n d e hair, their love for the Berlin nightlife and the will to take over the world, Roswitha and Natalie have been exploring together what their city had to offer. From the posh West to the hipster East, they embarked on ceaselessly living for their...um, art.

Roswitha followed her call of fate and relocated to London as a fashion journalist, where she is contributing to local and international publications.

Natalie is holding the forts in Berlin as managing editor for a German.

They miss each other very much!

Jennifer Brough, Author Ben Knight Evans, Writer Ben Knight Evans is a freelance writer living and working in London. He has assisted Sarah Mower in her work with upcoming designers and written for SHOWstudio, SID magazine and xxødigital. com. Ben spends his spare time exploring a love for grey suede, Tempranillo and drum n’ bass. His pet hates are stains and the northern hemisphere between t h e m o n t h s o f N o v e m b e r a n d F e b r u a r y.

When Jennifer Brough isn’t in labyrinthine libraries, enthusing about coffee, the ‘60s, or pretending to be a real life adult, she writes on typewriters, notebooks and napkins; anything she can get her hands on.

Inspired by Patti Smith, Plath, Atwood, Parker, (all the best story weavers), she hopes to one day have a large collection of her own, stories that is, not stamps.

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BUTORS Lydia Shellien-Walker, Writer (/l?d?æ??li:nw?:kæ/) Since flying the coop (leaving uni), film writer Lyidia has spent most of her time in cinemas across London writing film reviews, ranting about 3D and the demise of the independent cinema, and trying to shat on the multi-plex. Now back in the Big Smoke after a year’s sojourn in the wilderness of Western Canada, Lydia is training teaching English Language so she can scratch her now rather itchy feet, leave old Blighty once more in the search of cultural escapades, uncultivated landscapes and spiritual awakening.

William Grove, Writer W i l l i a m G r o v e i s d e s p e r at e ly l o n e ly.

His wit is sharper than Victoria Beckham’s cheekbones, his charisma more dazzling than Mel C’s gold tooth and his beauty the awkward blend of ginger, scary and b a by. H e p r o b a b ly w o u l d , s o h i t h i m u p.

Josh Bridges, Writer and Music Manager Josh is a purveyor of electronic music riding the wave of discovery one night to the next. You can spot him in midnight haunts waiting for a Hudson Mohawke track to be played, and then soon after you will see this grizzly looking northern boy whirling his t-shirt around his head.

Standard. Having worked for Outlook and Dimensions festivals this summer and been an avid supporter of underground music for a number of years, he still spends most of his morning dancing around his bedroom in his CKs.

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REMEMBER THIS MANTRA FROM COUNTER-CULTURE 1986 EDITION OF NOVA MAGAZINE: “I have taken the pill.

I have hoisted my skirts to my thighs, dropped them to my ankles, rebelled at university, abused the American Embassy, lived with two men, married one, earned my keep, kept my identity, and frankly...I’m lost”.

THEMSELVES.

LOOK FOR YOURSELF IN EVERY SINGLE EXPERIENCE YOU HAVE. LOOK AT THE WORK OF ANITA BARTOS. Fashion turned art photographer, Bartos now shoots works that deal with issues of female erotica and freedom. She explores the limitless powers of art photography. Her work shot on Polaroid film in seedy hotel rooms with the look of sinister erotic tableaux, show depths of a darker female subconscious. She confronts dreams and fears, she confronts the male gaze and she confronts the female body as both victim and perpetrator of the male gaze.

Harriet Sherwood,

Kate Adie, Olga Guerin, Eman Mohammed Darkhalil, Jodi Rudoren, Ruth Pollard,

Ana Carbajosa, Abeer Ayyoub, Rolla Scolari.

These women are fearless. Their courage and their integrity is not spoken about enough.Learn each

READ ABOUT SALMAN RUSHDIE’S UNTIMELY HEROINE, VINA APSARA FROM ‘THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET’. Of a world and beyond a world, Vina loves with a temerity that Rushdie captures through simultaneous comedy and despair. “Vina, who came to us from abroad, who laid waste to all she saw, who conquered and then devastated every heart. Vina as female Dionysus. Vina, the first bacchante.”

She says, “ M Y H E A R T B R O K E O P E N A N D H I S -T O R Y FELL IN. THAT, AND THE FUTURE TOO” .

REJECT KITTEN HEELS, FOR HEELS ARE WORN TO BE TOO TALL. Laugh when you stumble in them. KICK them off when they hurt, and hold onto your friend for support. Love them, hate them, cherish them.

WATCH MARGARET THATCHER’S “NO, NO, NO” SPEECH. Love her or hate her, her boldness as the only woman in the House of Lords is unforgettable. Holding her own, Thatcher ensured that everyone around the world was to shut up and listen. BE BRAVE. DRESS YOURSELF IN A SILK SLIP that caresses your body, accessorise only with your personality.

WEAR A COAT OVER YOUR NAKED BODY AND GO SOMEWHERE OUTISDE. RESPECT AND REMEMBER THE LATE MARIE COLVIN AND ALL FEMALE WAR CORRESPONDENTS WHO DEDICATE

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woman’s name, read each woman’s work and utterly respect them as limitless purveyors of female strength and for journalistic truth.

DANCE TO TRENTMOELLER’S “WICKED GAMES REMIX”, cigarette in hand with one arm above your head lightly swaying. Sultry, sexy and an aural orgasm, let your body flow to the rhythm. Do it in your bedroom alone, or let others watch you. Life your head to make eye contact with them that watch you, TEASE. JOIN THE FAWCETT GROUP, the UK’S leading campaign group for equality between women and men. Since 1886, founder Millicent Fawcett began her lifetime’s work leading the peaceful campaign for women’s votes. Today sees the oranisation campaigning on women’s representation in politics and public life;

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on equal pay, on pensions and poverty; valuing caring work; and the treatment of women in the justice system. They have achieved many successes, including passing laws for a new, fairer system for appointing judges and a new duty on public bodies to promote equality between women and men, as well as a change in the law to allow political parties to use all-women shortlists to increase the number of women MPs.

She smuggled female diaphragms donated more than $2 million ($23 million today) to Gregory Pincus’ development of the contraceptive pill.. Even after the pill was approved (1960), Katharine continued to provide funding to Pincus’s lab and research into improving the pill. Katherine’s donation of a female-only housing dorm to her alma mater, MIT also had an inestimable impact on women’s education in the sciences.

PUT A MIRROR BETWEEN YOUR LEGS AND LOOK INTO THE MIRROR DIRECTLY. THANK AND REMEMBER MARGARET SANGER AND KATHERINE MCCORMICK. In 1916, Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, which led to her arrest

CALL YOUR MOTHER, thank her and thank all of the women in your personal life.

BE CAREFUL OF UNPROTECTED SEX. Ensure condoms are packed in your bag with lipstick, money and keys. If you slip up, BE AWARE OF THE NEW MORNING AFTER PILL, “EllaOne”which can be taken up to fivedays after unprotected sex.

WATCH PARIS IS BURNING and VOGUE, VOGUE, VOGUE UNTIL YOUR BODY HURTS.

DON’T REGRET GETTING DRUNK OF CHEAP WINE. for distributing information on contraception. Her subsequent trial and appeal generated enormous support for her cause.

In 1921, Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

In New York, Sanger organized the first birth control clinic staffed by all-female doctors, as well as a clinic in Harlem with an entirely African-American staff.

Katharine McCormick met Margaret through her involvement in the women’s suffrage movement and Throughout the 1920s McCormick worked with Sanger on birth control issues, including smuggling diaphragms from Europe to New York City for Sanger’s Clinical Research Bureau, Katharine was vice president and treasurer of the National American Woman Suffrage, and vice president of the League of Women Voters.

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ENJOY EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY MOMENT ENJOY EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY MOMENT

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Live fast die young, bad girls do it well, Live fast die young, girls do it well, My chain hits my chest, When I’m banging on the dashboard, My chain hits my chest, When I’m banging on the radio. (MIA) HEY, you’re ‘bout to hear the most incredible shit ever written, Hard spittin’, cigar splittin’, PRAY, to your god and to them words in the Biblical scriptures, Critical bitch must, flow to the shit that just fit her, RODE, with the best auto that money can buy me- The best damn mami.(FOXY BROWN): I can be the answer, I’m ready to dance when the vamp up , And when I hit that dip, get your camera, You could see I been that bitch since the Pamper, And that I am that young sis, the beacon, The bitch who wants to compete and I could freak a ‘fit, that pump with the peep and, You know what your bitch become when her weave in. (AZZELIA BANKS) I’m the wicked bitch of the east, you better keep the peace, Or out come the beast, We the best still there’s room for improvement, Our presence is felt like a Black Panther movement, Seven quarter to eights back to back with ‘em (Back to back), And I’m sittin’ on chrome seven times platinum. (LIL’ KIM) I never learned to fail, all I know is win, The haters shoot me down, can’t help but crash land, I get up walking, they still talking it never ends, They build me up to break me down it builds me up again, On my Twin Tower shit, even when I’m gone, They gon’ pay to see where I’ve been, Now I understand the song, many men many men, It’s only so long, fake bitches can’t pretend, I’m gone with the wind, they can’t even catch my drift, The hate keep you from hearing, well fuck it read my lips, There’s some things I never do: never lose, never quit, Never change who I am, never give a fuck who gives a shit. (IGGY AZALEA) Go and do ya thang shawty, no, I ain’t mad at you, But you can’t fuck with me, I’m mo’ badder than you, My waist skinny, my ass more fatter than you, Sorry for being conceited that’s just my attitude. (TRINA) I ain’t gotta get a plaque, I ain’t gotta get awards, I just walk up out the door all the girls will applaud.

All the girls will come in as long as they understand, That I’m fighting for the girls that never thought they could win. ‘Cause before they could begin you told them it was the end, But I am here to reverse the curse that they live in. (NICKI MINAJ) We’ve been through things, feels like we’ve been to hell and back, And the ones you’ve lost, I’d give my life if I could bring them back (bring them back, I’d give my life), And your self esteem might be low from what people say (keep holding on), Hold your head up high, I promise it’s gonna be ok (ay, oh hey), I’m not perfect just like you (I’m not perfect), So come on let me give you a hug (come on let me give you a hug), I got problems just like you (I got problems), So don’t nobody sit here and judge (just like you). (MISSY ELLIOT) Yeah I don’t wanna live for tomorrow, I push my life today, I throw this in your face when I see you, I got something to say, I throw this shit in your face when I see you, Cause I got something to say, I was born free (born free), I was born free (born free). (MIA) Folks practicin’ how to spit like this, Sexy C-E-O makin’ hits like this, HUH?! I know you pissed, but take some advice from me, In five years, you’ll be as nice as me, But right now, nah, ya’ll ain’t ready. (LIL’ KIM) I be at my peak, I am not the one to be mastered, I’m the one to be after, I’m sweeping you while I’m dusting, I just popped up out the blue, I’m spontaneously combusting. Spit a little different, give me just a minute, Beat the beat down bitch, fresh it then I kill it, We are not the same but they don’t really get it, Tell ‘em do the math, hoe-fraction, division, Sick so sick help drop me in a clinic, Eat ‘em for the answer they not the beginning. (ANGEL HAZE) I haunt MC’s like Mephistopheles, bringin’ swords of Damocles, Secret Service keep a close watch as if my name was Kennedy, Abstract raps simple with a street format, Gaze into the sky and measure planets by parallax, Check out the retrograde motion, kill the notion, Of bitin’ and recyclin’ and callin’ it your own creation, I feel like Rockwell, ‘Somebody’s watching me’, I got no privacy whether on land or at sea, And for you bitin’ zealots, your raps are cacophonic, Hypocrite, critic but deep inside you wish you had the pop hit, It hurts don’t it, a ReFugee come to your turf, And take over the earth. (LAURYN HILL) Eargasmatic, from Distortion to Statics, Automatic, systematic, I’m nasty at it, So hand me the five micraphones like they did Illmatic, One time for the mind, Rhyme be coming from an illadelph state of mind, The real is not whole or half time all the time, and I shall proceedI’m movin on baby, I shall proceed, To remain, on point like an infrared beam. Succeed, in chasing out the ultraviolet dreams, No Mas like Shorty, ‘cause it’s all about me.

(BAHAMIA) Greatness is what we on the brink of.” (NICKI MINAJ

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i s F

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E n o u g h ?

Hip-Hop and rap are music genres in which the male voice dominates. They are also genres where violence and street life prevail, and hip-hop and rap have came to define and influence a lifestyle aesthetic. Both genres are equated with immense influential powers within the music industry and more importantly, the influential and inspirational powers they have on their fan base, which in comparison to other genres, is of a diehard dedication. So how do women fit into this? Female rappers began in the 1980s, with Queen Latifah and the like introducing lyrics of a different kind and acts such as Salt n’ Pepa came to revolutionise music movements. Since then, female rap has grown considerably; as rap and hip-hop themselves have evolved and became enriched, so have female rappers. Women such as Lil’ Kim, Nicki Minaj and Brianna Perry have began to express more and more explicitly the idea of the ‘bad bitch’, the one who is coming for not just her male rapper counter-parts, but for anyone who stands in her way to the top. This includes her female comrades. Strong, cocky and fearless, these women fight for themselves and their own integrity in the hip-hop world, an already oppressive world. To tackle this world would be to an extent destroy it, so the compromise of beat-them-at-their-owngame surfaces. Is this what female rappers are doing nowadays?

Or are they too ensnared in this genre’s philosophy so as to really support each other in their battle against it? It seems that there is hope and the verses chosen prove this. The hope is just disfigured by moments of weakness.

“The violence in rap must cease and settle, If we want to develop and grow to another level, We can’t be guinea pigs for the devil, The enemy knows, they’re no fools, Because everyone knows that hip-hop rules, So we gotta get a grip and grab what’s wrong, The opposition is weak and rap is strong.

Ramona “Ms. Melodie” Parker

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WHAT

WILD ECTASY

Wh at me n of god s a r e t he s e ? W hat ma id e ns l o th ?

Wh at mad p urs uit ? W hat s t r u g g l e t o e s c a pe?

Wh at p ipe s and timbr e l s ? W hat w il d e c s ta sy ?

J o hn K e ats, O d e o n a Grec i a n U rn

It had to be a smack in the face

A high-octane symbiosis of dance, music and science took place this year in the form of dance the piece ‘What Wild Ecstasy’. Unabashedly vibrant, the piece was a contemporary gestalt of Darwinian ideas, human nature and the union of mind and body. Abstract and provocative, the piece, created by the trio of Mark Baldwin, Artistic Director of Rambert Dance company, Professor Nicky Clayton and Gavin Higgins serves as a colourful homage to the palimpsest first authored by choreographer, Vaslav Nijinski and Claude Debussy in the form of the piece ‘L’Apres Midi d’une Faune’ from 1912. I meet them apprehensively, incredibly self-consciousness of my lack of scientific knowledge and over-zealous love for dance. It turns out I have absolutely nothing to worry about, for the friendly atmosphere of Rambert’s studio in Chiswick is very inviting. The walls are adorned with the Company’s history, there is a technique class taking

, explains Mark Baldwin.

place to the accompaniment of a live piano and the air is fused with energy.

Mark Baldwin, Professor Nicola Clayton and composer Gavin Higgins are an interesting and fascinating team. Not to mention extraordinary- both in their own fields which they serve to the highest acclaim, as well as standing as a powerhouse trio in the contemporary arts scene, bursting with integrity and originality. Artistic Director since 2002 of awardwinning contemporary dance company, Rambert Dance Company, Mark Baldwin has pushed boundaries creatively through movement, collaborations and through his choice of program for the c ompany. He won the French Grand Prix Award for Film in 1996 for his film, Echo, with Anish Kapoor and composer Brian Elias. 2002 saw him awarded with the Dance

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Artist Fellowship for Outstanding Contribution to Dance and his artistic directorship at Rambert has been awarded with the TMA Theatre Award for Achievement in Dance, The latter was with his collaboration with Nicky Clayton, Proffesor of Cognition at Claure college, Cambridge University, which introduced this fusion of science and dance. Gavin Higgins, Inaugural Music Fellow at Rambert in 2009 joined the duo and in 2010 to started to work on ‘What Wild Ecstasy’.

