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Essays from The Philogyny Project

by Augustine Blaisdell



MADONNA ON MUSHROOMS
Looking at the Madonna Sex book on mushrooms with my dad, my boyfriend and two future lovers sounds sexually perverse at best. To be clear, I had no idea my two other platonic male friends and I would eventually sleep together, several times, on separate occasions. One, Patrick, in what would be the more recent future of my senior year of high school, and one, Tristan, not until several years later when we both were living in New York. That Tristan, Patrick and the love of my life at the time, Judson, were all in love with me, that I knew.  
          In 1997, we tore apart Madonna’s Sex book page by page (something to be said for spiral binding), not literally tearing the pages but separating them from their order.
          The one image I really remember is her totally nude being pulled out of the water.
          Erotic. There is no other word that suits—the definition itself of erotic.
          Here was Madonna claiming her sexuality for herself.
    I’m no stranger to naked women in art. Part of my upbringing is the belief that this is what ‘art’ is made of, the nude model. And so I believed myself to be an open-minded person.
          Taking mushrooms at the dining room table with Judson who I could equally call the Handstand Man, Patrick—the Artist, and Tristan—the Circus. It’s funny because it seems like these are all people who would be in a circus. Handstand Man surely, but of course he was more to me than just Handstand Man. He could juggle also. He was tall, taller than me, with gorgeous hazel green eyes, a six pack stomach from all those handstands (I had a six pack too, we were only sixteen) and being a runner. He once said he loved the psychology of running, how having someone behind you, chasing you, kept you running, how having someone in front made you run faster.
          His skin—the same color as mine, what everyone calls an olive complexion, tan in the summer and pale in the winter. He had the habit of biting his nails or cuticles rather when he got nervous, and had had a not so easy childhood. His parents divorced when he was young, but that wasn’t only what had made it rough, still he knew he was loved. He was an incredibly talented and creative artist—could draw almost anything. He loved comic books, wrote poetry, could whistle a long tune, was incredibly charming and romantic, pretty much everything one could hope for for a first love.
          Tristan was like my brother. Like all three of these men, we could all talk for hours and hours. We become friends because we all stay after school, talking and talking. We call each other after ten and keep talking and talking until long after midnight. We can have what our teenage selves consider very deep conversations about our lives. This is before there is any jealousy between them. Before we fall out with each other. Tristan has a brooding magnetic side. Like Brad Pitt’s character of the same name in Legends of the Fall, he is passionate, incredibly intelligent, calculating, can debate anyone under the table and win, and anticipates people’s actions before they even know what they will do.
          Tristan is shorter than me but stands up straight. His eyes have an indigo ring around the honey colored iris that you can only notice if you’re up close. He’s mastered a penetrating look where you feel he is really looking right at you. Out of the three of them, it’s him I’ll have the most intimate and intense relationship. It’s him who my twenty five year old self will risk everything for. His family is strict catholic and despite us being madly in love, I’ll never be invited to dinner at his home. A first generation American, his parents are the rare case of marrying for love and not an arranged marriage as was still typical of Indian families at the time.
          He admires me because I am a rebel. I’m not a “good girl.” He reflects back to me who I think I want to be. He has that wise beyond their years quality. Already at fourteen, when he comes to our school, he’s seen some shit. Growing up a brown man in Los Angeles with corrupt cops, he’s already been told to get down on the ground, the lawn of his front yard, when playing water guns with the neighborhood kids, and it’s been mistaken for a real gun. But he knows how to keep his cool and as I say he can outsmart anyone. From the moment we become friends, I always think we’ll just be best friends forever. I never consider any possibility of us getting together. I never want to ruin what we have. After all, I’m dating his good friend. What I know is I trust these men completely. They have been there for me and we are all incredibly close. And there is something so comforting about just having guy friends where there is seemingly no attraction, or no possibility of anything otherwise.
          This is probably why I don’t remember exactly when Patrick and I start having an affair, and even to call it that seems silly now. Though it was anything but silly at the time. What was silly, I know now, was that I truly believed Judson and I would get married and be together forever and that terrified me. It’s part of my rebellion as somewhere I’ve learned that sleeping with only one person in your life is a bad thing. Though I don’t quite understand the reason why, not yet anyway. Somewhere I’ve absorbed messages I should be playing the field, sowing wild oats, and haven’t yet questioned if this is true.
          Years later my father will reprimand me for fooling around with Patrick and question what I was doing. Even later still, Patrick will hire my father to teach him how to paint, though this will be seen as a way to be with me. How could I explain that Patrick loved me so fiercely, so profusely that I couldn’t say no?
          Years later, Patrick will indeed become the artist I imagined him becoming. And after years of having no contact with him, he resurfaces on Instagram when my father dies. It seems he’ll still use my father to get to me. He’s married—to another artist living in New York, they do sculptures together. The life I would’ve predicted for him.
