Marilyn Minter’s ‘Lick It Real Good’Marilyn Minter said a few years back that her art is in the outtakes. “It’s the moment when everything goes wrong,” she says. “It’s when the model sweats. There’s lipstick on teeth and the makeup’s running.”

I experienced another Marilyn Minter turnon this morning, reading about vaginas.

Posting an extensive collection of Minter images, one of several inspirations for our soon to launch Making Waves | Modern Aphrodites 2011 erotic writing project, I understand clearly why the artist is considered to be a purveyor or scopophilia.

Meaning of Scopophilia

Derived from the Greek ‘love of looking’, scopophilia or scoptophilia means deriving pleasure from looking. The moment I read ‘philia’ my mind went, not to Hamlet, but to the world of carnal pleasures.

As an expression of sexual pleasure, scopophilia describes sexual pleasure derived from looking at erotic objects, erotic photographs and naked bodies. In the 1970s, the term was used by cinema psychoanalysts to decribe pleasure — often considered pathological — spectators experience when they watch films.

Laughing just now, I said that I experience scopophilia with erotic flowers.

Screen capture, YouTube Scandalous Erotic Flowers

A quick trip to the dictionary confirms that ‘philia’ connotes unnatural attraction. The Internet Encyclopedia  of Philosophy makes ‘philia’ a subset of ‘The Nature of Love’, breaking down Eros, Philia and Agape.

Interestingly, the Greeks didn’t make ‘philia’ a dirty word. Think Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. One assumes that ‘philia’ got dirty with the rise of monotheism.

Le Petit Mort

I returned to the subject of vaginas today, ruminating over a comment I made last week about the male fear of castration in female orifices. Busy rewriting a new definition of sensuality that I will present to Webster’s before the end of 2011 — come hell or high water —  I found myself in the muck of ‘vagina dentata’ at 5am.

You might think that ‘vagina dentata’ or a vagina full of teeth capable of devouring a phallus without warning is present only in ancient history and mythology. It was actually the basis of the 2007 horror/humor film ‘Teeth’.

In Praise of Yoni Worship

A girl dressed in the attire of Indian goddess Maa Kali seen at Kamakhya temple. via demotix.com

With no intention of minimizing the degree of misogyny that today’s women experience in India, it is factually correct to say that among the most sacred pilgrimage sites in the country is Kamakhya.