“It’s not unusual for art and science to come together”, explains Mark, answering my question of how this all came to happen. Nicky adds, “One thing that binds all of it is this idea of thinking without words.

It’s not that we don’t have words at our disposal to think with, but in the mediums we are all working in it’s about taking words out of the equation be it dance, be it music and in my case, studying the behaviour of animals. So that’s one kind of communality- in a sense that it’s all about movement and communicating ideas through the medium of movement.”

The ideas first began to cement themselves in the 2009 piece, ‘Comedy of Change’, a piece that Mark had been inspired set to celebrate 150 years of Darwin’s The Origin of Species.Through Nicky’s contribution, three main ideas of the Darwinian work were set as the leading explorative factors- Time (past and present), All the same but different, and finally, Camouflage (conceal/reveal). The ideas themselves

In 1912, immediately after the ‘L’apres’ premiere en Paris, newspaper Le Figaro criticised the sexual implications within the piece as ‘vile movements of erotic bestiality’. The piece, though very advanced in its provocation of creative propriety for 1912, nonetheless made a landmark both in contemporary dance and music. The rich exuberance and the tonalities of both the orchestral piece and Nijinsky’s abstract choreography, along with Leon Bakst’s opulent stage design, communicated the dream and trans-like state of a lonely faun who becomes intoxicated by an encounter with three luscious nymphs, culminating in his masturbation over them.This bold move by the two visionaries was taken further by the present trio, taking the very primal eroticism and universalising it throughout the whole of human nature, projecting hedonistic exuberance into it. Mark explains the tying together of the idea canon. “We knew the piece had to follow Debussy’s music, and the ideas of sex and natural selection and colour were already there both in our own conversations and within the Faun.”

aesthetically evolved and with Gavin joining the team, the trio began to explore a creative evolution of the ideas themselves.

In 2012, the commission to put a new work on stage came in conjunction with both the cultural olympiad of London as well as with the centenary of the ‘L’Apres Midi d’une Faune’.

“The Mallarme poem that so inspired Debussy is very hazy and sensual”, says Gavin.”And the final masturbatory gesture of the danceyou can understand why it would have caused so much aggravation back then but not so much in today’s time.”

Mark adds, “It’s full of sex because when the faun comes down the steps, he’s actually going like that (does faun-like sexy gesture), he’s holding something quite meaty!

The faun is in a real/ nonreal

state and it becomes a literal bubble of erotica.

But where the faun never gets to copulate, in our version of this bubble, all the fauns get to copulate- even if it is briefly after a great big dance and all over in 30

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seconds!”. However, though the story undergoes a happier ending, the gorgeous abstractions of stimulating dance technique voraciously power through more abstract ideas than focusing on the singular faun.

“Well, what the faun feels is primal eroticism. And this constantly takes place in nature; the dance goes on forever and the male bird spends forever doing it. And then, bam, the actual act is gone in a snap”, says Mark, “Nicky’s ideas of sexual competition provided the basis for this and then we travelled through it”.

Nicky begins to laugh, “We had some great, colourful juicy conversations in the pub, I tell you! Dunnock and Hedge-sparrow females are very saucy!” Laughing along, Mark and Gavin launch into explaining the conversations that took place. I am in awe, and jokingly Mark shows me a taxidermy sparrow on his desk, making it dance through the air. “Gavin himself demonstrated over a glass of wine how ducks practise birth control”, he says.. “Ah, yes- I had been to this exhibition at the Natural History Museum for research a couple of times which was all about ‘sexual nature’ and how nature secures mates and sexual selection”, says Gavin. “And different animals approach different things, so then we started questioning how do humans to attract mates? This is how we got onto the rave thing.”

The aggrandissement of the faun into a 22-person party monster at an acid house rave was one of the turning points of ‘What Wild Ecstasy’, its accessibility and entertainment factor being both loved and hated by critics and audiences alike. Mark furthers Gavin’s point “You know, we dress up, we go dancing, we go to raves.”

I nod in vehement acknowledgement and Gavin smiles knowingly. Nicky adds, “It’s like the mating dance in nature again, so much build up to the actual thing and the thing is over in a second and then also the conflict between male and female.”

Gavin explains, “We find a mate through raving, but we also love it. There is something very primal about these strong beats- it’s really hard not to move to it. And it’s in humans to move to music and these beats. The whole point of acid house music is that it arose out of Maggie Thatcher’s ‘no such thing as society’ statements where she was destroying societies all over the country, and it became all about the individual. A kind of survival of the fittest, Darwinian attitude. Then she destroyed all the mines which had these amazing brass bands attached to them and out of rose people just coming together to be part of a community and to dance, illegally, and covertly.”

Tribal and merry, multiple bodies diving headfirst into a relentless piece of 13 minutes is a feat. It is also a story of relentless power relationships between men

and women and bodies. “Definitely”, says Gavin, “ It is a colourful, fun piece but there’s a darker undertone to it. On the surface it might feel a little frivolous and fun but underneath there’s something more dangerous there”.

Nicky explains “You have these wonderful tensions that rise because of these paradoxes: you have these tribal communities and we are all part of it and its all highly social we all work together. And yet, the undercurrent is that with so many of the facets of sex and Darwinismit’s competitive. In the same ways as there are these huge tensions with the horrors of Thatcher and disbanding all these communities, and then the need to find alternative realities by creating new opportunities of bonding, even if sadly some elements of that bonding had to be forced through chemical means.”

I had done extensive research, but I was amazed how the trio had linked the very essentials of biology with politics itself and had further made it eccentric.

Michael Howells dressed each dancer in neon colours of pink and orange, accessorising with fur and feathers as well as dressing each individual dancer in order to celebrate their personal cultural background. “When you look at the landscape of dance today, it’s mainly in black and I’m always trying to convince people to make a piece to do colour. The piece does bring the language of colour.

Of course in nature, colour is present everywhere in the most powerful ways. The birds that Nicky’s told me about are perfectly camouflaged in the forest floor and then when they come out they are bright orange. Everyone is a colourful peacock underneath”, explains Mark, pointing to his bright orange t-shirt smiling. “If you look around, everyone is using colour now and people are starting to get away from their fear of colour. And actually audiences love colour. So in a way, if you want a company like this, you have to embrace it all. And why shouldn’t you?”

He goes on “We have audiences outside London who aren’t that comfortable with the minimal-no-colour thing which I do love ‘cos I was a dancer in the 80s. And of course, the big piece of music is the ‘Rite of spring’, an avalanche of ideas and undoubtedly full of colour and Russian folk history. Most composers have been influenced by that and its vibrancy.” “Everyone has. You can’t not be. And that brutal, maximalist, highly driven rhythmic stuff, does appeal to me and it always- its like the godfather”, says Gavin.

And does ‘What Wild Ecstasy’ echo this too? “The staging is still subtle- we put it in a very palatable way which is nice because this is Rambert Dance Company and all our work is for our audience. It’s not like it’s a pole dance or a male stripper! The colours, the smileys, and the brights were a vivid statement. But we put a stop to the amount of rave smiley faces in the piece”, Mark

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admits, laughing.

“I think we’re in an era of you can do anything you like and for someone like me, it’s nice to watch what everyone is doing and then just do the opposite. It seemed to me when I was at uni that people who did the best did exactly that. They’d see what everyone else was writing so they would do the opposite and it seems to throw up things that you haven’t come across. I suppose the idea that throughout life one would just keep doing nice modern dance would drive me bonkers. And also when you have creative team members who can throw other things into it, I mean it’s the creator’s job to push their creative limits as far as they can.” “The piece had to be the complete opposite and the flip side of the coin” agrees Gavin.

“If we did something similar we would never compete.

An iconic choreography, iconic music- it had to be the opposite so as to not ruin the monumentality of the original and still keep our piece credible. To be honest, we knew whatever we did it would get some kind of reaction.

There are some reactions to it but they were not smacks in the face”, Mark explains.

And why should a work merely emulating a masterpiece be deemed a masterpiece? I put forward to the trio that the smack their work achieves is that the primal is coloured so vividly in exuberance and an accessible intelligence. It makes a comment on so much more.

“There is the given joy of watching dancing, and there’s a little something to think about if you want. But we don’t ram it down their throats, we leave the audience to investigate it if they want. And a lot of people do. I also think even in the most abstract work which is dance for dance’s sake- which I adore and is my first love- actually to get there, requires a lot of process. These guys bring their own process to it and it does give it multiplicative power. You see things that you may have seen before but in a completely different way- whether creator or audience member”, says Mark.

“None of us can ignore our biology. Yes, we’re humans and we’ve created houses and computers but you still like to leave the house and watch the moon and smell the sounds and taste of the sea”, Nicky says. Neither audience nor creator can ignore, and that is what makes this dance piece so powerful. The communication without words that each author of this powerful trio achieves in a wild, moving piece that can affect every single viewer. It is a non-physical shout that is made loudly by the physical, I say in a burst of inspired passion! “Absolutely, dance is always that”, vehemently agrees Mark.

were influenced by the way I think about movements and behaviours. Everybody’s influenced by their experiences and that’s what gives us our identity. And I suppose, a lot for me is about moving and about birds and that’s translated into all kinds of stuff. We all move. And I think, although everyone moves, I don’t think everybody is aware of how to think with both brain and body. Dancers are of course, thats what they have to do. But I think a lot of my academic colleagues think with their bodies, I don’t think my husband does- he’s just not aware of his shape how it moves through space and time. The whole reason I got into both dance and science was because I’m a movement junkie and I love to fly; that’s basically my world and that’s how I got into birds. I spend way too much of my day imagining what it would be like to be a bird. I’m sure most people don’t.”

“I think the important thing is that what you get at the end is much bigger than what you started with. In some ways it’s about creating new ways of thinking and new ways of exploring which we do by brainstorming together and putting ideas into pots and then seeing what happens”, says Mark. Again, I earnestly agree. Having arrived, prepared to converse, I was now enriched with not only knowledge of Darwinism, but just what it takes to make an artistic piece so compelling and potent.

So why science and dance; why wild ecstasy? Because it reflects a fusion of past and present, an eternal human nature. A marriage of same yet different, and a need to hide yet simultaneously be explicitly present.

Perhaps such ideas are bigger than simple verbal words, lost in the vernacular but Mark, Nicky and Gavin manage to say it in their own, original way. ‘What Wild Ecstasy’ transports us into an eccentric realm of primal politics that occurs in every single form of being, It shouts it, it celebrates it and it presents it in a ceaseless continuum of fantastic energy. As a collaborative dance project, its temerity and intellectual weight is at present, unmatched in force, colour and power. Many creatives could do with taking a lesson from such a collaborative team. I stay after the interview because I am invited to watch the rehearsals, have another coffee and just to enjoy conversation. Contemporary dance has never been so good, and ‘What Wild Ecstasy’s’ great originality and power is not a surprise at all after seeing its creators.

“Dance doesn’t need anything. Like science doesn’t need anything or music doesn’t need anything. We choose to do this”, Mark concludes.

Nicky adds, “When I brainstormed ideas at the beginning, a lot of the bits of science that I picked out

Words by Bojana Kozarevic

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A n d r e a s M . G e o r g i u i s a 2 7 y e a r - o l d C y p r i a n a r t i s t c u r r e n t ly w o r k i n g a n d r e s i d i n g i n L o n d o n . H i s f i r s t s o l o e x h i b i t i o n at t h e M o r f i G a l l e r y w a s t o c r i t i c a l a c c l a i m , a w a r d e d w i t h a n e o l o g i s m m a d e j u s t f o r h i s w o r k , ‘ S o m at o g r a p h y ’ . I n t r e p i d , h i s w o r k s p u s h b o t h a r t i s t a n d a u d i e n c e p h y s i c a l ly a n d m e n ta l ly, e x p l o r i n g c o n n e c t i o n b e t w e e n b o d y a n d e g o , a r t i s t a n d v i e w e r . P a s s i o n at e ly, G e o r g i u q u e s t i o n s t h e s e p a r at e p o w e r s o f b o d y a n d e g o , t y i n g t h e m t o g e t h e r a s a w h o l e e n e r g y.

C l a i r e L o u i s e A l e x a n d r a i n t e r v i e w s t h e y o u n g a r t i s t.

Was the decision to explore ‘body-energy’ a conscious decision? How did it come about?

I would say that initially, it was more like a physical development of the work rather than a conscious decision.

When I do something, I always start from somewhere, having in mind an idea in order to initiate an action or a procedure, but usually, while I am working, the work itself directs me on I should proceed. One of the duties of an artist, I think, is to pause and observe his work from a distance and evaluate what he has done and then make decisions on how to proceed. So I would say that ‘body energy’ emerged as an issue in my work during the ‘Gestural Painting Series’ (2008). From that point onwards, it became the main axon of my work.

The way I read ‘Gestural Painting’, ‘Somatographies’ and then finally, ‘Single Actions’ is a kind of progression through the idea of body energy which begins very physically and then incorporates the mental ego. Do you think the two can ever be fully separated?

Yes, that’s right. Well, I believe that maybe it is possible to approach them separately in order to analyse each one in a deeper way, to investigate a human being’s physical substance on the one hand and on the other hand the mental issue. But in the end it’s impossible to separate them because everything that constitutes us comes under the umbrella of our mental ego. The ego is the ‘crown’; it is the reason for our existence.

Do you think an artist can ever really separate the two and work with just one?

I don’t think that this is possible. You may choose to focus your work on the one, but deep down, you will know that this is not feasible and you will always have to deal with both of them.

This is a question about a force of self. The work ‘Somatographies’ are moulds of your own body and this is very intimate. Did the plaster act as a tabula rasa onto which you pressed your body (and thus power) onto it,

or does the plaster have a force of its own and there is a power relationship going on?

‘Somatographies’ are more like 3-dimensional drawings into the plaster rather than moulds of my body. I perceive the term ‘mould’ as something static; more like an imprint of something. ‘Somathography’ is a result of constant movement of my body, ‘a living drawing’, performed in order to control the material which reacts having its own forces and strength. It was a name given to the work by the Greek art critic and historian Haris Savvopoulos, and describes the procedure of impressing my body into the plaster. And there is the issue of gravity, of course. I think every material has its own resistance; even a balloon filled with air has its own acting forces. So, I would certainly say yes, absolutely; by the time you choose to work with a 3-dimensional material/mass, there is always going to be an on-going power relationship.

Like in ‘Somatographies’, ‘Single Actions’ are determined by your own body. Is there a variety of physical energies you eject onto the mirrors, do they vary in intensity and strength? Do you have to put yourself in a different mental space to create these pieces? What do you feel when you create them?

Although I have done this several times by now, every single action is a new experience for me. I have to take decisions regarding the colours, so I could say that in the first stage I compose a painting on my ‘spatula’ which is more or less an extension of my body. So this stage has all the characteristics of a painting. Up to this stage I have total control of my decisions. The next step is more controlled by the subconscious, so that moment, the moment of the action, is like a gap, I don’t have control, I don’t know what to expect, everything happens so quickly, and after a few moments I realize what I have done. What I want to emphasize is that it is such a fast procedure that I don’t have the time to understand how my body behaves, it is almost as if the body knows what to do, how to behave and It simply does it. I confess that during these few seconds, before the action, I am so nervous because I don’t

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know what to expect, what it will look like. It’s a moment of emotional intensity! And this intensity is transmitted into and through the paint.

Do you think the body has limits? Are there any limits to body energy?

From the moment we speak about physical reality and about mass, then, automatically we set boundaries. By this, I mean that the body on its own has limits. By saying ‘body energy’, it is not like any other form of energy.

The way I understand the term, I think it is a complicated situation. And this is because of the nature of the human body which is constituted by an ensemble of things, mental and physical; so I would have to conclude that no, there are no limits.

I love the bold colours in both ‘Single Actions’ and ‘Gestural Paintings’. Is colour something that is important for you? Why do you choose to work in such bold colours?

Wassily Kandinsky used to say that colour on its own, is capable of being seen not only as composition but as theme as well. I think when youabstract figure from a painting, what remains is the colour. Colour is the theme, the language and the mean/medium. So when you don’t need to copy or study from nature any more, then the colour becomes your new reality, the theme and your new, entire world. You are painting the painting. In my ‘Gestural Paintings’, I used to paint with bold colours but with many colourful greys as well. In ‘Single Actions’, it is a bit different. I use mainly raw colours because I want to approach the idea of colour as a 3D object/ mass in an effort to comment on the matter nature of painting on the mirror.

