21 May 2008

When you see her

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Photo by Eric Francis.

WHEN YOU SEE a woman, who or what do you see?

What does she want you to see? And is there a difference? The difference is like the gulf between a porn model and the guy cumming onto her picture. Through doing these images of Book of Blue, it occurs to me that society has turned women themselves into porn.

We live in world made supposedly of one to one relationships. More accurately, women are the masturbatory objects of men. Does this sound harsh?

That is, out in the physical world. In the etheric, men are also the masturbatory objects of women. Many women, even those who appear the most conservative, have wild fantasy lives and do things in their imaginations they would never dare speak. Men allegedly need something printed with ink to get themselves going; women, being more sublime, require merely the printed word, the sound of someone’s voice for a moment, a glimpse of imagination and the Cone.

The thing about porn is that it doesn’t say anything. Everything it has, you bring to it. I would propose that as a definition of this highly elusive concept. The more nothing an image relates, the more it would qualify. By extension, we are conditioned to see the world and in particular women through this process of looking by projection.

The woman’s body, in many ways designed and outfitted by the glamor industry, is a sexually charged projection screen. One looks and fills in the story. She tends to be seen and see herself on the basis of comparison rather than inherent existence.

Similarly, women project onto themselves, often selfcreating themselves into a kind of mirage that does not match the substance of who they are. This helps us understand the kind of mixed signal that comes out when a woman spends an hour getting ready to leave the house, impeccably attending to the last detail of her appearance, and then resents that men notice her or that other women get competitive with her.

So if she tends to see herself by comparison, as do most other women, and he tends to see her by projection, then who really sees her?

This is an exquisite place to go exploring: the space of truly looking, of expressing curiosity, and of witnessing.

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