          And even after all these years to call Patrick the Artist weirds me out since that’s my father in my mind. I can’t ask my father now what he remembers because he’s gone, though I know he remembered this. And though all three of them were artists, and in the style of Leonardo DiCaprio drawing Kate Winslet in the Titanic (every woman’s fantasy at the time, Judson was as smoldering to me as Leonardo DiCaprio), two out of three of them did draw me nude. It’s not until I read Katy Hessel’s fantastic book, The Story of Art Without Men, published in 2023, that it occurs to me I could paint a nude portrait of myself.    
          I don’t feel bad. It’s not until Florine Stettheimer paints herself reclining nude with flowers à la Édouard Manet’s Olympia in 1915 that we have what is considered the first female nude self portrait in Western art history. Incidentally painted at forty four years old, the age I’m writing from now. Considering there were so many images of nude women in art before this, it’s quite remarkable no woman had done it before then; though like most firsts for women it’s not surprising because so many activities were made illegal or unacceptable to them. I search for the first male self portrait in Western art history. This is harder to find. My dad would’ve probably known. I give up the search.  
          My parents’ house at the time is a playground. My dad’s paintings cover all of the walls. Large scale paintings of colorful landscapes, based on his approach to color theory, and how color makes space. In my room, I’ve been allowed to do whatever I wanted. I’ve covered the ceiling in glow in the dark stars, I’ve painted Ritz cracker and cereal boxes with glow in the dark puffy paint. I have a purple lava lamp (a gift from girl friends), a black light and a huge fish tank at the end of my twin size bed which has one large goldfish I’ve had since I was twelve. In journals at the time I liken myself to the goldfish growing and growing as it takes up more and more space, needing a bigger and bigger aquarium.
          There is a train set that takes up the entire living room floor in front of a fireplace. The train set was built by my dad and I as a way to heal as his parents were killed by a train and after that he stopped playing with trains when he was nine. I know what this means to my dad. We make a whole world with the train set. Using “Mountains in Minutes,” a polyurethane foam that expands once you pour it. It’s my dad and I who build the wood frame so the train track can be permanent.
          In the backyard, our house has three, four levels, the patio with stairs which lead up to a grassy area. As a child, I had a jungle gym and swing set but this has now been replaced by a giant trampoline. A gift from my rockstar cousin. In high school I have several parties, with my parents in attendance, and we drink and smoke. Friends driving out all the way to the Valley to come. My father builds a treehouse in the backyard as well with Christmas lights surrounding it. This becomes another place to chill and hang out. It’s a wonderful house. It’s a wonderful time.
          My parents believed if I was going to do drugs better to be in the safety of our home than somewhere else. Though this seems unusual at the time, it doesn’t seem too unusual. By sixteen many of us are drinking wine with our parents. Though I may be, besides my boyfriend, one of the only ones allowed to smoke cigarettes but only with his mother who lives across the street from the school. By our senior year, we’re smoking pot with my boyfriend’s mother, who is also a smoker of cigarettes and occasionally a heavy drinker, like my father. So drugs and alcohol are present everywhere and it all seems completely ordinary.
          Which is why it feels as if we’re just having a normal dinner when we sit around the circular dining room table next to the painting titled Monk’s Sunlight Olive Grove by my dad. It’s a six foot by eight foot painting of an olive grove in Italy, the colors deep oranges, bright violets, crimson reds, cadmium yellows and cerulean blues.
          Cream of mushroom soup. Were there really no other girls there? My mother was there, hovering around, providing an invisible and comforting safe presence surrounding us. She remembers, but she, like me, believes we did nothing wrong. My parents had never done mushrooms before or at least that’s what they told me, whether this is true or not is debatable.
          I don’t know where Patrick procured the mushrooms. I know there will be a certain point where Tristan will think he’s turning into sand. And Patrick will have to tell him to get out of my bed. Did my parents really believe I was platonic friends with these boys? Did they know these three young boys turning into men would inform all my later decisions about men for the rest of my life?
          Why do I keep returning to this moment of tearing apart the Madonna Sex book while on mushrooms with three adolescent men and my father, with my mother in the background?
          Is this what growing up in a sex positive house means? And is that why I’m obsessed with returning to this moment and what it meant to me then and what it means to me now? There is something I am trying to pull apart, like how we pulled apart the pages and spent so much time looking at them.
*
Now I’m a monogamously married mother, a working from home writer who engages in bondage and kink whenever I can. Even writing those words is terrifying, because it means admitting to something that is outside the norm and admitting to something that one day my children might read. And because we are going to have to teach our kids about the spiritual nature of sexuality and having sex and what it truly means to connect with someone on that level, we’ve had to go back to our education on sex.
          I feel here I should give a brief biographical statement about Madonna as well, not that we haven’t heard her name or know at least the very minimum of detail. At 22 years my senior, Madonna has been a permanent fixture of my entire life.