The idea of the mirror, I personally read as an invitation for the viewer to assess both themselves as viewer and the works as works in themselves. I read how you said that the works demand constant exposure and create a viewer interaction. Is this something that is important for you as an artist- the viewer interaction?

That’s right. Mirror is multi-functioning in this case, in two terms: pragmatically and conceptually. Interaction is very important in this case because we have ‘a live artwork’. There is movement on the surface, the whole visual information is constantly changing, save for one thing: the thrown paint. The mirror’s surface is not like a video projection where we may watch movement, but ‘static’; it’s preprogrammed what to show and nothing will change it or interfere with it in if we change the place or the audience. But the mirror is an interactive surface of 2D illusions. All these activities take place at the same time and constantly, so it’s really interesting for me to manipulate them and eventually be able to express my ideas through them. Viewer and Space interaction, both reflected on the mirror’s surface, are in constant conflict and contradiction with ‘mass’ (the thrown pigment) which comes to be seen an “object”.

think that this recognition happens only once or that we are constantly changing? And thus, should always keep looking at mirrors- and here, in a way, I put art as a mirror).

I think what makes Lacan’s mirror stage, such a powerful moment in each person’s life is the fact that it is the first time in our life that we realize that we exist on our own.

From that moment on, we exist as individuals in nature, and we are not a part – extension of our mother. We have shape, we are image, we can be recognized by our image.

So I think this particular moment is ‘unique’. There are several powerful times during our life when we reconsider or we reevaluate our life but none of them are comparable to the ‘mirror stage’. I would say that we are born two times: when we are born physically - when our body comes to life - and when our ego comes to life. I am asking for people to look at mirrors, in an effort to pose questions to them: real – unreal, mass or visual illusion, permanent or ephemeral – instant?

Do you think art has the power to say big things? Do you think it should speak of big things?

History has proven that Art is powerful enough to say big things. I feel that big things are out there but we may not want to see them or we close our eyes to them. So, sometimes art shows us ‘big things’ for the first time, from a different point of view. So maybe Art is socially very valuable and helpful. But what are ‘big things’ really?

Is something that refers to a large group of people a big thing? And something that refers to fewer people or even to one person isn’t? I wouldn’t say that. I think that when something is powerful enough to push an artist to work, it’s big. Therefore, an Artist’s aim is to convince the audience that which he is talking about is worth their attention.

So where and what next? What is your plan, and what are your desires as an artist?

Currently, I am in what I call ‘my productive period’ where I only need to be in the studio creating without any outside interferences. At the end of May 2013, I will be showing/exhibiting my work at Central Saint Martin’s MA Fine Arts Final Show, then, a solo show in Cyprus will follow in November of the same year. During the time between the two, I will be participating in some group shows in London. For the next couple of years I am planning to remain and work inLondon. I think the most important thing for an artist is to be able to create the conditions he needs, in order to be productive and then to have the opportunities to show his work outside, to the public, to communicate his ideas through his work. Otherwise, I feel I couldn’t exist in this world.

Currently studying at MA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, Andreas is also co-founder of Daitumn Foundation.

The connection between the mirror and Lacan figures in these works, and taking the Lacanian idea of the child’s recognition of the ego is a very powerful moment. Do you

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Pillars of crisp light break across lips and hips and jaws bones, cutting mysterious figures through the crowd. The enticing beat nurses goosebumps down your neck like a lover’s whisper. Flashes of elusive flesh promise intimate introductions. The stifling air is thick with excitement as your hands sweat restlessly looking for love, the love of T h e M o m e n t , when the walls and dancefloor melt away beneath the passion of strangers.

The music is your partner, holding you with gentle explosions of sonic sensuality. It rocks you gently to the pulsating rhythm amongst the visages of youth and beauty brought together to celebrate life, to live, to love; The love of T h e M u s i c . As the uplifting vocals and soaring synths rise up into the ether, as the waves of hands and outstretched arms cry out for euphoric release, a man counts under his breath barely nodding his head to

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the thunderous bass. His hand hovers above the dial, a tantric breath in the deep song of the dark night, suspending their emotions along a tightrope of tension. He eyes the crowd, an orgy of bodies like matches waiting to be struck with the sound that resonates through the ages…

Vintage US-American house and garage music has influenced many strands of underground music produced on these fair shores, and Marc “MK” Kinchen helped define its historic audio signature with chopped vocals and deep basslines that powered people through the night and on to welcome the sunrise throughout the ‘90’s. Having spun out of Detroit’s techno scene when still a teenager, MK found gold creating cutting edge remixes in New York and producing R&B for LA’s elite. Now as ‘90’s couture has made a marked reappearance on the high street

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as the latest installment of retro revivals, as to have the nation’s DJs appeared to rediscover the CDs and vinyl of yesteryear.

Having steadily regained some stature since emerging from the shadows cast by Dupstep’s meteoric rise, the reassuringly repetitive 4/4 beats of House have emerged back on the scene. Bringing with it the trophies of former glories crafted in the warehouses of Manchester and Chicago; classic beats for fresh new hedonists. … the lights flicker, the clock ticks, the music fades to reveal the roar, thousands of voices shout for more. A track they’ve never heard before drops from the roof destroying the floor. Faces light up in the dark, electrified by the onrushing swell of sound thumping through their chest, their heart, their soul. Faithless once sung “God is a DJ”. Be this true then House is the Gospel and MK preaches the second coming.

MK – “Burning” 1992 With an instantly addictive hook, MK shows he doesn’t just rework other peoples’ beats but arguably delivers one of his own finest releases with “Burning” capable of incinerating any dance floor.

S t o r m Q u e e n – “ L o o k R i g h t T h r o u g h (MK Don’t Talk To Me Dub)” 2012 A fun-loving first-pumping belter that demonstrates MK’s signature chopped vocals with a drop to send listeners into raptures.

Aimirali – “Just an Illusion (MK Remix)” 2012 A subtle alternative to Aimirali’s slick Deep House track.

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M O N E Y

Illustrations By Rebecca French

Capitalism

“Under capitalism, man exploits man.

Under communism, it’s just the opposite.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Religion

“Even as a tree has a single trunk but many branches and leaves, there is one religion-human religion- but any number of faiths. “ Ghandi

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Politics

“One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”

Plato Ghandi

Science

“Every great advance in science has issues from a new audacity of imagination.”

John Dewey

Sex

“I thank God I was raised Catholic, so sex will always be dirty.”

John Waters

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stats F R O M T H E 2 0 1 1 D E P A R T M E N T O F H E A LT H A N N U A L S TAT I S T I C S R E P O R T. (All Information available online at https://www.wp.dh.gov.uk/transparency/files/2012/05/Commentary1.pdf )

i.The Abortion Act 1967, as amended by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990, permits termination of a pregnancy by a registered medical practitioner subject to certain conditions. Legal requirements apply to the certification and notification of abortion procedures. Within the terms of the Abortion Act, only a registered practitioner can terminate a pregnancy. The doctor taking responsibility for the procedure is legally required to notify the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) of the abortion within 14 days of the termination, whether carried out in the NHS or an approved independent sector place and whether or not the woman is a UK resident ii. Except in an emergency, any treatment for the termination of pregnancy can only be carried out in an NHS hospital or in a place approved for the purpose by the Secretary of State, and after 24 weeks, only in an NHS hospital. Through contractual arrangements with Primary Care Organisations (PCOs), some approved independent sector places perform NHS-funded abortions.

1. Overall number and rate of abortions In total, there were 196,082 abortions notified as taking place in England and Wales in 2011. There were 189,931 abortions to residents of England and Wales in 2011. This represents an age-standardised abortion rate of 17.5 per 1,000 resident women aged 15- 44 2. This is 6% lower than the rate of 18.6 in 2007, but 2% higher than in 2001 and more than double the rate of 8.0 recorded in 1970 (Figure 1). fugure 1: age standartised Abortion rate per 1,000 women age 15-44 year, England and whales, 1969 - 2011

iii. A legally induced abortion must be certified by two registered medical practitioners as justified under one or more of the following grounds: A. the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk to the life of the pregnant woman greater than if the pregnancy were terminated (Abortion Act, 1967 as amended, section 1(1)(c)) B. the termination is necessary to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman (section 1(1)(b)) 2. AGE C. the pregnancy has not exceeded its twenty-fourth week and that the continuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman

The abortion rate in 2011 was highest, at 33 per 1,000, for women aged 20.

There were 1,000 abortions to women aged under 15 (less than one per cent of the total) and 683 to women aged 45 or over (less than a half of one per cent) (See Figure 2).

D. the pregnancy has not exceeded its twenty-fourth week and that the ontinuance of the pregnancy would involve risk, greater than if the pregnancy were terminated, of injury to the physical or mental health of any existing children of the family of the pregnant woman

fugure 2: Abortion rate per 1,000 population by single year of age, England and whales, 2001. 2010 & 2011

E. there is a substantial risk that if the child were born it would suffer from such physical or mental abnormalities as to be seriously handicapped or, in an emergency, certified by the operating practitioner as immediately necessary: F. to save the life of the pregnant woman G. to prevent grave permanent injury to the physical or mental health of the pregnant woman

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The under-16 abortion rate was 3.4 in 2011 compared with 3.9 in 2010 and 3.7 in 2001 and the under-18 rate was 15.0 in 2011, compared with 16.5 in 2010 and 18.0 in 2001. Rates for women aged 15 to 19 were lower than in 2010, whereas rates for women aged 31 to 39 were higher. Similarly, compared with 2001, the rates in 2011 were lower for women aged 15 to 24 and higher for women aged 25 or over.

3. Marital status

Congenital malformations were reported as the principal medical condition in nearly half (45%; 1,046) of the 2,307 cases undertaken under ground E. The most commonly reported malformations were of the nervous system (23% of all ground E cases; 540) and the musculoskeletal system (7%; 160). Chromosomal abnormalities were reported as the principal medical condition for just over a third (39%; 889) of Ground E cases.

Down’s syndrome was the most commonly reported chromosomal abnormality (22%; 511) As in each year since 1999, fewer than 10 abortions under ground E in 2011 were associated with rubella.

About four-fifths (81%) of abortions in 2011 were carried out for single women, a proportion that has risen slowly from 76% since 2001.

4. Ethnicity The revised HSA4 forms introduced in 2002 allowed for the recording of ethnicity, as self- reported by the women involved. This information was not previously recorded. Ethnicity was recorded on 95% of the forms received for 2011 compared with 80% in 2003, the first full year of collection. Of women whose ethnicity was recorded in 2011, 76% were reported as White, 10% as Asian or Asian British and 9% as Black or Black British (See Table A below). table a: percentage of women who had one or more previous abortions by e t h n i c i t y, E n g l a n d a n d w h a l e s , 2 0 1 1

7.Method of abortion

The percentage of women having an abortion in 2011 who had one or more previous abortions varies by ethnic group. 32% of Asian women having abortions in 2011 had previously had an abortion, compared with 49% of Black women (See Table A below).

5. Location and Funding of Abortions In 2011, 35% of abortions were performed in NHS hospitals and 61% in approved independent sector places under NHS contract (previously named NHS Agency), making a total of 96% of abortions funded by the NHS. The remaining 4% were privately funded. The proportion performed under NHS contract has been rising steadily since this information was collected in 1981, while the proportions of NHS hospital and private abortions have been falling since 1995 and 1988 respectively.

Different methods may be used to terminate a pregnancy, depending on the duration of gestation, and other circumstances relating to the individual woman. There is one principal medical method, involving the use of the abortifacient drug Mifegyne (mifepristone, also known as RU486).

The main surgical methods are vacuum aspiration, recommended at up to 15 weeks gestation, and dilatation and evacuation (D&E) recommended where gestation is greater than 15 weeks. D&E may be used in combination with vacuum aspiration; such cases are recorded in the statistics as D&E. Medical abortions accounted for 47% of the total in 2011. The proportion of medical abortions has more than trebled in the last ten years, from 13% in 2001. There has been a continuing upward trend in medical abortions since 1991 when Mifegyne was licensed for use in the UK, when only 4% of abortions were undertaken using a medical procedure. In 2011, 60% of abortions under 9 weeks were medical abortions compared with 20% in 2001. The choice of early medical abortion as a method of abortion is likely to have contributed to the increase in the overall percentage of abortions performed at under 10 weeks gestation (58% in 2001 compared with 78% in 2011). Early medical abortion is less invasive than a surgical procedure and does not involve use of anaesthetics.

6. Statutory grounds for abortion In 2011, the vast majority (98%; 185,973) of abortions were undertaken under ground C and a further 1% (1,455) under ground D. A similar proportion were carried out under ground E (1%; 2,307). Grounds A and B together accounted for about a tenth of one per cent of abortions (195). The proportion of ground C abortions has risen steadily, with a corresponding reduction in ground D cases. The vast majority (99.96%) of ground C only terminations were reported as being performed because of a risk to the woman’s mental health. Abortions are rarely performed under grounds F or G.

The surgical procedure vacuum aspiration was used for 48% of all abortions in 2011; and Dilatation and Evacuation (D&E) alone in about 5%.

For abortions at 22 weeks or beyond, feticide is recommended prior to the evacuation of the uterus to stop the fetal heart. In 2011, of the 1,264 abortions performed at 22 weeks and over, 72% were reported as preceded by a feticide and a further 25% were performed by a method whereby the fetal heart is stopped as part of the procedure. 2% of abortions at 22 weeks or beyond were confirmed as having no feticide.

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d a s e

Grindr Profile: Matt, 24 I love music and hanging. On Top. Approx: 47m away

1 2 a m , a g r o u p o f f r i e n d s d r u n k e n ly stumbling, flirting, laughing makes t h e i r way f r o m a b a r t o a c l u b. T h e group comprises of both homosexuals and heterosexuals; friendships and sexuality are out in the open, c o m f o r ta b l e a n d c l o s e ly i n t i m at e .

O n e m a l e m e m b e r o f t h e g r o u p a b r u p t ly stops, iPhone in hand, and stares h u n g r i ly at i t w i t h o n e e y e s h u t f o r focus. A female member, in dire need o f a t o i l e t a n d p o s s i b ly e v e n v o m i t ( b e t t e r o u t n o w t h a n l at e r , s h e s ays ) , h o l d s o n t o h i m f o r s u p p o r t a n d c o m f o r t, clutching at him to tell her that she is still beautiful; that he has chewing gum. They both stare at the screen, f e m a l e c r o s s i n g h e r l e g s i n a n g s t.

She points to a cute-ish blonde guy on the screen, 24, called Matt who likes ‘Top’. “He’s nice, babe!”

isn’t he?

“M e s s a g e h i m w h i l e I w e e a n d h o l d m y b a g ” , s h e c a l l s r u n n i n g o f f.

A third male member joins, scoffs, and fixing h i s s i l k s c a r f, g a z e s j u d g i n g ly t h r o u g h h i s l i g h t ly - m a s c a r e d l a s h e s .

“A g a i n ? Y o u ’ r e s u c h a s l u t ” , h e s ay s , m i n c i n g a w ay.

A c o u p l e f r o m t h e g r o u p, n o t y e t a c o u p l e b u t s l o w ly m a k i n g t h e h e a d l o n g d i v e into a night of drunken-is-this-morethan-platonic fumbling, joins. “ O o h , w h o ’ s t h a t ? ” a s k s t h e g u y, l e a n ing into the girl. “Matt”, she responds s i m p ly, p h y s i c a l ly e m a n a t i n g p l e a s u r e .

“He’s so close”.

WORDS BY WILL GROVE

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WELCOME to the age of modern-day libertines, of modern-day sex at the touch of a button, of bona-fide bonings through phone apps. Grindr, the GPS phone app that was launched by Joel Simkhail in 2009, allowing homosexuals to locate other homosexuals around them, now has 2.6 million users worldwide (with Londoners being the most enthusiastic). Blendr, its heterosexual sister aimed at women, launched in 2011, but with focus on FRIENDSHIP, NETWORKING, and the like as opposed to the SEX RIGHT NOW IF YOU WISH that Grindr has become famous for. Once you sign on (a profile photo and the barest bit about yourself will suffice), the app presents a grid of pictures of potential dates sorted by proximity, accurate to a couple of hundred feet.

People interested in meeting can text each other or send more photos using the app. Handy.

