Category: Culture

Sex, Sex, Sex! (There, I Said It.)

On By Edissa Nicolas-HuntsmanIn Culture, Family Matters, Physical Wellness, Sex WellnessLeave a comment

I’m no prude, and yet, I have not written a single word about sex on this health and wellness blog. Last week a friend shared a powerful TedTalk by Peggy Orenstein called “What Young Women Believe about Their Own Sexual Pleasure,” which alerted me to my oversight. After I watched it, I thought that if women like me don’t talk about sex, then my nieces and nephews are doomed. It warrants examination, this omission. Somehow sex has become the dirtiest three-letter word in the English lexicon, but we can clean it up. Here’s why we need to apply ourselves to this task. The prevalent avoidance of discussing the topic of sex can be linked to numerous societal dysfunctions:

  • Sexual assault and rape
  • Blatant ignorance about our anatomies and procreative capacities
  • Vagina shaming and mutilation
  • Sexism
  • Misogyny

Phew, that’s a lot—too much if you really stop to think about it. These concerns impact everyone on the gender spectrum. If biological women can’t own their bodies and feminine identities, then those transgressive figures, who are adopting femininity will inherit those problems even as they seek the health and healing that that kind of transformation represents. It also means that men can’t be comfortable with women’s bodies, because we aren’t teaching men about the healthy boundaries we need to co-exist in a pluralistic society. The taboos against sex limit our understanding of our beautiful bodies.

The vagina is sacred and holy by design, housed and protected by vulva, legs and arms. Women are meant to open and bloom like flowers for our chosen beloved. And yet, too many women carry fear, where life and pleasure should prevail, judgment-free. Sex is meant to be a beautiful invitation, a dynamic and transcendent connection between consenting adults seeking mutual happiness. Let’s claim that right this century.

I think we can live up to the expectations of biology. Both men and women have pleasure buttons that can be activated by loving touch. Let’s aim for joy, pleasure and the power of reciprocity in the context of sexual intimacy. Let’s discuss this with our sons and daughters, so we don’t have to spend all our time repairing the damages of rape and sexual violations that surround too many sexual encounters. We can reclaim the sacred space of human dignity intended for sexual intimacy. Oh, and, can we say the V word, please? It’s really okay that boys have penises and girls have vaginas. That’s how God made us. This is a beautiful thing.

We can heal our society and ourselves by taking inventory of our sexual beliefs, examining them openly and moving forward bravely into a sexuality where women own their vaginas and men own their penises and each takes on the full privileges and responsibilities for what happens with and in them. That’s a revolution in which this Third-World Feminist is willing to enlist.

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Watchful Patience

On By Edissa Nicolas-HuntsmanIn Art, Community, Culture, Emotional Wellness, Living Artist ProjectLeave a comment

The messages of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela remain relevant even in a world where ideological confrontations and invasive totalitarianism have been overcome. They are messages of hope, of faith in a society’s ability to overcome conflict through mutual understanding and watchful patience. To achieve this, we must rely on our belief in human rights, the violation of which—whoever the perpetrators may be—must provoke our indignation. We must never surrender these rights. ~Stéphane Hessel

 

I wonder whether it is enough for me to do my work, to write my story, to create my art. I can no longer take liberty for granted, if ever I had. I have the urgency to stay awake, and yet, I also feel a tremendous responsibility to foster peace in the world, in my heart, in my home. The more I am afraid of the future, the more I cling to my sense of purpose, the calling in my life and to caring for myself, and others, with compassion, serenity and love.

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Elliott C. Nathan

It is easier to deal with the external manifestations of racism and sexism than it is to deal with the results of those distortions internalized within our consciousness of ourselves and one another.*

We must not permit our backs to be pressed against a wall, dogs to run us down like fugitives, or bars to close in around our hearts. If we are free, then no one can take that. And, we must believe that we are free—we have to know it. We have to own our freedom and live accordingly.

I say, keep your peace. Make room for your joy. Make sure that when the storm passes, your house is standing.

I believe I do not have to burn things to be part of a revolution —though I honor and recognize that those who must burn structures, effigies and ideals are necessary to the cycle of change.

I am writing about an anger so huge and implacable so corrosive, it must destroy what it most needs for its own solution, dissolution, resolution.*

I tend my garden, write like a mad woman, connect with my people, cry into my pillow, sculpt my ancestors, sand the teak table that has stood out in the blessed rain all this long winter. I do these things, and I watch, as Hessel prescribes, with a patience that is steeped in long-suffering and the alertness of a new season.

