object lessons

 Last November, I stood dressed in my tattered skivvies for Molly Crabapple. She sat on the floor with her legs folded under her looking like a wayward flower-seller. She drew me, pausing periodically to hold up her brush mathematically to capture the angle of my arm or my thigh. We talked about the healthcare debate and academic life, and when I tipped a pot of ink over onto her carpet, she was kind. I blotted up the mess, and she said the shadow blotch added character.

Two of these illustrations are now available on t-shirts. You can buy them at Fred Segal, if you live in LA; you can buy them at Atrium starting in mid-June, if you live in Gotham; and if you live otherwhere, you can buy them online. I have bought one of each of the t-shirts myself so that I can wear myself in stereo. I can, from time to time, endorse my own narcissism, a quality I like to rebrand á la Gala Darling as a tepid flavor of radical self-love. (I can’t quite call my self-love radical; it remains timid as weasels and twice as unpredictable.)

 Molly’s drawing of me called “Strut” by Dirtee Hollywood is at the framing shop. Soon it’ll sit bright and shiny and new on one of my old and dingy walls. It’s art, and I love it, and I know few people who can say that they have adorned Fival Stewart’s chest. I have, or an image of me has, anyway. I am one degree of separation away from Twilight franchise teen-tart tit. Che Guevara and I now have something in common, presumably.

Make no mistake about it: posing for an artist is gratifying in profound ways. It’s fantastic to stand for five or ten minutes, to take pride in holding a pose, to feel your muscles quiver tight as a racehorse, to keep your chin tilted just so, to hold tight and hold tighter, and to see at the end yourself represented through someone else’s gifted eyes and talented hand. I’ve modeled for artists only a few times in my life, and I’ve never felt anything but a rarified form of aerie elation. It’s a bit high-making, in all honesty. It beats drugs because rather than a hangover and a headache, you inevitably get a lovely two-dimensional parting gift rolled in your hand.

Which is to say, in short, that there is joy in being an object. I have loved the slipping feeling of turning into a thing and losing my being. I spent so many years as a stripper in a happy vague state of bland awareness, and I enjoyed much of that time. Consciousness is a curse, I’ve often felt, and felt keenly, bright and sharp and shiny as an expensive German knife. My consciousness has often been unkind; it has lit my life in the unforgiving gaze of overhead fluorescent lighting. I have been grateful for the Lethean waters of objectification.

Though I’ve not known why until recently. At the beginning of March, a team of researchers from the New School for Social Research released their findings from a study of objectification of women. The study, as reported widely on the web, suggested that women are objectified, their cognitive abilities falter. The researchers suggest that this decrease in cognitive function is due to a splitting of self—an awareness both of oneself as viewed and as viewing one’s self being viewed—and that this splitting of consciousness makes it, well, hard to think.

Objectification is hard, let’s go shopping.

The research leaves a lot to be desired. For one thing, it acts as if women’s objectification of women is inconsequential. For another, it acts as if women’s objectification of men doesn’t exist. It also studied only 25 women, and the methods of the study—filming women from the neck down, asking them to fill out a questionnaire about their own self-objectification, and then subjecting them to cognitive tests—seem to this layperson to be a bit fragmented. There’s no question that the study leaves a lot to be desired before we take it as anything more than an interesting cocktail niblet.

And yet. My experience as a professional is that there is a delightful slip-sliding of self that happens during an attenuated moment of objectification. I can’t speak for all strippers across all time, but I can say that one of the things I most treasured about becoming CiCi (at least in the first few years) was how much it made my mind go blissfully blank. I felt like a silver screen, a blank spot for the projection of fantasies, and I liked it. I called it "my blonde lobotomy," and I still hold it close with nostalgia, even as it cloys with the scent of too much perfume and tanning lotion.

I miss that blonde blandness. Granted, not all the time—and certainly that was one of the many reasons why CiCi died that long slow death; I grew to resent the object-becoming, I fought the fugue, and I stayed more solidly myself—but when I’m with my lover, I like to be an object. I like to feel my mind go blank, white and flat, clean as a clean sheet of paper. Ready to be drawn upon, or merely drawn.