So what is the problem?

We live in an age where the smartphone is an extension of ourselves, where we can get what we want, when we want, at the touch of a button.

So is it the same for intimate relations? Can it be? Is something ‘beautiful’ lost? Is something ‘dodgy’ propagated?

Liberation, freedom fun, friendship, encouragement and simultaneously regression, undermining

and danger are all aspects of this modern day phenomenon that has come to touch us all at one point- whether intimately or through a friend. Grindr, a name that clearly connotes a forceful action as opposed to a mere peck on the cheek, is leading in the virtual sexosphere.

Intrinsically linked with and made for homosexuals, it is a new phenomenon in the field of homosexuality which is fervently fighting battles for equality in a suppressive heterosexual world. Is Grindr friend or foe?

And what about the fag hag? Surely they deserve the same sort of plaything as their GBF who so pleasurably toys with it whilst in line for a skinny mocha.

And surely we all deserve to have the option of making new friends who in their similarity to us support us for who we are. We need not have sex. And if we do have sex, so what? Convenience has never been so troubling.

Loud discussion starts. Is Matt cute? Is he really that cute?

Are you really going to meet him? Would you really?

For what? Let’s hope he’s not too big if he’s a Topper! Isn’t it dangerous? Isn’t it too much?

The group assembles in the queue for the club, carrying on the discussion, loudly inviting unknown faces to become distinct in their opinions, their confusions, their thoughts, hopes and worries. Security chews on its gum, bored, uninterested whilst fervently the queue gathers in energy, in voices. One man, Comme Des Fuckdown all over his body and face, steps forward confidently, assuredly with a smile on his lips. He addresses the queue.

Picture this- last night, in my room- there’s a plastic crow lurching from my half painted shelf, a gold artdeco lampshade off centre on my bedside table and a slow, steady trickle of cum making its way from my eyebrow to my cheek. I tell the man in front of me, that it’s ok, really, ‘I don’t need to finish, I get off on you getting off so’ - and some short moments of small talk and eyes shooting around making sure that everything has been got and we’re done here, aren’t we?, I’m wiping the watering semen from my cheek, checking that none of it went in my hair and thinking about what’s just happened.

Go on...

Cruising has evolved.

Gay men meeting other gay men in gay places so they can have a gay time in a gay sauna or, you know, a regular house with a bed is definitely still a thing- but in the 21st century and with the lines blurring between gay, straight, , man, woman, horse...it’s difficult to know who I can try to blow without being seriously rebuffed or, worse, pitied.

Jaws drop We used to use chat rooms. We used to get asked “a/s/l?” and erections would be hidden surreptitiously when we learned they were ‘18/m/somewhere exotic, pretend you’ll come to see me’. Sometimes we would get to chat to them on MSN messenger. Sometimes we would see what they looked like. Often we would just get lost in our own fantasies, cum in our lap and close everything, guilty, read a book, put some Franz Ferdinand on and wait until our hearts stopped pounding a breakbeat rhythm on our ribs.

Sounds of approval

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Going out and finding people to fuck is time consuming, and expensive, while speaking to people who are probably paedophiles on internet forums lost its charm somewhere between schoolgirl Britney sending people wild and shaved head Britney being sent wild by the people (People look up at the sky in remembrance).

It’s basically the future right now, goddammit, and if I believe in the future-as-predicted by WALL-E like a sensible human being should, we’re all going to be fat and sedentary with our corneas hand-stitched to screens soon enough.

If I’m going to make the effort to cruise, it’s going to be from my bed, accom only, come, cum and fuck off.

That’s where Grindr comes into play. Remember the cum on my cheek earlier on? It’s still in my eyebrow, and I’ve got Grindr to thank for that. I used what is hypothetically the ideal tool for the modern day wannabe libertine to find a cock. Bish bash bosh, job done. I pat myself on the back (literally), feel slightly depressed after having done so and, if I wasn’t here, I would probably completely forget about the whole episode, make myself a bowl of piping hot Ready Brek and watch The Walking Dead.

Grindr is information. It tells you which gay men are closest to you, you can strike witty conversation with the most attractive and you can try to fuck them. Over 5000,000 men in London alone have the app. Embrace them. Love them. You are them.

Everyone stares at each other.

The homolier-than-thous are no doubt equating me with the cold-coffee men-grabbing salad-dodging lurkers outside Caffé Nero on Old Compton Street and, although I fully acknowledge my own hypocrisy, I wouldn’t say that using Grindr means that I’m a desperate queer looking for sex at all costs. I’d say that it marks me as a pragmatic Peter.

That isn’t a bad thing. When I’m plucking out my last cum-splatted eyebrow, I’m thinking that another relationship might not be so bad, really, and it might be nice to have someone to talk to about whether or not I should attempt to lattice bread like that old man did on The Great British Bake Off before we sex, sleep, snore and watch each other’s back hairs grow.

Then again, I wouldn’t use a sex app to find that. Love, for me, will forever be something found in real places with real people.

Cruising, for me, will forever be virtual places and virtual people. I’m a 21st century slut.

Grindr enables my passive and feckless attitude to sex to merge seamlessly with my general laziness. I don’t rule out the value of real human relationships- if you’ve got one then good for you, I hope you enjoy your mortgage- but the value of fuck it whateverness and permitted self-servedness that is the value of Grindr works for me right now.

And there’s not a damned thing wrong with that.

Silence. Everyone thinks, questions. Guy goes back in queue, gets in club first.

Snippets of thought and confessions are heard as each member of the queue goes into club. People dance, drink, kiss. Night ends. The questions don’t.

“I have met all sorts on Grindr, it’s like a genuine community. People have asked me to lick their balls, for me to a dominatrix, asked me just for a coffee, wanted intellectual chats and some have just sent me pictures. I love this feeling of knowing there’s a variety of people out there and that I can choose to mix with who I like depending on how I feel. It is definitely a community!”

“It’s like having a gay bar in your living room and there is someone always to take home.”

“I haven’t got the time to cruise, and sometimes it’s just nice to be able to do it quickly and efficiently. I might even make a friend.”

I once concocted ludicrous fantasies in online chat rooms, and I can now live out some aspects of those fantasies in abject, abstract, forgettable portions at the touch of a screen. If I want to have cock, I can get it.

I can get cock and you’ll never know about it. You don’t see me in person fingering my skinny latte outside a freezing Caffé Nero, examining every arse and farce on Old Compton Street with razor sharp, paper thin precision. Despite evidence to the contrary, I don’t shout about my acquisitions (heartless term, but basically true).

I don’t even whisper. The people I ‘grind’ are barely important while I’m knee-scraping on my bedroom floor.

They’re a shot of sexual sambuca.

Wow. Don’t get me wrong, Grindr isn’t always a wonderland for the emotionally void. Ultimately, it’s an interface where people talk to other people, and people will still be people regardless of whether or not they’re sending pictures of their cocks to strangers.

The majority of people on Grindr are flaky, dull, vain and self-obsessed (some offended faces). The brain-dead fuck and go-men that I go for aren’t as great in number as the men who want a cuddle, chat, coffee and to be human and enjoy being human while they’re still alive (same offended faces now nod in great agreement).

“I feel liberated. It’s now about two men or man and woman meeting up and seeing if they like each other or not to get it on. Back in the past, men had to use codes and wear coloured hankies so as to signal their interest. I’m a lot more vocal than that now and I proudly walk as a gay man, able to smile at my Grindr friend in open acknowledgment rather than have to play some sort of winking game.”

“It has opened up my own boundaries and I’ve learnt what these boundaries are. I didn’t think I would use it, but actually I go on it now because there are men like me who don’t buy into it’s obsessive sex mantra and just want to meet other gay men”.

“I actually came out by making a Grindr account. It felt so good to write it down and be able to say ‘hello’ to my quasi-neighbours. I like Grindr because it makes me feel safe knowing that I am surrounded by people like me. I use it for the empowering purposes.”

“I met my boyfriend on Grindr and our first date was in a normal pub. I openly said I wasn’t going to have sex with him. I can’t do that, it’s not something I’m into. But my boyfriend of now eight months, respected that and we’ve had great times since then.”

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“You know what? To each their own, I don’t actually mind it one way or another. I personally use it but sporadically becuase I pull a lot in real life too- when I am drunk off my tits and it just happens. I am a bit intimidated by Grindr because it means meeting up sober and I don’t always have the courage for that.”

“As a gay man, I fight for love- not quick sex. I feel like Grindr only makes worse the stereotype that we homosexuals are frivolous sex addicts.”

“I genuinely think that if you want sex, you are going to get it in some way. If Grindr helps- then why not? If you want love, then you state that and you search for someone who wants the same things as you. Don’t blame an app for your being weak in saying what you want.”

“I actually can’t subject myself to sex for sex’s sake so I can’t go near an app like that. I also prefer meeting people and seeing if there is any chemistry and flirting with them, making them want me and then having me.”

“Grindr is just another way of cruising. It is not liberation, it is still confining people to have intimate relations in a clandestine manner and have the act over and done with rather than meet like two adults out in the open.”

“I only know a name and location, I don’t know anything else. How can I judge someone on the basis of that and whether I want to meet them? I feel like I have to let my guard down a lot in order to even start a conversation and only then can I judge where to go. It’s not appealing because it’s anonymous and whether sexually or just for a friendship- that is not cool.”

“Grindr is not a tool for the modern gay man to fulfill his sexual needs; it is a trap that restricts men to irrelevant behaviours under the guise of progression. It is actually as regressive as the fight for marriage equality is progressive.

“I think I can make friendships more easily than having to search for them on my phone and I can have sex quite easily as a woman. I see no point in these apps because these things are around us already.”

“I have control over it, which I really like. I have been so drunk on one night stands and really regretted it and I have learnt some harsh lessons because of that- mainly embarrassment. So with these apps, I like how I can choose and I can plan a date or hook-up. I think these apps are great dating websites!”

“I don’t have sex through this app, but I like how the proximity just gives me the excuse to chat to someone who I think is hot.”

“Oh, it’s sexy, isn’t it? Knowing someone wants you and they are so close- we could just have eye contact and that would really attract me. I like how secret it is and if I want to, I can make it public.”

“I have never cared less. I only make friends or date or sleep with people face to face. I don’t indulge in these things because they are utterly inane.”

“Some of my friends use it, and some don’t. But we all still want love and something real and substantial at the end of the day. I guess every journey is different.”

“I am all chat and no bat. I say I could get an account and do it, but I actually find it a bit much and I am way too insecure just to put myself out there like that.”

“I think this just echoes how fucked up we all are and how addicted to fast fucking everything we are. We should get back to writing letters and re-learn the meaningful things in life.”

“Where is the lust and romance? Why has it became acceptable to simply state ‘I want your cock’ and actually get somewhere with that? I want a date and I want chemistry and I want to feel sparks fly- not a seedy phone message”.

“I think it’s not safe for a woman to be so open about where she because of the obvious dangers of rape and attack. I would in no way let anyone know where I am because of that and the fact that these apps do that is weird.”

“Although I don’t judge it, I just can’t meet up with someone I have met over my phone for casual sex within the same day. That is way too much for me. It’s like a planned one-night stand but without actual contact or knowledge of anything or any magic. It’s simply convenience.”

“I think it says a lot that Blendr is boring in comparison to Grindr. I went on Blendr thinking I would have a laugh but instead ,it was almost schizophrenic in its mix of seedy men and confused women looking searching for casual sex and falsely making friends.”

“As a straight woman, it makes more sense to me that Grindr is successful than Blendr. I can’t imagine a lot of

women are so comfortable that they are going to let themselves into this dangerous zone of sex, but I can see that both straight and gay men would.”

“My friend and I made an account for him and together we perused who was good to further meet up with and who was not. My friend had just come out, hadn’t told anybody but me and it really helped him. There was some scary stuff on there but once he got past that and I saw the relief in his face, it showed that this app does provide some sort of support in that sense.”

“I just think- if fourteen year-olds, still very confused and insecure, are brought up with this kind of mentality of fast fucking, where is it going to go and what kind of attitude are we creating?”

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T h e

Pleasure For Hannah, Claire, Catherine, Faye, Lydia and you.

By Bojana Kozarevic

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‘Woman “touches herself” all the time, and moreover no one can forbid her to do so, for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already two - but not divisible into one(s) - that caress each other.’

Luce Irigaray, The Sex Which is Not One

There is that age old adage of finding your brother’s porn collection under his bed and discovering for the first time the joys/shocks/horrors of pornography.

My experience wasn’t that poetically teen-movie as such, it was a fluke and it scared me for what followed were worries that I was a confused pervert. Somehow, I had stumbled across the ‘Last Viewed’ section on his Media Player (ah, the days of downloading before streaming) and before me figured a list of HD, forty minute long reels of lesbian love with not a man in sight. Penetratingly intense, if you pardon the pun.

I was not so naïve about lesbianism that I had never ever encountered it on a screen before, but as far as a sixteen year old virgin can know anything about sex I was amazed by visions of tongues, strap-ons and the scintillating snake that is the double dildo. And may I add, amazed by the sheer amount of orgasms and their intensity (age has now graced me with personal knowledge and experience of faking it). I proceeded to masturbate at length, discovering with my own hands the very parts of myself that were reflected on the screen in front of me. With these women I learnt about my own body, the vast sexual activities on offer and most significantly, my own arousal points.

Since then, my masturbation fantasies and activities have gained new breadth. From hands to dildos to power showers physically providing the simulation whilst both heterosexual and lesbian fantasies fuel the mental.

I enjoy masturbating, and I do it often, on estimate every day/maybe every day depending on time, emotional state and where I am at a given moment. As for my sexuality, I would primarily deem myself as heterosexual but I am

never ruling out lesbian experiences or relationships. I am not a sex addict and I thrive on relationships and real and intimate sexual contact and trust. I enjoy a healthy sexual lifestyle and I am comfortable enough with it to enter into sexual situations and relationships and most importantly, discussions.

But the point here is masturbation which only involves me and my body and my sexual arousal- nothing else. And so why should I talk about it so openly or explicitly? Because it’s a dirty secret.

It is a worrying factor that typing in Google (where else) ‘heterosexual women and lesbian porn’, presents not an overwhelming amounts of results, but questions, fears and anxieties on insufficient forums asking “Am I gay if I watch lesbian porn?”. The more I scroll down, the more I find women answering intimately and supportively. So conversation does exist, but it takes place in a virtual back alley in hushed tones with limited, almost powerless support.

Why this lack of openness? For if it wasn’t deemed such a fearful secret and an uncomfortable confessionthere would not be such a sad amount of girls and women out there feeling guilty, embarrassed and alone. From personal experience, I relate to this- the fear and the confusion that followed such masturbatory practices were enough to start a downward spiral of mental angst about my sexuality and over what it was I was doing.

I know now, that my personal preference is heterosexual, but as afore mentioned I am never ruling out same sex experiences or relationships. Perhaps I am much more comfortable now that I sit here reading this article and

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my various research has emboldened me to say this. It is almost as if a huge weight has lifted on my shoulders, and I am free to admit whatever because it actually does not matter what I watch, what I am and what I like.

Yet, this is not primarily a discussion about sexuality coming into a black and white definition through linguistic demands. It need not be. It also does not for one minute undermine the girls and women out there who worry about their sexuality, who seek to find themselves more clearly in this wide open sea of sexuality. For you, girls, we are all also here and we show our support. Loud and clear.

The universal question that lesbian porn opens up for all sexualities of women is the one of sensuality; a

stimuli as by watching male stimuli, even though they prefer having sex with men rather than women.

J. Michael Bailey, professor and chair of psychology at Northwestern and senior researcher of this study, ‘A Sex Difference in the Specificity of Sexual Arousal’, believes that women are somehow disconnected from their genitals.

For one, he says, there appears to be a significant disconnect between what sexually and mentally arouses a woman.

Many of the women in the study did not even recognize they were being aroused by some of the tapes, which leads Bailey to believe that women are somehow disconnected from their genitals- and are perhaps fully aroused more by circumstance, such as an emotional bond or a sexy scenario, as something that engages their brains and emotions.