In our struggle for justice, peace and equity, we owe it to ourselves to nurture love, self-care and harmony. These are critical responsibilities for liberation workers.

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Elliott C. Nathan

We get to thrive. We get to love. We get to live.

 

*Audre Lorde

“This Land Is Our Land”

On By Edissa Nicolas-HuntsmanIn Art, Community, Culture, Environmental Awareness, Living Artist ProjectLeave a comment

We all have a part to play in how our world operates. The interconnectivity of our lives can no longer be ignored. Beloved, justice-loving President John F. Kennedy once said, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Now, more than ever, this question is pertinent in its application to service in this country, and also to the required work in our cities, families and extended communities. Perhaps we need to expand the definition of poison, broaden the scope to encompass of how actions that intend to harm one group inevitably undermines all of us, since we share the same ecosystems.

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Cristiana Briscese

When Regan took office, he implemented all manner of racists policies as a backlash to the reforms of the 1970s—the product of much bloodshed and activism during the mass Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s—he wanted a return to the past, to once again disenfranchise black Americans, who were at last prospering with gainful employment, access to the ballot and a legislated end to centuries of legal discrimination. So the 80s became the decade for undoing the gains of previous decade, by first closing the factories that employed thousands of workers all over the country, but especially in the motor cities of the mid-west, where many blacks had migrated the century before. Other manufacturers shuttered plants as well, lining their pockets and resting their large heads on soft pillows in the great old US of A, while keeping their portly purses well out of reach of Uncle Sam. Combined that with the simultaneous economically devastating white flight from urban cities and the strategic divestment in the remaining communities, and America’s working class was dealt a mortal deathblow.

Just as many whites as blacks lost jobs to the factory closings. The lose of tax revenue from those who left the cities, dwindled, and then, those who could, packed their bags and left. But it seems that now the desolation of a targeted group of people has inexplicably, at long last, trickled down to the rural areas of Virginia and runs amok in the woods of Pennsylvania, where the toxic stream meanders through the land and fords the vast wildernesses where once stood the fabled factory of the well-paying job for the undereducated. And just like that, it becomes woefully apparent, that though poison will at first killed the intended undesirable fish in the immediate vicinity, it will, before long, also kill the frogs in distant ponds as it runs it course.

Take the clever example offered in the movie There will be Blood when oil tycoon Daniel Plainview, takes his straw and says to his nemesis, “I drink your milk,” he clarifies that the oil beneath the ground does not honor property boundaries; the milk, of course, is a metaphor for the oil in the earth, the same collective resource of all those who inhabit the land, sustenance that may as well be any resource from housing, to jobs, to healthy food, to lead-free water.

Your consent is unnecessary.

Similarly ironic, when decades of fracking leads to earthquakes in places like Oklahoma that had never before been susceptible to the shifting of tectonic plates, it give pause—to some. Or, when oil pipelines that have long mapped over Native lands like arteries outside an ailing body leak oil into formerly pristine waterways, we see that it’s only a matter of time before what we have done unto others gets done to us:

Pillage the forests; get land erosion and warmer climes.

Spray pesticides, and kill all the bees.

Undermine the livelihood of black American, and sow widespread unemployment.

We are all connected.

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by Cristiana Briscese

No one can escape the poison once it seeps into the land, the water and the air. We have to clean it all up, or we all perish. We don’t get to choose who lives or who dies. We must be the stewards of the land, and not solely the environmental aspects of our shared geographies, but of the people, especially, and the plants and animals that are sustained or destroyed by our daily choices, and our insatiable hungers. We must invest in each other, with our hearts, and be willing to extend that love to our brothers and sisters—no matter what skin tone, regardless of papers, beliefs, notwithstanding.

It is our responsibility to seek these reconciliations—each one of us. When we have done these things, all will be well.

Stir the Masses: The Necessity of Art (Part VIII)

On By Edissa Nicolas-HuntsmanIn Culture, Good Habits, HistoryLeave a comment

There is nothing like art to wake us. Art has the power to get under the skin, splinter nails and moisten brows. Hang a urinal on the wall and get a rise (No pun intended). Draw a comic the Prophet and get blasted out of this life. Paint a portrait using multiple perspectives and challenge convention. Art is noise. Art is a thumb in the nose of static notions.

