Women In Love
Opening August 31st
From 4 pm
Atelier E.B - Beryl Cook - Lucille Groos - Leigh Ledare
Lucy McKenzie - Elliott Jamal Robbins and Aura Rosenberg
Image - a dogging map of Denmark taken from www.dogging.dk
Women In Love
In a recently unearthed video from July 2006, George Michael took the decision to speak to the press about paparazzi photos published of him leaving a cruising area in Hampstead Heath in the early hours of the morning. Naturally, the tabloid discourse that surrounded these images came from a place of acrid homophobia that this sort of media so loves. In this unedited video, Michael is passionate, radically clear and composes himself with a level of articulation that pierces any potential thatthe interviewer may have as collateral.
He is furious that lies about his own relationship are being printed and at one moment he says that it is heterosexual women who are the worst when it comes to judging his non monogamous relationship; in fact straight men, much like gay men, understand this act of cruising whether they admit this or not. Women are jealous and therefore as a side effect they spurt homophobia.
But - what if this accusation of homophobia is in fact misguided and comes from a place which Michael is seemingly blind to - that sexual adventure is an arena for men to enjoy and explore and this freedom is not available for women. For women, as Michael so aptly explains (as straight culture), just going to a bar comes with the risk of being drugged where cruising is a non violent space. Cruising gives Michael joy.
In another TV interview from 2019, Emiliy Maitlis interviews The Duke of York about his friendship with serial paedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. At one moment when Maitlis questions His Royal Highness about the accusations against him by Virginia Giuffre, who at the time was seventeen years old, that she had been trafficked to have sex with The Duke of York, an adult male, multiple times in various countries, his response is odd.
He explains in dry, strange, almost textbook psychological terms that for men having sex is considered a positive action and positive actions are things that are remembered.
To be precise - his words were:
If you are a man it is a positive act to have sex with somebody (sic) if you try to forget it's very difficult to try and forget positive action and I do not remember anything.
A very interesting allegory for rape.
Popular notions of female sexual pleasure live in consumerist worlds of the worthy, holistic, manageably subversive and even worse- the spiritual. Vegan leather whips, organic lubricants and pastel pink dildos are seen as friendly ways for women and queers to be sexual. I want more than this.
Sex for us does not have to be sanctimonious - perhaps masturbation is the only wild place for us and I am a woman in love with it.
Reba Maybury, 2024.
References:
George Michael Heated Interview on Cruising, Homophobia, and the Press (2006)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVJPY3dpA38&t=427s
Prince Andrew & the Epstein Scandal: The Newsnight Interview - BBC News https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtBS8COhhhM&t=1944s
With thanks to the New Carlsberg Foundation, Danish Arts Council, Municipality of Silkeborg, Augustinus Foundation and the William Demant Foundation.
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