When men get an erection, Bailey says, “it makes men

‘ F o r i n w h at s h e s ays, t o o, at l e a s t w h e n s h e d a r e s , w o m a n i s c o n s ta n t ly t o u c h i n g h e r s e l f. ’ wholesome intimacy with your own body and arousal. It is looking past the definitions of hetero, homo and transsexual, and it is a fight to celebrate the full surrendering to our most intimate moments and fantasies. This is the response we need have to the overwhelming amount of confusedness, guilt and shame.

My article research consisted of two reference points- Google (including porn websites) and a group of my female friends. It is interesting that for the unknowing latter, I provided an incentive of the vino form so as to manipulate the conversation into sapphic territory.

Beginning with the technological side of things, I masturbated then turned to some pillow talk with Google search. Through the plethora of chatty forums, I found a scientific study that shyly raised its hand. Undertaken in America’s Northwestern University, research has presented within the sparsely investigated field of female sexuality (as opposed to male) results that indicate a plural sexuality within females. These scientific studies into the feminine realm of sexuality have shown that in comparison with men, female sexual arousal patterns are not as strictly connected to their sexual orientation.

The Northwestern researchers measured the psychological and physiological sexual arousal in homosexual and heterosexual men and women as they watched erotic films. There were three types of erotic films: those featuring only men, those featuring only women and those featuring male and female couples. As with previous research, the researchers found that men responded consistently with their sexual orientations. In contrast, both homosexual and heterosexual women showed a bisexual pattern of psychological as well as genital arousal. So heterosexual women were just as sexually aroused by watching female

motivated to have sex with whatever’s causing the genital arousal. I don’t think women have the same connection”.

Preparing for the further research into this field, Bailey concludes the study as reinforcing that men are much more sexually simple, and women are not. “I think it really shows us how much we don’t know about women more than it shows us what we do know.” (Quite right).

Related articles led me to some further goldies. Lisa Diamond, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Utah shows how cultural evolution itself is a strong factor. “Women don’t package their sexual orientation the same way that men do. Western cultures tend to lump many different experiences into one category called “sexual orientation”- including distinct desires such as who we love, who we want to marry, who we are attracted to and who we fantasize about. However, this comes more naturally to men than it does for women”. Some women unconsciously dissect what defines their sexual interests, and find that they may want different things from different sexes. “You have a lot of cases of totally heterosexual women who may not be aroused by women, but their deepest emotional bond is with other women”, she says. “They feel they fall in love with other women, without the sex.”

My final find was Wendy Maltz, coauthor of ‘Private Thoughts: Exploring the Power of Women’s Sexual Fantasies’. Taking a more feminist approach, she argued that men are themselves slaves to society, and their response to the porn in the study proves it. It was interesting that she contested against the study anthropologically.

Arguing that straight women were turned on by women because of the female body’s cultural implications, she discussed how straight men were turned off by other men because of America’s severe homophobia. Men are taught to avoid the male body, to be borderline repulsed by it, and

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the straight men in the study did just that, she said. However, she did provide support for us by saying how since women are open to seeing another woman’s body, they’re free to identify with that woman — to see her orgasm on

female pleasure. ‘It’s all about them, and that doesn’t turn me on, especially when they start shouting ‘oh, baby’ whilst pounding a girl hard and she so obviously faking it. Nothing worse than faking it and getting paid for it.”

‘ H e r s e x u a l i t y, a l w ay s a t l e a s t d o u b l e , i s p l u r a l . ’ screen and physically feel it for themselves, just as they might cry upon seeing people enrapt in sorrow. On a surface level, they are being aroused by the woman on the screen, but Maltz says the real response is deeper than that.

“It’s not necessarily a desire to be with that woman. It’s probably a celebration of their own female sexuality. It’s an identification with the woman rather than a lusting after her.”

Though Maltz may not be in full support of the study, she also opens up what was the prevailing theme in my main research, that of the females around me. Whilst not for one second undermining the results of any study which opens doors for female sexuality, the quick pace of life means that we cannot begin to question scientifically or philosophically every wank we have. We just need the comfort. The identification with the female in the video, for me, is the mental arousal the previous study speaks of.

Mental arousal is actually my own personal enjoyment at seeing a body like mine, organs like mine, being touched in ways I can relate to by another body like mine. This double, triple entendre of identification is what I find most pleasing. It is not so much a mirror as it is an understanding of and a relating to that what I see before me. I trust the women more because there cannot be feigning of ignorance of any action they make. If we are aroused genitally by seeing all types of sex, then I, personally, am aroused when I see pleasure and sensuality in sex.

AM I RIGHT, LADIES? Cut to the wine conversation.

“There is heterosexual and homosexual pornography that arouses me and I can masturbate to, and I love to watch all kinds and all kinds of bodies. At the same time, there’s lots lesbian porn that is clearly made for the guys which is just frankly dull.”

“I just sometimes wanna say, ‘cum into my mouth if you wish, sir, but you make sure that I come too and you make me feel good whilst doing it’.”

I put to the group, “Standards should exist, in whichever form; goals should be met for all parties and arousal is a journey with a pleasurable end.”

Here we all stood together, wine in hand and a joyous roar of approvals. To desire pleasure is nothing to be embarrassed of. To enjoy seeing it on screen is nothing to be embarrassed of. The issue of pornography is not that we watch it- it is that there is not enough quality pornography out there. By watching pornography we already enter into a removed realm of sex for sex’s sake. Yet just like the choice to be dominated, watching pornography does not rule out the fact we do not deserve quality.

This distinct difference in sexual and mental arousal is the distinct difference in masturbatory practices and sexual relationships. Alone, we are not forced to enter into an emotional, intimate connection. Alone we are free to roam the realm of our own body and focus on the sphere of sheer sexual pleasure, the sphere of mere orgasm for orgasm’s sake. The lack of any external pressures is the ultimate power of masturbation. It is not that we negate the mental, but we are not necessarily forced to manifest the mental into a literal sexual relationship.

To make ourselves orgasm through our own power is normal. It belongs to everyone To see and desire pleasure, sensuality and real body contact which will result in this is normal. To enjoy the multifaceted energies and preferences within our minds, that is normal. LOUDLY, I SAY LET’S CELEBRATE THE DISCOMBOBULATION OF THE PSYCHIC HYMEN. I watch lesbian pornography because I love sensual sex. And if I cannot get it in real life, then I will gladly turn to help from the women that empower my own hands and head to do the trick.

“It’s not the problem of pornography asserting male dominance, it is the palpable problem of pornography forgetting

‘But woman has sex organs more or less everywhere. She finds pleasure almost anywhere.’

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Anniversary

nowflakes the size of baby fists piled up on the dashboard. With the engine stilled, heat dwindled; the woman’s warm breath hit the cooled air in smoke balloons. She rubbed a porthole in the fogged window, watching the white sky break apart and fall to earth.

watched as he broke the lake’s surface, absentmindedly rubbing her stomach.

Looking at the paper bag on the passenger seat, she knew it was time to leave the car and enter the forest. It had to be buried. Twisting the keys out of the ignition, she picked a path between the tall trees.

Over the blanketed landscape no birds sang.

The falling snow made plump teardrops on the brown paper. In the silence, save her padded footsteps, the woman’s thoughts wandered to late summer, when they had taken a picnic to the uncharted forest.

They were about a year into their marriage when they realised they couldn’t have children.

Her husband playing the great explorer, made her abandon the map in the car, armed with excitement and three years of Boy Scout badges. There were no signs of others, only the occasional beer bottle, cigarette butt or scrap of newspaper.

They eventually stumbled upon a lake, a serene mirror doubling a sentinel cabin.

She spread the checkered blanket by the calm water and began dispensing slightly warm sandwiches to her inquisitive hunter.

The sun radiated, calling them both to peel off their summer clothes. The man stood on an egg shaped rock near the lake, performing comically elaborate stretches before his first dive. The woman

Floating on the calm water, the man could see the trip becoming a yearly pilgrimage. The anticipation building in his wife and young child as the leaves started to yellow, Is it time to go yet? the light elfin voice would ask. He would smile and point to the red ring around the last date in the calendar month, Almost, buddy. In the same thought, he flashed forward to the child maturing, becoming too old for the cabin, even bored of its isolated charms. But for now, staring at his wife on the shore, taking in her curved hips and full breasts, he was content.

Though they set about their usual routines, the child shaped space emerged often, sullying their domestic set up. Each party harboured growing blame for the other, as they argued over directions, buying groceries and the slow increase in drinking.

Their intimacies became forced, appearing only on rare occasions, like birthdays, Easter Sunday, and once, when they got a tax rebate. The woman soon stopped teaching and getting dressed; the man stayed later at the office.

Pouring himself a coffee from the pot, he remembered the day they met. She was wearing a white cotton sundress, sipping a milkshake at their local

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Words by Jennifer Brough

diner. He told her Monroe had nothing on her and took her to a drive-in movie. Since then, a black and white photograph inlaid itself on top of their kodachrome existence.

He closed the refrigerator door, We’re out of milk. He waiting for a response, but she continued staring out of the window, spoon in hand, poised over the bowl of sinking cereal. I guess I’ll pick some up after work, he said, beginning the dishes.

It’s two years today, she mumbled, pointing the spoon in the direction of the calendar. Over the running taps, he barely heard her, What, honey? He said, turning to follow the metallic path of the shaking spoon. Oh… Well, happy anniversary!

You too, she whispered. Then her face changed suddenly, eyes aglow with some far off picture. I’ll cook something! Your favourite. Just make sure you’re home by 7. Then, exhausted with the promise, she resumed staring out of the window.

The suggestion threw him slightly; he had planned drinks and dinner with an intern from the office. They’d been seeing each other for a few months, nothing serious. Trying not to let his face cloud, he realised he could push this appointment back; she was always more than willing to wait for him.

warmly kissing the crown of her unwashed hair.

She knew he would forget the milk long before he comedy slapped his forehead as he hung up his coat. No matter, she said brightly, eyes on the simmering pans. It smells incredible, hon, he said, grabbing her aproned waist. She flinched at the unfamiliar touch, but quickly leaned into him.

She shrugged off the whiskey flavoured kisses he planted on her neck, focussing, there was one more thing to do.

Removing the meat tenderiser from the drawer, she turned to the familiar flesh in front of her, savouring the weight of the tool. Blank faced, she pushed back a stray hair before pounding and hacking until freckles of blood traced her own. In the silence that followed this attack, she realised she was sobbing. Seeing the stains on her dress and in her fingernails, she groped the gristle into a pile, double bagging it. Washing her hands, she pulled on her coat and headed to the car. It was beginning to snow.

Walking to their spot by the lake, she pulled the bloody mass out of its paper bag and laid it gently in the hole she dug with bare hands.

She had never liked steak anyway.

Looking again at his wife, he saw the blueprint of a smile hinting at her former beauty, as she mused upon their evening together. He left that morning,

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Green lace vest: La Perla W h i t e D o l ly : V i n ta g e Zebra print bra: Dolce and Gabbana P u r p l e F r i l l a n d D o t b r a : V i c t o r i a’ s S e c r e t Black bra: Myla Navy with Lace trim bra: Agent Provocateur W at c h w o r n t h r o u g h o u t : M o d e l’ s o w n

P h o t o g r a p h y: B rya n H u y n h Styling and concept: Bojana Kozarevic Model: Nassia M

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NA N OAR A LNH I S T O R Y “ E v e r y o n e w a n t s ( N a n ’ s w o r k ) t o f i t i n t o s o m e m a r g i n a l t h i n g . . . I t ’ s h e r o i n u s e r s ; i t ’ s t h i s , i t ’ s t h at. ” David Armstrong

But Nan Goldin’s art is more than that, as is David Armstrong’s and all of the artists born under the heady lights of 1970s and ‘80s New York. To peruse through one work and to marginalise it is almost to undermine the extraordinary emotional significance Nan Goldin has brought to contemporary art photography.

The emotional expression Nan Goldin’s work captures, the emotional honesty and intimacy it so wrenchingly communicates, has affected a world-wide audience.

Photographing from the heart and from the most intimate physical and emotional proximity, Nan Goldin has recorded more than just a scene, a culture, a moment; she has vividly recorded universal states of mind, of being and no matter how happy or dark they may be, her work is a celebration of each and every single state. The photographs of Nan Goldin deal with joy, vulnerability, drugs, destruction, friendship, love and AIDS. They deal with an age gone by but the timeless truths of them remain and within each and every one of us, they still go on.

Nan Goldin is a photographic mirror of the highest sense, where she shows both herself, her friends and ultimately us in all of the hopes, glories and falls of life.

The following work is a chronological curation of Nan Goldin through the words of her closest friends, critics and herself. Based from the book and exhibition “I’ll Be Your Mirror” (1996), the following quotations testify to the importance of Nan Goldin’s definitive life stages and biggest works. She has since exhibited all of the works and more throughout the world.

Nan Goldin: It’s about letting it be what it is. And not trying to make it more or less, or altered. What I’m interested in is capturing life as it’s being lived, and the flavor and the smell of it, and maintaining that in the pictures.

David made me realise about my work is that it really is about this enormous acceptance. About wanting to see the truth, and accepting it, rather than about trying to make my version of it....

David Amstrong: ...or trying to change it or make it prettier or... uglier. Just that kind of immediacy. This is what it is.

Nan Goldin talking with David Armstrong and Walter Keller, 1996 It comes directly from the snapshot, which is always about love...

and history. Nan Goldin in conversation with J.Hoberman, 1996 September 12, 1953, Washington D.C Born Nancy “Nan” Goldin April 12, 1965 Barbara Holly Goldin commits suicide.

“That was my moment of clarity that defined my life. My break with the family, I was 11. The tyranny of revisionism even at the moment of greatest anguish. Suburbia. Don’t let the neighbours know. Or even the children. Rewrite history immediately before it can be written.”

Nan Goldin: Soeurs, Saintes et Sybilles, 2004.

1969 She eventually moved in with foster families and enrolled in an alternative school in Lincoln, Massachusetts, called Satya Community School. Here she began to photograph defining relationships which helped her define and explore her identity. She began to capture the pulse of her own life.

Elisabeth Sussman, 1996 Goldin has written that she began photographing to save her own life...Photography gave Goldin a voice that would not be censored, silenced or lost, that would not disappear...(photography) would validate her thoughts, reflect her changing identity, her experiences, and her feelings, by keeping a photographic record that no one could control or rewrite.

When I started taking pictures, I realized it was a way to make a real record...of what I had actually seen and done. It came from a really deep place, this need to record. It was about keeping myself alive, keeping myself sane and grounded. About being able to trust my own experience.

Nan Goldin talking with David Armstrong and Walter Keller, 1996 What Goldin does is ultimately something no politician can:

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GOLDIn she empowers people by representing them. Unable to make the pictures powerful enough to keep her sister of her friends alive, Goldin ironically gives us pictures of life and loss and turns them into pictures to live by.

Marvin Heiferman, 1996

In these works, Goldin dislocated fashion photography’s transgressive narrative of female glamour by exposing its offstage domesticity and intimacy by exploring the subject of men who live as women.

Elisabeth Sussman,1996

And then I found my own family. These were the first two friends I photographed. (David Armstrong and Suzanne Fletcher).

Throughout her entire oeuvre of some twenty years, she has treated these self-styled queens with the respect their regal name demands. They embody freedom and beauty. They are courageous.

They are victorious.

Nan Goldin, 2004

Joachim Sartorius, 1996

David gave me my personality. When I met him, I was painfully shy. I don’t think I’d spoken more than a few words in months. He taught me to laugh, and about laughter as a way to survive.

David and I were the dust-and-scratch school. We only cared about content.

1970

Nan Goldin talking with J. Hoberman, 1996

Nan Goldin talking with J. Hoberman, 1996 For me it is not a detachment to take a picture. It’s a way of touching somebody- it’s a caress. I’m looking with a warm eye, not a cold eye. I’m not analyzing what’s going on- I just get inspired to take a picture by the beauty and vulnerability of my friends.

Nan Goldin talking with David Armstrong and Walter Keller, 1996 One of the misunderstandings of my work is that I go into relationships with people because they are spectacular photographic subjects. Whereas the emotional comes first, and then the pictures.

Nan Goldin talking with David Armstrong and Walter Keller, 1996

1974 Having been encouraged by photographer Henry Horenstein and introduced to works by european photographer Lisette Model, Goldin enrolled at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston- as did David Armstrong, Philip- Lorca Di Corcia and Mark Morrisroe.

