Answer: A good half will say, “I hate the way I look.” I wonder why?
True.
Make It Plain
Nobody looks on two things quite the same way. Photographs like the ones I take are polarising. The body - and the politics of the body - is a contentious issue. Gender equality is a fight not yet won. Being on the “privileged male” side of the fence, I have to be mindful, but not cloyingly careful about what I create. Respect in how participants are portrayed and how the images are communicated is paramount. My photographs are political statement, if only because women and men will look at them with their own particular prism. I can either perpetuate the same old bullshit pigeon-holing stereotpes, or I can facilitate expression, beauty andstrength in a particular kind of way. Do I subvert expectations and hack sterotypes through my work, or re-inforce subjugating myths? Always speak your truth. Make it plain.
I’m a girl. I’m automatically insecure, so I’m not going to do it. I’m a Muslim! If my parents found out, they’d fucking kill me.
— Making assumptions about who people are is a hard-wired human nature thing. It’s serves a fuzzy-logic purpose I suppose, and that’s why it’s there: the evolutionary hang-over from our fight-or-flight ancestry when we fought sabre-toothed tigers in caves. But still. Assumption teeters towards prejudice unless you watch your step. We all do it - I do it, but I’m learning to ask for what I want without dressing it up. It goes easier, and I think it’s appreciated, despite the obliqueness, rules and ritual of English behaviour. I want you, naked, animal. I know you understand me, no matter who you are.
Spring is around the corner. The sap is rising.
— Stranger, in the Northern Quarter
Deep Inside: A Statistical Porn Star Analysis →
Porn. It’s a national obsession, behind closed doors. Politicians are against it, except when they are for it, watch it in private and bill us, the bloody taxpayer. Never ones to let the truth get in the way of a good story, feminists wield it like a club, embedded with pointy nails to up-end the patriarchy: here after all, is proof of systemic gender oppression - isn’t it?
The truth is like beauty: in the eye of the beholder. Meanwhle, an analysis, “a massive data set of 10,000 porn stars… analysed. What they do on film, and how their rols has evolved over the last forty years” might take a little heat out of the argument, and like a good recipe a little something tasty to the debate.
I am confident in my own opinion, and asking women to strip in the street is weird.
— Well, she might run a feminist zine, but I’m still crushed.