I write today as I wrote yesterday as I will write tomorrow as a feminist. Yet I can’t say that there isn’t value in being objectified, in losing yourself to those sublime blank moments. The problem isn’t becoming an object; it’s staying one. That’s what I’ve learned from my time in two dimensions. You can choose to be three-D in a shiny neuro-second. In a moment, you can take back your presence. I’d be interested to see these sociologists study a passel of strippers. I’ve no doubt they could turn off and on the objectification faster than a strobe light

These are object lessons, and they’re illustrative. Pretty pictures don’t tell the whole story, neither being one nor making one. Speaking as a sentient carbon-based life-form with an insatiable need for lip-gloss, I quite like being an object from time to time, even if I enjoy being a fully embodied person most of the time. Nothing is either good nor bad but thinking makes it so.

Comments

[Paul McCaffree]

i don't want to hear ur stripper violins no more, you don't have to, you have to lean on that no more. Talk of ur self, ur perspectives, not so much, all the time, bout the stupid, whining, violin songs.

[chelsea g. summers]

Oh, Paul, you poor, poor punctuation and grammar deprived man.

You're clearly a very bad reader--or merely terrible at trying to pen incendiary comments. You come off as someone too dim to understand my prose, my point or my tone. Toddle on. I'm sure you can find a writing composed of monosyllables, simple phonemes and short, declarative sentences that tells a single-level narrative in clear chronological order.

Kissy-kiss,
chelsea g.

[anon]

Funny, where he heard violins, I heard a grand orchestral swell.
Thank you for writing this. I cannot imagine both the draws and dangers of being objectified put more juicily and brilliantly than this. :)

[sera]

Oh thank CHRIST you're writing here more regularly. This piece was fantabulous. I also love objectification, and I love reading, and reading you write about objectification was like drinking a large, warm, alcoholic, and of course chocolate-tinged beverage. Yum.

[Mike Philippe]

I just read the comments and I love that I never have anything negative to post.

[Mike]

I just had to read the comments again. I am trying to imagine Chelsea saying that aloud to someone on the train or something. For some reason I would find that very pleasurable to watch.

Mike

[Ariel]

Speaking as a long-time artists model, sometimes stripper, current sex industry participant, and always feminist, I can't say I've had the same experience. I certainly don't feel that my mind goes blank- but rather I feel constantly on with the urgent need to keep the situation under control and the other person under (consensual) illusion, and guard my own boundaries with a metaphorical spiky club (as they are likely to be crossed.) For me, sex-related work is an act that both myself and clients participate in knowingly and willingly. Every now and then it isn't an act because I actually get turned on by a situation, and this always scares me a little. But I am having some interesting experiences with what I'll call a sex-worker head-space. Not unlike sub-space, this is a somewhat altered mental space that I can step in and out of and I sometimes have a little trouble stepping out of it. I can step in and I am the sexually adventurous young woman of your dreams (whatever your dreams are, I'll figure it out and then play the role). I am neither surprised nor judgmental, but smile flirtatiously if you have ED, if you ask to lick my asshole (no thanks!), if you want me to pretend to be your ex-wife. After all this isn't about what I want, its about what you want, and I'm creating this fantasy for you (for a fee...) Sometimes I lose myself in this a little bit and have to come back to reality. Can anyone else relate to these experiences?

[D.Simms]

hi author =) i thought you'd wanna know that your t-shirt link "Two of these illustrations" is broken, it points to something that ends up at http://www.robinson.com/ which is some German site, wtf?

btw, thanks for the word "lacuna" which you used in one of your posts or stories i just read =) though i'd heard it before, i never knew what it meant, so i looked it up, etc. etc. =) thanks =) always nice to learn new words =)

also, you don't have to post this comment, i was just lettin' you know you gots a broked link =)

be well and take care =)

[alphagirl]

So good to see your writing here again. Wonderful and thought provoking as always.