Elisabeth Sussman,1996 1974, 1975 She began to use a Pentax camera and learned to use a wide-angle lens and flash attachments. Most importantly, she was beginning to shoot in colour.

Elisabeth Sussman,1996

1971 As if sensing that the camera would reveal a new identity, independent of conventional society and relating to a world constructed of each other and of a fantastic symbiosis with glamour, Goldin’s friends became enamoured of picture taking and posing.

Elisabeth Sussman, 1996 I photograph directly from my life. These pictures come out of relationships, not observations.

Marvin Heiferman quoting Nan Goldin, 1996

1975 Rather than ignore the commercial glitz of Guy Bourdin’s colour, as a photographer devoted to the artistic values of the medium would have done, Goldin embraced it. She made lyrical use of artificial light and frequently employed a flash to photograph interiors in colour.

Even when photographing with natural light, she often unconsciously replicated the effect of artificial lighting. In many of her works, radiant natural light such as a sunset, takes on the unnatural effulgence of a stage backdrop.

Elisabeth Sussman,1996

1972 (Nan) was introduced to Boston’s drag bar, The Other Side, and began to photograph drag queens at the weekly beauty contests.

Some of them became her friends. The group of photographs from this period represents a coherent microcosm of social relationships and constructed identities.

The beauty of her pictures came from a grasp of both formalism and the snapshot aesthetic, from an innate and shrewd handling of light, and an appreciation of the rich sensual, and oversaturated colour noticed in offbeat places.

Marvin Heiferman quoting Nan Goldin, 1996

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Luc Sante, 1996 1976 Goldin had found in the past-time of the slideshow the answer to sequencing and editing of images. When she had no access to a darkroom, she showed her photographs as slides which she could have developed commercially, so as to gain school credit which proved appealing. She had discovered that her interest in photography lay in the creation of imagistic narrative; and out of this evolved her preference for maintaining a strong narrative flow that propelled a group of images into an affective whole.

Elisabeth Sussman,1996 Maybe more than other photographers I don’t believe in the single portrait. Because I think people are really complex.

Nan Goldin talking with David Armstrong and Walter Keller, 1996

Nan’s work won’t let anyone stop at pain. The journey is longer than that.

Luc Sante, 1996

1980 Goldin showed the slides with sound and lyrics provided by a live band, the Del Byzanteens. Later in the 1980s, she showed the slides at Tin Pan Alley, a bar ran by Maggie Smith- a politically active woman whose views impressed Goldin. She had established the pattern of her future practise: she would henceforth edit individual images, ordering and reordering them into her own brand of narrative.

Elisabeth Sussman,1996

1978

I saw the chance relations between the images and the music.

Goldin moved to New York and rented a loft on The Bowery.

Nan Goldin talking with J. Hoberman, 1996

Elisabeth Sussman,1996

The signature theme, though, was ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’. “And what costume shall the poor girl wear to all tomorrow’s parties?

For Thursday’s child is Sunday’s clown, for whom none will go mourning. A blackened shroud, a hand-me-down gown of rags and silks, a costume fir for one who sits and cries for all tomorrow’s parties.”

The makeshift, the beleaguered, the militant, the paranoid, the outcast, the consumptive romantic, the dead-eyed post everythingall the shifting and coinciding modes and poses played very well against the backdrop of ruins. Our lives were black and white, Nan brought in colour.

Luc Sante, 1996 We were all finding our legs and moving shakily around on them, like baby giraffes. People were trying to decide on their names, their hair colour, their sexual orientation, their purpose on earth.

You were the cynasoure of all eyes, your life was enacted on a raised stage.

Luc Sante, 1996 What (the photographs) turn out to have captured also was how vulnerable and young everyone was, qualities that were seldom evident in all the noise. Most of us were shouting or just trying to listen, but Nan also looked.

Darryl Pinckney, 1996 Despite the growing market for photography, she had no commercial success. The one person who recognised the gritty strength of her work was Marvin Heiferman.

Elisabeth Sussman,1996

Luc Sante, 1996 1981 Goldin titled a slide show The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and the ephemeral performance became a distinct work.

Up until its last showing in 1995, the work was left open ended to be furthered ever since its inception and now is a work of 800 pictures lasting 45 minutes.

Elisabeth Sussman,1996 Like a latter-day Billie Holiday, her renditions of the Ballad never came out the same way twice.

Marvin Heiferman, 1996 The pictures were both of their moment and looking back at that moment from a great distance, across a perspective strewn with highlights and disasters yet unknown, with the accrued if unaccountable wisdom of that distance.

Nan Goldin talking with J. Hoberman, 1996

1979 He showed her work in various exhibitions and handled her work as a private dealer. Heiferman also became interested in slide shows Goldin had been showing to friends and she began to present her slide shows at more public venues- the clubs of downtown New York.

Elisabeth Sussman,1996 But then Nan began to hold slide shows, and everybody was astonished. The slides were raw slices of the collective experience, uncannily preserved, but they went far beyond that. The slide show was a vast movie of intersecting fragments that showed us our lives, startling us with meaning where we’d seen only circumstance.

I wanted to make a point about sexual politics and male-female relations. I taped music for the first time. Until 1987, I used to change the soundtrack constantly...It’s not about the quality of the photograph, it’s about the narrative thread.

Nan Goldin talking with J. Hoberman, 1996 1984 From the haze and the clamour a man with a quitting-time shadow face that housed a broken toothed smile emerged to become the agent of profound change in her.

The problem was had always been that she had more to offer him than he had to offer her.

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He beat her and beat her in a Berlin hotel. Her face was put back together, but Nan was different inside after that.

1991

Darryl Pinckney, 1996

‘All we need really need is bread, water, love and work that we enjoy and are good at, and an undying faith in and love of ourselves, our freedom and our dignity.’

1985

Gordon Stevenson’s letter to Cookie Mueller, Reprinted from Nan Goldin Cookie Mueller Exhibition, 1991

I was in denial that people were going to die. I thought people could beat it. And then people started dying.

I photographed the people around me. I didn’t think of them as people with AIDS. About ’85, I realized that many of the people around me were positive. David Armstrong took an incredible picture of Kevin, his lover at the time, right before Kevin went into the hospital. I photographed him when he was healthy. At that stage, we still didn’t know very much. There was a lot of ignorance. We were very obsessed with what caused it: There were all kinds of rumors, everything from amyl nitrate to bacon.

1992

Nan Goldin, 1990

The dreary puritanical room where she underwent her own withdrawal program, the empty brothel rooms, the rooms with hotel beds- made or unmade- all of these directly reflect states of mind and ways of living in which we recognise ourselves.

Joachim Sartorius, 1996

1988 I didn’t have any knowledge of light, consciously- none- until I went to the hospital in 1988. I lived in the dark, I lived by night.

1993

So I thought that when I went to the hospital and I discovered natural light, the work really changed.

One evening in Berlin, in a bar in Charlottenburg, Helmut Newton spoke about his childhood, and he and Nan Goldin discussed their common craft. Newton praised Nan Goldin’s self-portraits above all. And rightly so. Rarely do we find in contemporary photography such boundless self-effacement.

Before we parted, she took out her camera and photographed Helmut Newton. He said he was proud that he now belonged to the “Family of Nan”.

Joachim Sartorius, 1996

Nan Goldin talking with David Armstrong and Walter Keller, 1996

1989 The same day Cookie died, my big show “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” opened, which I curated at New York’s Artists Space.

It was the first major show done by people in the community where all the work was done by people with AIDS or by people who had died of AIDS. It became a national controversy.

Nan Goldin, 1990 ‘WHEN I WAS TOLD THAT I’D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG TO REALISE THAT I’D CONTRACTED A DISEASED SOCIETY AS WELL. To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific repercussions in the pre-invented world. The government has the job of maintaining the day to day illusion of the ONE TRIBE NATION.’ David Wojnarowicz, reprinted from Nan Goldin “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” Exhibition, 1989 1990 Cookie was a social light, a diva, a beauty, my idol... In 1988, Cookie got sick. When I came back to see her in August 1989 the effect of AIDS had robbed her of her voice.

I used to think I couldn’t lose anyone if I photographed them enough. I put together this series of pictures of Cookie from the 13 years I knew her in order to keep her with me. In fact they show me how much I’ve lost.

Nan Goldin, 1990

I had the good fortune of working on two projects with her in Berlin (she had come to Berlin in 1991 on a DAAD scholarship).

One of them was an exhibition at the DAAD gallery, accompanied by the publication The Other Side. Vakat came ayear later, her collection of photograohs of rooms without people in them.

But Nan’s rooms were not empty. They were melancholic, like my poems, but sadder, sometimes claustrophobic, with no way out.

1993-4 Goldin collaborated on a book with Nobuyoshi Araki, titled Tokyo Love.

She had seen Araki’s presentation of his own work as an assembled mural where images covered all available surfaces/ His dense hangings, which counter the conventions of discrete, separate images typical of galleries and museums around the world, appealed to Goldin.

Tokyo Love was shown as a wall-size grid of individual images.

All the people pictured are young, many of them are posed seductively or embracing. The grid presentation downplays the strength of any one image and forces the viewer to make formal and emotional connections up, down, and across the surface, and to experience the whole as a kind of kaleidoscope.

Elisabeth Sussman,1996

My work does come from the snapshot. It’s the form of photography that is most defined by love. People take them out of love, and they take them to remember- people, places, and times. They’re about creating a history by recording a history.

I think photography is like drawing. The mark indicates the person....It’s a very intimate thing. It’s something about one’s signature...one’s eye- and the way one looks at life, that one can’t even describe in words.

Nan Goldin talking with David Armstrong and Walter Keller, 1996

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Aesthetic

sex-

-plotation “Not everyone needs to be asked prior to each insertion”

George Galloway “The female body has ways of shutting that whole thing down”

Todd Akin on “legitimate rape” Words By Lydia Shellien-Walker

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Throw-away comments create a culture of a throwaway issue. Cretins the like of George Gallloway and Todd Akin are just the latest in a line of public figures dancing around rape – a crime that is thoroughly misunderstood, under-discussed and frequently unpunished in the courtroom. Sexual violence affects ONE IN THREE women in their lifetime. Too often do these throw-away comments become throw-away issues in public consciousness. Twitter blood-lust hounding Galloway fades away in days, and turns to praise for his support of the CagePrisoners campaign, Akin stays on the campaign trail.

Back in 2008, Helen Mirren revealed she had been date-raped on multiple occasions, claiming that she was “locked in a room and forced to have sex”, but violence was not involved, so her case could not see the man taken to court, but was rather a “subtle part of the man/woman relationship… that should be worked out between them.”

While trying to attack the issue, both male and female magazines fumble, focusing on extreme cases, playing on a reader’s morbid curiosity (The Girl from Trail’s End: Texas Gang Rape of 11-Year-Old, GQ, 2012), or when approaching a case with real depth, sidestep a genuine issue by having it appear wedged between This Week’s Hottest Trends and Make Him Cum Like a Packhorse. Searches for rape in Cosmopolitan magazine delivers more furious bloggers criticising an article on “grey rape” - “sex that falls somewhere between consent and denial” (Cosmo, 2007) than actual results on their site. One of the bestselling woman’s magazines in the country offers a feeble and frightening look at the issue – one that ratifies the culture Helen Mirren thirty years ago could not refute – destroying a woman’s right to say no, deteriorating her testimony in court.

The effect is damaging, eschewing the real issue, reducing it to nothing more than a fleeting topic, a passing trend. Rape holds a conviction rate of only 58% in the UK - leaving an estimated 95% of cases unreported. 92% of rapes are committed by someone the victim knows, with nearly half of rapes committed by the victim’s partner. Forget dark alleys and knife-wielding psychopaths. The most terrifying fact is that rape is happening in the quiet house next door.

I find myself looking over my shoulder writing this piece in public spaces, the presence of ‘rape’ on my screen making me into some kind of pervert – when truly we

should be screaming it from the rooftops. RAPE is a crime.

A husband can RAPE a wife. RAPE is not something to be silent about. A narrative must be established – we must not be afraid of the lexicon involved in establishing it.

We ask - can we use aesthetic to penetrate ethic? In a world where information flows at the rate of 340 million tweets per day, and the average time spent reading news is 1.2 minutes, can the representation of rape in art create an ingrained story, a certain timelessness to an abuse so horrific that it is just that for the victim – on-going, unforgettable? Through art can we take a step back from the very immediate, the currently trending news, to instead create a timeless narrative exploring a horror that continues to affect all ages, generations and genders?

Rape is highly represented in Renaissance art. The Latin root for the word ‘rape’, ‘raptio’ (meaning abduction) is usually the subject matter of the period – not directly implying any sexual abuse. The Rape of the Sabines as imagined by Poussin and Bologna depict “heroic rape” – multiple acts of sexual violence carried out against the abducted wives of the Sabines in order to populate the new Roman Empire. Heroic rape imagery sanitizes, aesthetises, and even glorifies sexual violence.

Botticelli’s Primavera, based on Ovid’s Fasti, sees the wood nymph Chloris snatched away and ravished by Zephyr, the first wind of spring. She is transformed into Flora, the goddess of flowers, and the painting has become allegorical of “the burgeoning fertility of the world” (Cunningham and Reich, 2009). The work was commissioned as a wedding gift – reminding Pierfrancesco deMedici of a man’s sexual bravado, and his wife of her expected submission.

Classical rape images are allegorical or even erotic.

God’s raping Goddesses who never come to serious harm have the viewer avoid the pain, terror and revulsion of the act. Rape becomes its own brand of mythology, the artist deviates from the horrible in favour of the beautiful, creating a false narrative in which the act itself is unaddressed.

With the advent of cinema the sexualised body could move and breathe, and our morbid fascination with abuses against it could be explored with squirming, bleeding realism.

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With the relaxation of cinematic censorship in the US and EU the early 1970s, the rise of the exploitation film became one of the defining motifs in cinema of the era. Exploitation films used the extreme and the outlawed to arouse curiosity - from “Nazisploitation” (Love Camp 7, 1969) to “Nunsploitation” (Nude Nuns with Big Guns, 2010). These low-budget, quickly produced films often exploited news events in the short-term public consciousness to gauge interest. In exploiting a story in the short-term public consciousness, can film attempt to ingrain it into the long-term?

Sexplotation films, and the rise of the rape-revenge narrative in 70s cinema saw (often socially successful) women who are raped, go on to revenge their abuser.

Feminist critic Carol Clover applauds the proactive way in which female victims avenge themselves rather than relying on an often unjust legal system. I Spit on Your Grave (1978, sequel 2001, remake 2010) was a driving force of the genre and precursor that inspired Kill Bill (2003) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009).

The powerful emblem of the female avenger overwrites a narrative created by the likes of Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 Virgin Spring, in which the angelic daughter of wealthy land-owners is raped and murdered, and her attackers unwittingly seek shelter in the parental home, allowing the father to reap revenge. The film is based on a 14th century Swedish folk song, and relies on a mythologizing of the female body that divides women into two categories - the Virgin Mary and Eve the temptress. Beautiful, blond and Christian, Karin is opposed to her dark and sexualised step-sister Ingeri, who is first seen in the film calling the Norse god Odin. Whilst Ingeri is doomed to a life of judgement after becoming pregnant by an unknown man, her raped step-sister is a picture of purity and sadness in the loss of innocence.

These biblical distinctions defile the female body; whilst the Eve figure suggests corruption and whorishness, the virgin figure is often painted as a temptation that men cannot avoid corrupting. In Livy’s History of Rome (inspiration for Shakespeare’s play, Benjamin Britten’s opera and Titan’s painting, among others), Sextus is attracted to Livy’s “beauty” and “chastity”, and rapes her to corrupt her perfection in the eyes of her husband. The image is one of the whore vs. the virgin - both of which belong only as figures of the male imagination. Whilst Irreversible (2002) and Memento (2000) (in which men exact revenge for their women) create a powerful sensation of disgust, anger and vengeance, the rape/revenge genre champions the female avenger fighting for her own justice, drawing the viewer to the violence against the female body in itself, rather than the image of “the female” as a concept in the minds of men.

The female body as property of male imagination is a terrifying online phenomenon that is continuing to grow.

The recent Reddit “creep shots” debacle, where secretly photographed images of woman are used as bragging rights in online forums create a “sense that female bodies are public property, fair game - to be claimed, admired and mocked” (The Guardian, 2012). The obsession with prying into the sexual life of women reached a tipping point when Kate Middleton was photographed going topless in a private home by paparazzi. Her beauty, her celebrity, makes her sexuality public property.

