Note: In honor of the last few days of the Sun in Pisces, we’re posting the CREATE astro-brief from the March 7 premium membership mailing. Enjoy! — Amanda
In the mood for a good… read?
Clayton Cubitt’s video art series, entitled Hysterical Literature, portrays female subjects reading literature aloud while being simultaneously masturbated with a Hitachi Magic Wand vibrator, out of the frame and therefore unseen by the viewer. The reading session lasts until the woman reaches orgasm — the longest so far being 11 minutes and 42 seconds (but it’s not a competition).
Cubitt launched the project in August 2012, featuring women (some famous, some not) each reading aloud from a book that’s personally important to her, including classics like Leaves of Grass and A Clockwork Orange and newer works such as Necrophilia Variations by Supervert. The videos are shot with no nudity and no other participants in the scene, just the woman and her book. “And that allowed me to poke fun at the idea that our mind is somehow ‘better’ or more ‘us’ than our body,” notes Cubitt in an article at The Daily Beast. “How nobly we view the act of reading, compared to the act of sex.”