{"id":74982,"date":"2014-03-17T13:30:28","date_gmt":"2014-03-17T17:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=74982"},"modified":"2014-03-17T15:15:19","modified_gmt":"2014-03-17T19:15:19","slug":"female-hysteria-hardly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/sexuality\/female-hysteria-hardly\/","title":{"rendered":"Female Hysteria? Hardly."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Adult
Adult film performer Stoya gives up on Supervert and gives in to the Magic Wand. But you don’t have to be a porn star or famous to be involved; just contact Clayton Cubitt after you’ve read the FAQ page<\/a> if you’re in the New York metropolitan area and would like to read in one of his videos. Photo by Clayton Cubitt.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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<\/a> mailing. Enjoy! — Amanda<\/em><\/p>\n

In the mood for a good… read?<\/p>\n

Clayton Cubitt\u2019s video art series, entitled Hysterical Literature<\/a>, 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\u2019s not a competition).<\/p>\n

Cubitt launched the project in August 2012, featuring women (some famous, some not) each reading aloud from a book that\u2019s 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<\/a>. “How nobly we view the act of reading, compared to the act of sex.”<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

That nobility is questionable given the romance novel industry and the frequency with which ‘literary’ books have been banned for including ‘frank’ subject matter. Even more questionable, though, are cultural relationships to female sexual pleasure, even now in the 21st century, when graphic violence is more likely to make it past the movie censors than, say, a woman receiving oral sex. Our cultural injury around sex underlies one of the reasons Cubitt has disabled comments on these videos since the beginning: “Sex has a tendency to make smart people dumb. So does visual art in general, though. Most of us aren’t taught how to write intelligently about visual art, much less depictions of sex in art.”<\/p>\n

Cubitt continues, “The sex is hidden. The viewer would have to object to the very concept of sex to object to Hysterical Literature. And in so doing, what does that say about them?”<\/p>\n

What, indeed? <\/p>\n

Have you tried the Planet Waves premium membership? Sign up for a six-month membership and receive weekly and monthly horoscopes, plus more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s video art series, entitled Hysterical Literature, portrays female subjects reading literature aloud while being simultaneously masturbated with a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":191,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74982"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/191"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74982"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74982\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}