The act of rape as ownership of the female body is a terrifying reality that is portrayed with surprising intensity in at the end of Season 2 of Mad Men when Joan is raped by a husband threatened by her feisty sexuality. In Tinto Brass’ explicit and highly controversial Caligula (1979), the Roman emperor rapes a virgin and her new husband on their wedding day to remind the people their bodies belong not to each other, but to the empire, thus to Caligula himself.

The screen adaptation of J.M Coetzee’ Disgrace uses rape as an allegorical feature. Set in apartheid-torn South Africa, the white daughter of a University Professor is raped by a group of young black youths. She describes her attackers as “debt collectors”, metaphorically reclaiming fertile land that white aggressors stole from them. She becomes pregnant by her rapists and insists on keeping the baby, after her attacker moves onto a farm she shares and becomes her “husband” in name only. The film has been described as a parable for the issues facing multi-racial South Africa, and Coetzee as an author who puts his characters in extreme situations in order to discover “what it is to be human”. Perhaps the viewer becomes the surrogate victim, and through extreme depictions on screen, assess the reality of those events - as Alex of A Clockwork Orange (1971) philosophises - “it’s funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on a screen”.

Some of the most well-known rape scenes in cinema exist in subcultures or semi- fantasy worlds like that of Tinto’s sexually lavish Caligula, or Kubrick’s “ultra-violent” Clockwork Orange. Do representations of rape in fantasy diminish real understanding of the issue? Real instances of rape occur mainly in relationships, not by mask-wearing maniacs or monomaniacal emperors. However - Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) proves we can confront the real through the surreal. The female protagonist - implicitly a victim of sexual abuse - lives in a haunted dream world, which eventually deteriorates into fantasies of arms grabbing her through walls, and anonymous attackers striking in her bedroom at night. The surreal narrative conjures a

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state of constant terror and isolation, a surrealist portrayal that allows a real insight into the mind of the victim.

For this critic though, it is in the realist that rape is most powerfully portrayed on-screen. Gritty British drama Tyrannosaur (2011) in which a wife is abused by a pitiful, pathetic husband; The Accused – a powerful portrayal of a woman gang-raped in a bar surrounded by the jeers of drunken on-lookers, where her attackers are charged merely with “wreckless endangerment” due to her having been drinking and dressed “pro vocatively”; and Snowtown (2011), the true story of an Aus tralian serial-murderer who exacted revenge on childabusers, all provide the audience with a startling re alism that cannot be ignored.

But I am just scratching the surface. The more I see, the more I read, I discover endless horror, an endless crime. Any work of art confronting an event that thoroughly destroys its victim is bound to be reductive.

However, there is one saving grace. Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues is an artwork that creates a tumultuous, unstoppable force of positivity in this darkness. With V-Day now in its 15th year, performances of The Vagina Monologues continue to create a lasting narrative, a voice that continues to shout - RAPE IS A CRIME! Injustices against the female body happen every day! It is through this narrative, in Eve Enlser’s artform that refuses to be silenced, that aestheticism of sexual violence can give a real voice to a real issue.

Through depicting rape in art we can continue to confront an issue that is too often sidestepped due to embarrassment and misunderstanding. Politically, art must step forward and scream it’s support of fighting against this crime. Through this art, we create a voice, and the art creates an image for an everlasting narrative that continues to lambast, and will continue to do so until we can say the word rape out loud, and truly understand what it means.

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Is it right to claim ignorance of racial slurs? Ben Evans explores the questionable accessorising by Dolce and Gabbana since 2010 till now.

Just who is the fashion victim?

W

hilst the label ‘ethical’ associates itself solely with an environmental social consciousness, periodically fashion throws up a very human moral quandary.

Ebullient and exuberant Italian fashion duo Domenico Dolce & Stefano Gabbana have become the latest subjects of scrutiny for their inclusion of a blackamoor motif in their Spring/Summer 2013 womenswear presentation. A symbol with a complex and multi-rooted history, its appearance emblazoned on colourful shifts and trinket earrings invited heated debate and impassioned criticism from the international fashion press.

As with much of their creative output, the inspiration came from Dolce & Gabbana’s beloved Sicily and its florid history of conquest and conflict with her Mediterranean neighbours. The inclusion of Pupi dolls in prints may have courted less controversy than the gaudy blackamoor baubles; yet the souvenir dolls found across Sicily representing the mediæval Arab conquistadors (along with the Moors) form a part of the intensely diverse range of cultural influences rooted in the island’s bloody past.

Has Dolce & Gabbana’s exploration of the culturally sanitized effects of past conflict in turn conscripted them square into their own moral battle?

There lay many differences between the representation of Arabs as Pupi and Moors as blackamoors, particularly in this specific context. Perhaps most powerful is the simple fact that here the blackamoors appear solely as a head. This unmistakable link to decapitation can be traced to the appearance of the blackamoor head in heraldic symbolism, and can still be found. The island of Sardinia has as its standard a red cross marking four quadrants each containing a blackamoor head or maure, once blindfolded and now with a headband. The gruesome collection represents four Moorish emirs defeated by then sovereign the King of Aragon in the 11th Century, and elsewhere the symbol largely represents the historical capture or killing of a Moorish enemy.

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Don’t ever wear artistic jewelry; it wrecks a woman’s reputation.

Colette Gigi, 1944 in using the symbols in a decorative fashion manage to let less progressive views on gender equality seep into the controversy.

This concept of the symbol as trophy mutates from scalp of war to commercial possession as we race half a millennium through history from the slave trade and west African slaves serving as decorative playthings for European nobility to the later haute bourgeoisie of the 17th Century. Whilst being a slave to fashion discriminates only against the willing, fashion itself has long had a questionable relationship with the treatment of one man’s most abhorrent historical endeavours.

As recently as 2010 in a blog posted on the Vogue Italia website was a trend report on large gold hoop earrings, translated by the site into English as ‘slave’ earrings. Whilst the controversy should have regarded how the translation process exposed the sterility of modern parlance through etymology’s encrypting nature, the article lost any defense through less coded vocabulary later on. Arguing for the jewellery as emancipating through fabulousness where once it had characterised the enshackled, the writer quoted, “if the name brings to the mind the decorative traditions of the women of colour who were brought to the southern Unites [sic] States during the slave trade, the latest interpretation is pure freedom”.

It appears that kind of jeweller, through its inherent nature as pure decoration and expensive frivolity, can betray uglier attributes like glittering Trojan horses. While Cartier and their contemporaries may have eased off production of jewel-encrusted blackamoor brooches from their height of popularity in the ‘20s and ‘30s, ‘Moretti’ trinkets remain a popular memento to be brought back from sojourns to Sicily and Venice. It is the black slave as trophy possession that most directly informs the decorative Moretti sculptures and trinkets from which Dolce & Gabbana took inspiration, which is perhaps more troubling than the glamorisation of war that forms an earlier root.

Studying the decorative permutations of the Moretti, a distinct gender divide can be identified with be-turbanned males holding swords, tabletops and keeping guard whilst females almost uniformly appear in an exclusively decorative capacity. Whilst not wanting to deal them a double blow, D&G’s own use of blackamoors for which “no further comment” reveals scant explanation,

Whilst a plea of ignorance in a trial by media often provides a legitimate loophole, for some that ignorance is read more damningly as arrogance. This is perhaps understandable (if not justifiable) in those whose job it is not only to instruct a willing audience what they should be wearing in six months time but also to charge a hefty premium for the privilege. Those looking to punish Signori Dolce and Gabbana may feel content with the news that charges of tax fraud are currently being levelled at the pair and their billion-euro fortune. As contemporary masters of baroque opulence many will see the Sun King-style hubris as revelatory of the pair as emperors detached from reality at the head of a grand empire. With Stefano Gabbana one of fashion’s most prolific twitterers, revealing aspects of his fabulous lifestyle to his hoards of followers on a dizzyingly regular basis, it is harder however to argue an arm’s length detachment from his subjects.

It is the nature of jewellery and accessories as vehicle of pseudosubtle personal expression that define this particular controversy. Despite the emblazoning of this same symbol across the heart plain and simply printed on a shift, it is the statement of an object dangling nonchalantly from an earlobe that has attracted the most analysis. Whilst the cousins of the symbol adorn rice packets and until recently jam jars, it is indeed the fact that Dolce and Gabbana mistook a symbol for a mere decoration that has garnered them most criticism.

In this latest round of exotic masquerade, it is most important then that vocal and public debate as to where ‘celebration’ of the exotic (that once allowed people as pets) ends, and where an industry allowing frivolity to mask casual bigotry begins.

The most precious jewels are not made of stone, but of flesh.

Robert Ludlum The Icarus Agenda, 200 9

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Fashion Fairytales Forever An unadulterated, unapologetic beauty so powerful it made fashion history.

It was Winter 2001 Dior Couture, a show inspired by Marchesa Casati which took place in Paris’ Opera House. Thousands of virgin white, full-bloom roses bathed the grand steps down from which descended women swathed in masterpieces that so decadently stroked each curve. It was set designer Michael Howells’ first show for Dior.

Ballasting onto the runway, Howells alongside John Galliano set a standard for fashion presentation with such unequivocal force that they transcended mere runway dramatics. Tears of the audience glistened as the shimmering confetti trickled down from the ceiling, marking the beginning of the golden age of show production. Since then, through theatre and tales of life’s greatest romances, passions, dreams and falls, Michael Howells’ shows for Dior have presented unparalleled ideas of femininity; romantic, gentle, forceful. The stories, so beautifully wrapped up in history they are never without a look towards the future,in turn becoming the most beautiful messages of a universal femininity innate in all women. Sublime.

Howells laughs good naturedly when told he has the best job in the world, “I do, yes, I love it”. His achievements and innovations as production designer and art director are

heralded in the world of fashion and film, and his visionary approach to fashion, theatre, film and music sets gained him critical acclaim. In 2007 he was awarded the Prix d’Excellence de la Mode in Paris and also the first ever Isabella Blow Award for Fashion Creator of the Year from the British Fashion Council. A true aesthete, Howells physicalises concepts and ideas, sculpting them into rich, sensory narratives that blow away audiences. Winter 2008 Dior Couture show had thousands of mini lavender balls whose scent exploded into the air as the models walked over them, enchanting the unknowing audience with smells of musk and romance.

“Well, of course, every show is always inevitably covering the five senses. In particular the Dior ones. I think a show should evoke all of the five senses if possible- I thoroughly enjoy such experiences myself and so I love to work that way too”, says Howells. “There is no set formula to creating a show.

It’s about doing the unexpected. You don’t want people just to accept”, he explains. “It’s a different story, a different journey each time. I think it’s always about re-examining it.”

A gentleman, very tall and very well-spoken, Howells jubilantly muses on some of the sets and shows that are considered works of art by the industry. “The Madame Butterfly 2007 Couture was one of my favourites, John’s (Galliano) collection really brought to life so much of the whole story.” Inspired by Madame Butterfly, her dedication to Pinkerton- to love itself-

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the show opened with a slow revolving door to the sounds of Malcolm McLaren’s Madame Butterfly. A succession of runways led to four separate stations, progressively eeking out the story of a woman desperately waiting for love. Each backdrop served as a physical ode to the story, completed by each model’s presence on and with it. An opulently draped frame, a baskedin-lily-blossom archway, a pale-blue background and finally a giant ‘House of Dior’ chair all culminated in an incessant flow of personalised Madame Butterflies, all telling their own stories of standing for love, waiting for love, believing in love.

“It was so that the models could literally blossom into poses. And that for me was the main thing- It’s like turning the pages of a magazine. I like to treat it as an editorial. So you have with each different platform twelve beautiful and different shots…so it becomes a walking editorial”, says Howells of the show. “We (Galliano and himself) wanted to get people as close as possible so they could hear the rustle of the clothes themselves, to tease them with the pieces so they can almost touch them.” Howells’ conspicuous setting became a raw and intimate stage upon which fantasy came alive. The gentility and the vulnerability of Puccini’s heroine slowly became real as each model took her journey through this lusciously melancholic Dior world. Through the set and the sensual physical proximity between the butterflies and audiences, Howells blurred boundaries between the viewed and viewer (as he so often does), inescapably immersing each individual his and Galliano’s world.

In an age where some fashion creators are so intent on creating the newest neologisms of minimalist avant-garde fashion, the history that so inspired John Galliano’s creations was, and remains, a reverberating decadence. Yet, neither the set nor the collections were ever stuck in it. Again, Howells laughs when told he is a post-modern romantic. “The history...

It’s important but you know, it isn’t everything. I would say it’s there to play with and to reinterpret. I see the shows and the collections as great love letters from the story to the history.

There’s a lot of obvious poetry there. That’s exactly what it is.”

A love letter to the 18th century fused down a long runway filled with smoke, a gothic gate submerged in a eerily moonlit sky light marking the entrance for the models. Candles stood gregariously on the edges of the runway, surrounding wanton white roses and shining white lion statues, providing an unabashedly stunning life-size frame for whatever femme was to stand inside it. The audiences seats were covered sneakily with love letters from classical figures such as Princess Margaret, dancers such as Margot Fonteyn and Zizi Jeanmaire and Hollywood starlets such as Marlene Dietrich and Lauren Bacall; women who impressed in every single part of their lives, personal and public, emotional and professional. The dramatic entrance by Erin O’Connor cemented the blast into this dark past, but the bias cut of the sheerest chiffon floor length dresses and the plays on Dior’s ‘New Look’ culminated in a modern sultry gothica. The juxtaposition between the scenery and the collection ranged in intensity, with the scene toying differently with each set of looks titled as ‘New Look, ‘Debutantes’ and ‘Hollywood’. Howells chuckles, “Ah, yes, the family that eats together stays together. It was a way of putting the flesh on the bones”. The flesh on the story? “Yes, but also the flesh on the ideal Dior woman. Each model interprets her role in a personal way; they method- model. The letters were both a love letter to the past but they were also love letters of

the very woman on that runway. Full of past but definitely in the present.”

Milliner Stephen Jones remarks of Howells’ and Galliano’s shows, “They are much more demanding, physically, but also because the shows give them scope to be the character, the woman in the dress”. The method modelling began in Galliano’s shows of the 1990s and began to take on more force as Howells’ sets came in. In Winter 2007, emotion transfused clearly from behind the curtains to the very stage. Set in Palais de Versailles, Galliano took to one of the longest runways ever to walk in remembrance of his friend, Steven Robinson. The models were there as characters, but they were there as Dior women and they were there as friends to support the designer.

The setting was typically romantic, but details and characters were visibly ripe with a raw emotion and support for the designer. The details are another indication of Howells’ mastery.

Ruby-red ballet slippers charms were invitations to Winter 2005 Couture, inspired wholly by Elizabeth I who strutted down a runway lit with pink panther lighting reminiscent of 1950s boudoirs. Red, pink and a bricolage of royal gaudiness. Other invitations were Russian dolls or rusty keys with handwritten notes on them; these invitations today are treasured like the sweetest child-hood memory.

It is this ability to dream into reality that marks Howells’ talent so strongly. Constantly experimenting with both past and present, Howells worked with Galliano to bear worlds of sublime romanticism. Ginger Duggan, fashion theorist, once wrote on the power of the fashion show as a phenomenon.

A fascinating read, Duggan explores the fashion show as an autonomous power in itself, alluding to the variety of artistic merits different shows possess. Yet, she differentiated a show of spectacle from a show of substance. With Michael Howells, there is no such thing. Spectacle is substance.

“My job doesn’t worry about the sales. My job is to make it all as beautiful as possible”, says Howells. The director of the impassioned fairytale theatre that was the Dior under Galliano’s direction, the sets for films as Bright Young Things and Emma, exhibitions at the V&A and Kate Moss’ legendary 30th birthday party, Howells creates physical and visual intoxications from which we can all take something- even if just fantasies.

Colin McDowell once wrote of the partnership between Howells and Galliano as ‘making all the madness sublime’.

The two tellers of most beautiful tales of the woman will hold a special place in fashion. In an industry whose forte is drama and the female, nobody told it the way they did and sadly, nobody dares to. Thankfully, Michael Howells is still willing to enter such ephemeral worlds. His effortless courage to dream, and to celebrate the romances of the past, of the present and the future and so dreamt off by every single one of us- is a courage and a vision that is rarely found in today’s world of fashion. And we should remember it and cherish it. For such visionaries are eternal.