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Art and revolution are long-time companions. Militant art directs movements by giving people motivational images, reflecting their thoughts and capturing possibilities: You could be her; this could be you. We need art to energize us. The United Farmworkers Union employed an iconic eagle as their emblem; the Black Panther Party and Mao’s China used art to manipulate, agitate and propagate a message (not necessary in that order).

It was Honoré Daumier, who in the late 18th century glorified the masses of the “Third-class Carriage” even while giving us a peek into the lifestyles of the first-class passengers. I relish neither classification, because poverty is the domain of those who do not own their destinies. Calling attention to disparities is the domain of artists. Take Goya’s criticisms of public figures through allegory and blatant representation of government atrocities, which led to public outrage. Likewise, satirical political cartoons have been the voice of dissent since the American Revolution.

Art also has unintentional consequences. Take the writer Nicolai Gogol, whose most famous, and nearly seditious work, Dead Souls, foreshadowed the fall of the monarchy and led to political strife when it was published in 1842. In fact, Gogol, a nobleman, believed in the crown and serfdom—he did not expect Dead Souls to be interpreted as criticism of the state. For Gogol, he was simply depicting Russian life. Ironically, he was unable to “correct” his book though he tried, twice, to create a second volume; in frustration, Gogol committed suicide by starvation, proving we cannot control Art.

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Rebecca Solnit assures us that artists have a place, poets have a place—and protests have a place. Without art, she implies, we succumb to dichotic thinking, viewing the world and everything in it as binary opposites, rather than complicated, nuanced situations that we have the power to impact.

Art is no trivial matter. It is skillful, thoughtful, daring and courageous work that must be done. Whether imagery or words, film or created objects, performance or free association—these are the pillars of a thriving society. Art is not merely the purview of advertisers and marketers. Art belongs to us.

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The Uses of Visual Images as Envisioned by Douglass: The Necessity of Art (Part VII)

On By Edissa Nicolas-HuntsmanIn Art, Community, Culture, History, Spiritual WellnessLeave a comment

 

Art is a visionary’s tool (among others). For a long time artists have used the medium of photography to foretell, criticize and reimagine the way we see, what we see, but also why we see. Take the great reformer, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who in moving from images of Black poverty and nakedness to dignified and well-dressed statesman, understood and recognized that art could liberate Black men and women in the consciousness of the viewer. Douglass embraced photography in the form of Daguerreotype and used his own image to bombard the social media of the era. What had easily become a keepsake token of affluence, the portrait became a force for transforming consciousness in the hands of a powerful Black American, who used it to define himself and a people. With his actions as a writer and a subject of the gaze, Douglass used art to change America.

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Today selfies are a widespread phenomenon misused by young people all over the world. The intoxicating image of the self has us giddy with self-absorption (you can even by a stick for this). For his part, Frederick Douglass employed the power of the portrait that few of us seem to value or recognize today because of the proliferation of cameras. Yesteryear, however, Frederick Douglass, the original selfie King, sat for numerous portraits as an act of liberation, intending to shatter static notions of Black identity using his own changing image. Given that he did so well before the advent of cell-phone cameras, the selfie king had to make deliberate efforts to make his image available to a 19th-century populace, many of whom eroticized the African body as a side-show attraction, or relegated them to an exotic sub-human status unworthy of the lens. It was under these circumstances that Douglass envisioned a narrative that could only be told through the camera’s eye—a story he would repeat dozens of times to become the most photographed figure of his epoch.

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Pillar in Print

For Douglass, art in the early manifestation of the selfie, the portrait, was a vehicle used to normalize Blackness. By sitting for portraits wherever he went, Douglass realized that the image of a free Black American would provoke the viewer to consider his personhood and, thereby, challenge the perceptions of White Americans that he used to gain a kind of social currency, an invented algorithm inserted into the mainstream dialogue. Douglass did so in the struggle to abolish slavery; Douglass knew art had power, whether by creating it, starring on the canvas or generating a frequency of sound; art’s power was undeniable.

Frederick Douglass was able to harness the power of art and use it to reframe an entire narrative about Black identity. Later artists of the Harlem of Renaissance—writer, painters, poets, dancers and sculptors—would continue his legacy, crafting a movement of empowered self-expression that would begin to heal a people from a history as a formerly enslaved people. Art and change are not separate. One births the other and the other fathers the revolution—more on that later.