“The idea behind the glitter is to leave a trail of stardust wherever you go”. Michael Howells.

Sittings Editor: Catherine Connell

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Terracota silk skirt by Kirsty Doyle Pearl collar by Topshop

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B l u r b : T h e f l o o r - l e n g t h s k i r t i s t h e e p i t o m e o f f e m i n i n i t y.

D r a m at i c a l ly v u l n e r a b l e s p l e n d o u r I t i s t h e r u l i n g h o m a g e t o t h e mysteries of the feminine; the woman who leaves a mark wherever she goes.

P h o t o g r a p h y: B rya n H u y n h Styling: Bojana Kozarevic M a k e - U p a n d H a i r : L i ly P a r k Model: Sinara Barbosa Assistants: Darcy Rive and Harry Bowen With thanks to: Recession Photography Studio

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Vintage red chiffon and tulle skirt by Valentino Red

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Vintage pink chiffon and silk pleat skirt by Nina Ricci

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Purple chiffon skirt by Kirsty Doyle Gold cross necklace by Topshop

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Vintage navy velvet skirt by NINA RICCI

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Vintage navy velvet skirt by YSL

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Vintage cream silk and velvet skirt from Rokit Gold Biker chain by Topshop

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Vintage cream silk and velvet skirt from Rokit Gold Biker chain by Topshop

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head_VO HUN

Everyone is a HUN. Derived from the word ‘honey’, this abbreviation puts a short emphasis on the sweetness of each and every person. It is effect i v e p a r t i c u l a r ly w h e n s h o w i n g g r at i t u d e , f o r example- “Oh, you are such a huuuuuun, thanks.”

HEDI SLIMANE VICTIM

BABE

ON KET

Another monosyllabic gold ‘un, “babe” is a noun for every one, at any given point- happy or sad, angry or approving.

Manorexia and boys that are too thin and res e m b l e t h e d ays o f S l i m a n e ’s D i o r H o m m e . H e ’s at Saint Laurent now, and the time has passed. Either help them or judge them.

A lt h o u g h n o t l i t e r a l ly o n k e ta m i n e , a n y o n e w h o d o e s a n y t h i n g m ay b e “o n k e t ” . I n f u n n y o r d r am at i c s i t u at i o n s, yo u m ay r e s e m b l e , f o r e x a m p l e , “G l o r i a G ay n o r o n k e t ” .

LOL

212 MUCH

No, Dave Cameron- it doesn’t stand for ‘lots of luv’. It stands for “Lots of Laughs (laffs)”. It also saves you having to laugh at things that a r e n ’ t a c t u a l ly t h a t f u n n y. “ L o l” s a v e s l i v e s .

T h a n ks f o r t h i s, A z e a l i a B a n ks. T h i n g s m ay b e t o o m u c h , b u t t h at d o e s n o t m e a n t o s ay t h at i s a b a d t h i n g. M ay b e u s e d i n b o t h a p p r o v i n g a n d d i s a p proving situations. We are all 212 much somet i m e s . F o r e x t r a e f f e c t, d r o p t h e ‘ m u c h ’ a n d d o hand actions to symbolise the 2-1-2.

THE FIVE G’S (“Good.God.Girl.

G e t. a . G r i p ” )

WOMANDON

S e l f - e x p l a n a t o r y. T h a n k y o u f o r t h e q u o t e , o n e o f the best women around, Amanda Lepore.

T h a n k y o u , L a T r i c e R o ya l e ( R u p a u l’ s D r a g R a c e star and all-round inspiration) for providing us w i t h t h i s v e r b a l - r e a l i t y - c h e c k - s l a p.

HANGIEXTY

HARSHTAG

MAP

PLANKTON

KFB

YOLO

That thing you get when you wake up hungover and y o u r m i n d a n d b o d y a r e r i f e w i t h r e g r e t, d o u b t and a feeling of self-hatred for the things you did the night before. NOTE: When feeling this, make sure you are not alone and surround yours e l f w i t h p e o p l e e q u a l ly a d d l e d w i t h i t. S tay a w ay from the judgemental ones.

A c l e v e r p l ay o n t h e “ # ” . N o t t o b e p r o c e e d e d by anything, this saves you making both a hashtag and something mean. For emphasis, show the lack of wording after the “harshtag” so as to let your victim know that you’re saving them face at least s l i g h t ly / d o u b ly b e i n g h a r s h .

For and and the

M o r n i n g A f t e r P i l l . “ D a M A P, t a k e n b y P i l l B i l l . ”

B e c a u s e f r i e d c h i c k e n s h o u l d o n ly c o m e i n a b u c k e t.

all those that lack personality and opinion are just too weak and plain. Might sound mean n a s t y, b u t i n a c t u a l f a c t h e l p s t o s o r t o u t men from the boys.

T h i s i s r e a l ly i r o n i c . W h at o n c e m i g h t h av e b e e n

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CABULARY an inspiration has now been ruined by chavs and t h e i r t - s h i r t s . N o t t o w o r r y, “ Y o u O n ly L i v e O n c e ” can still be used. If you are worried about it’s o v e r - c o m m e r i c a l i t y, m a k e a j o k e o u t o f i t w h i l s t still knowing deep-down that this moves you emot i o n a l ly.

McGEE

A v e r b a l f u l l s t o p. A s u f f i x t h a t f o l l o w s e i t h e r verbs or adjectives. For example, “Catwalk Mcgee” or “Pretty McGee”. Use all the time because i t ’ s p o w e r i s e x t r a o r d i n a r y, M c G e e .

PREACH/CHURCH

One for the tribe. When a sister preaches an utt e r ly f a n ta s t i c i d e a , g at h e r a r o u n d i n a g r e e m e n t, r a i s e y o u r h a n d s t o t h e s k i e s a n d s i n g o u t “PREACH!” whilst others follow with the same action, singing “CHURCH”.

SLUT DROP

Dance move. At the right beat of a song, drop your b o d y, w h i p p i n g y o u r h a i r . R i s e b a c k u p a n d p o s e .

RUPAUL

OKUUUURRR

Shocantelle Brown, who “takes cuuur of yo’ h u u u u r , o ku u r r ” . A p o i n t e d p l ay o n t h e “O K ? ” , t h i s i s a way t o s p i t o u t t h e s i g n o f w h o’s d a b o s s.

Okurrr?

One of the wisest divas around. “If you can’t love y o u r s e l f, h o w t h e h e l l y o u g o n n a l o v e s o m e b o d y else?” AMEN.

SHADE

POST-MOD

“ S H A D E I S I D O N T T E L L Y O U Y O U ’ R E U G LY B U T I DONT HAVE TO TELL YOU BECAUSE YOU KNOW YOU’RE U G LY. . . A N D T H A T S S H A D E . ” - D o r i a n C o r e y, P a r i s is Burning

SEEPIA

GSOH (Great Sense Of Humour)

Because EVERYTHING is so post-modern and subvers i v e ly s o . L o l .

W h e n h i p s t e r s g e t t u r n e d o n a n d w e t.

CATWALKING

If they don’t have it by now, they never will.

This is how we walk, everywhere and anywhere.

O n e h a n d i n t h e a i r , h e a d h i g h a n d s .t. r . u .t.

TRANNY ON A BUDGET

FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)

W e a r e a l l t r a n n i e s , b u t s a d ly o n a b u d g e t i n l i f e .

R at h e r t h a n c r y a b o u t t h i s , c e l e b r at e i t. C a n a l s o b e a b b r e v i at e d t o “ T. O . B ” a n d i n c o r p o r at e d i n t o a dance move called the ‘TOB-OT’ which resembles the ‘Robot’ dance but bigger and better.

G AY B L I Z Z

The blisters you get on your nose when you have b e e n s n i f f i n g t o o m a n y P o p p e r s w i t h y o u r G B F. H e pulls and you have nothing else to do and you’re so drunk, it spills everywhere. Remember, Vasel i n e s o o t h e s i t a n d f o u n d at i o n c o v e r s i t.

T h e c o n d i t i o n , ( c o m m o n ly e x p e r i e n c e d a s a h e a r t / gut-wrenching pain) when you sense fun taking place. Without you there.

Nippy-Nippy-Noo-Nar

When it’s so cold, your nipples burst into song.

Voops

“Oh, did I just drop my pen? *sexy bend of body* Voops.”

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S o N a u g h t y,

Berlin!

Words by Natalie, Translated by Roswitha Schleicher

Nervously I walk towards the two huge, red, metallic doors. Three young Russians dressed in jeans and dark sweaters are already being thoroughly examined by the severe lady at the entrance.

Because of their understated clothing they’re being rejected, in a friendly but clearly determined way. The door policy at ‘KitKat Club’ or ‘Kitty’ as it is called on the scene, is known to be very strict.

Conspicuous and unreserved clothing is one of the requirements. They say the dress code is ‘sex conscious’.

Me – in leather mini and corsage – and my male company – in dark jeans and vest – are being eyed for party-appropriate clothing.

Inside the entrance area is a ‘chance to change’. It is a way for those directly coming from work to change into the already planned party outfit in front of cashier and cloakroom.

The front part of the club, in comparison to the rest, is very bright and vividly decorated with a vintage wooden floor, beds and sofas, an illuminated pool and a small bar. In one corner I’m watching an older gentleman, as by god created, sitting in a rattan basket chair, playing with himself. In the other corner on a great white bed, lay two women in fishnet tops and latex minis whispering and sipping champagne. At the bar, half naked bartenders are mixing drinks that furtively glow in the dark due to the fluorescent lamps which are installed all over the walls. In every room there are little artworks glowing in the dark, painted on the walls with neon paint colour.

I’m taking a seat at the bar, ordering a Gin and Tonic in order to observe the colourful hustle and bustle from close by. On the dance floor in the main area, the most unimaginable variety of people are partying to trance, house and electronic beats – from the unemployed to the nurse, the manager or lawyer to the gay, lesbian, lacquer fetishist, porn star and celebrity. There not to be seen but to have fun above all.

I particularly take notice of a naked older married couple that dominates over half the dance floor in their frenzy. A few men in corsets, high heels, latex costumes and colourful thongs build a circle around a young girl in a lacquer and leather bikini on the pole. Suddenly I see something striking red flashing between the revealingly dressed party guests. It’s a young man in a Santa Claus costume with a white beard, Adilettes and a coffee mug in his hand.

Everything here is normal, apart from the norm. You render your identity at the cloakroom.

After I feel like I’ve seen enough here I walk into the next

room. The eye-catcher of this area is a massive, golden Buddha statue. Two gays in lacquer are dancing underneath it next to some naked women. A techno fan, only dressed with headscarf, is moving to the sound of the music and in the seating circles couples are excessively making out.

A communal play area with its walls drenched in glory-holes invites to watching movies and other activities. There are also a few sadomasochists, who enjoy to be watched.

Urban beats are buzzing from the speakers in a separate, smaller room. In here, next to numerous fetish devotees I spot three young women among the party guests.

In contrast to the others, they look quite unobtrusive wearing black and grey cardigans. Surprisingly innocent. Two elderly gentlemen treat them to a couple of vodka shots at the bar, chatting and flirting a bit before the ladies suddenly start pleasing their admirers amidst the turmoil of the dance floor.

In the basement there are two small SM-Playrooms.

Here there is a massive cross and some kind of love swing.

“We want to dismiss the classical separation between ‘artistic performers’ and ‘the audience’. With that, our audiences can provide the show themselves through their own sexual activities, and everyone decides independently if and to what extent they could or would like to participate in the spectacle”, says Simon Thaur, co-owner of The KitKat.

As my preliminary terror had become subdued by this visit, I decide to visit another popular fetish club. I take my handsome companion by the hand and we make our way to ‘ Insomnia Erotic Nightclub’. This one has an equally changeful history just like ‘Kitty’. Arriving at the doorstep of the club, I press the doorbell. The door opens. Here is a kind gentleman in a suit opening the door for us and examining our outfits before he grants us admission. The stylish atmosphere and pleasant lighting is an adequate welcome for newcomers.

Guests can change directly in the entrance area, like at the KitKat. A short stairway leads downstairs to the cloakroom while the other longer one ascends to the main dance floor area of the club. Right after that, there is the bar with four huge, illuminated mirrors divided by golden statues in between each blazing surface. At the end of the bar waits a fruit basked for the little appetite.

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Immediately a massive screen catches my attention, where smutty flicks are running in Hollywood style. I keep looking around. Some couples are chatting relaxed, others seducing each other on the dance floor.

Many small additional rooms, divided by thick curtains, are equipped with love swings, beds and quite a choice of sex toys. Behind the DJ desk I notice a black velvet curtain that shuts another two rooms off from the eyes on the dance floor. Once of them is the so-called ‘clinic-room’ that includes a gynaecologist-chair and a big red bed, which appears a bit frightening at first. Big red crosses painted on the wall are supporting the atmosphere.

In the sanitary-area is a whirlpool and showers; there is a couple going for it. As soon as they are leaving the pool, the attentive staff clean everything carefully. If it is an ash-tray, an empty glass or unsightly stains, the nice staff take care of all discrepancies – quick and discreet. Upon request one receives new water in the pool and a personal waiter for around thirty Euros.

The upstairs gallery is a restricted area only for couples. A huge canopy bed in red and black with big pillows invites joint fun. Next to each bed I find a bedside table with condoms and tissues. Not even five minutes after the gallery opens there are six couples going wild on all five beds. From my position on the dance floor I’ve got a good view of the gallery where the couples are energetically going for throughout night. At first I feel a bit embarrassed, but I cannot look away either.

I notice that after some time I feel way more comfortable at Insomnia. Guests are giving me my space, which provides a more enjoyable and comfortable atmosphere in general.

The choices in outfits are revealing and luscious in here too. Yet they appear more discreet and classy – I see many corsets, straps, long black gowns, dark leather and latex suits as well as robes made from chains and lace.

Shortly before we leave, I’m having a little chat with Dominique, Insomnia’s owner. She tells me that the club’s fetish and erotic events are well known all around Europe. During the week, however, only tough erotic fans should pay the club a visit. At parties like ‘Pack Games de Luxe’ or ‘Swinger’s Paradise’ it would be rather the more knowledgable revellers that get their money’s worth.

“Insomnia wants to seduce, provoke, stimulate and hence fill a gap in the capital’s scene”, Dominique tells me with a wink before she says goodbye, closing the doors of this

Facts: KitKat Club

F o u n d e r : Kirsten & Simon Thaur Born: March 1994 as a bi-weekly clubbing event at the club “Turbine” Now?: In premises of Sage Club, Köpenicker Straße 76,

10179 Berlin (since 2001) Tube: Heinrich-Heine-Straße in Mitte

Approximately 3000 visitors each weekend

‘Avant-garde night club’

Name comes from the legendary KitKat Club from

the musical cabaret of the 1920s and 1930s in Berlin

insomnia

F o u n d e r : Dominique & DJ Clark Kent When: 1996 as event at the KitKat Club

1999: Dominique continues the parties solo

2006: Insomnia becomes a nightclub on its own

Where? Alt-Tempelhof 17-19, 12099 Berlin

Name was inspired by the song ‘Insomnia’ by the

British band Faithless

other world behind me.

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ABSO L

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Photography: Claire Louise Alexandra Stone Styling: Catherine Connell Model: Louise Walker

O LUTE Left Cheek: From Left to Right Tribal earrings, Topshop; Pearls, all vintage from R o k i t; C i r c l e o f H o p e p e n d a n t, g o l d c h a i n , v i n ta g e ; Alex Monroe, Victoriana ring, Claudia Pink Jewellery; Silver and quartz cut two-tier earring, Claudia Pink jewellery; Pink gold and emerald set bangle, Roberto Cavalli.

White leather and gold heart necklace, Topshop: G o l d B i k e r c h a i n , T o p s h o p.

Right Cheek: From Right to Left Chanel brooch, vintage Chanel: Colour peardrop earrings, Mikey; Topaz and white gold ring, Swarovski; Gold leaf-drop earrings, Miss Selfridge; Gold-leaf and pendant earrings, Claudia Pink jewellery; White gold and Labradorite necklace, Past Times.

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