          I am a child of Madonna, a Madonna’s child. Some of my earliest memories are listening to Madonna in the car with a girlfriend, watching Material Girl on MTV. If I keep tracing how I learned about sex, I again return to Madonna and the aphrodisiac of lime.
GET INTO THE GROOVE AND THE APHRODISIAC OF LIME
In the summer of 2022, I make myself a delicious margarita. Good margaritas are rare in France. There is something to be said for three ingredient cocktails. Herradura tequila, cointreau, and lime, ok four, a splash of bitters. With the lime rimming the glass. Thinking about the smell of lime. How lime has always been an aphrodisiac for me. Is it exotic? Is it erotic? Is the exotic always erotic?
          The smell of lime is an instant turn on, instant arousal. It recalls memories of summer and heat and sweat. Is it that it harks to an earlier time of being with Judson in Guadalajara and having so much hot passionate sex when we were young? My sensory mind may forever associate lime with that time in the bathroom where we made love standing up and the cum landed splat in a puddle on the floor.  
          This is where the smell of lime brings me, or is it just the tequila talking?
          Or is it an even earlier time of being ten with my parents in Mexico with my Walkman and listening to Madonna, “Get Into The Groove,” and dancing around the room and understanding what it is to feel sexy in your body—to feel desirable to yourself—to understand that one day you would be dancing with someone and would use your dance moves, your eyes, your hips, your lips to seduce them.
          In this way seduction must be instinctual, unless it was Madonna who unleashed it. I’m inclined to believe the latter. I knew I was sexy then, when I was ten. This seems impossible now, this awareness, but I know it awakened the creative power of the erotic in me.  
          Thirty years later, on the day our package arrived from the sexy store, we had become resigned that it had been canceled—Corona/Covid problems—and we needed the money; lingerie and bondage can be quite expensive. But instead the package came and boy did it ever. I imagine handcuffs and ropes, clamps and collars, black lace stockings and silk blindfolds, but I don’t know everything that’s in the package, because some of it’s meant to be a surprise, and I love the surprise and anticipation of it all. That’s as much a turn on as the box.
          That same day we’d been listening to Madonna and her album Erotica came on and it was a come on. I knew what I would’ve never known before—she had to have been in her late thirties to early forties to write this album.
          Her dominatrix sexy phase went along with her book, Sex. A quick search clearly reveals my intuition is right, and she was thirty four when she produced that album. The title song, “Erotic,” features a lot of moaning and mistress-ing, her alter ego Mistress Dita. I discover in researching about the book that she calls herself Dita as an homage to the film star, Dita Parlo.         
          Madonna takes charge right away.
          The album was good when I was younger but now that I’ve surpassed her age, it’s even better. Could it be that sex is even better than when I was a teenager just learning about it and had the stamina to stand up while doing it?
          Like the lime, the album is a turn on—and it’s sexy because she is in charge—in control of her desirability. This must be confidence.
          Now I know how confident we were. I think of my girlfriends who took charge—who loved sex. We had that in common. Thinking of Madonna recording the album reminds me of recording vocals for Bobby in his makeshift recording studio of his living room and hall closet. In an imitation of Portishead, I wrote some lyrics, he provided the music. How powerful—how confident I felt. A friend of his stopped by to say hello, interrupting us. He gave one look at me and told Bobby, “be careful,” but still he left us.
          Now looking back how lucky Bobby was somewhat a gentleman—a somewhat decent human being that he didn’t rape me or push me to have sex with him too much. He knew that at sixteen, I was half his age. Thirty-two, the same age as Madonna at the time. He smoked joints rolled in licorice paper. And like the lime—if I ever come across that licorice paper I can’t resist thinking about this time and the other things I did resist.
          Bobby, the piano teacher who looked like John Lennon and tasted like candy licorice. We made out on Wilshire and Santa Monica Blvd once. Having pulled over to the side of the road when we saw each other driving. Who runs into people while driving in Los Angeles? He had a Jeep and never went under tunnels out of a fear of earthquakes. I remember him now because of the NPR episode on Frenemies where a woman, a teenager at the time, is raped by her piano teacher. How did I escape this fate? How did I escape rape? What I know now, is that no matter what could’ve happened, it would never have been my fault.
          I wouldn’t have known that then, wouldn’t have understood that in my bones. What I knew was that it was a fun time to be desired and I was always being desired. What power there is from that. The other musician, Dylan, who took me to his prom—born on St.Patty’s Day and so sexy, who now, like most of us, is married with kids.
But the scene I remember most was the after party and him singing Led Zeppelin in front of his friends, I sang the lyrics of being dazed and confused.
          And he followed up with—“Wanted a woman, never bargained for you,” he tells me.  
          I’ve held that scene in my mind for years. I might’ve been embarrassed though I think I was flattered. If I keep writing this scene will I forget it—meaning will I resolve it? There’s something here about constructed identity. How these songs informed—created who I am that I’m fascinated by. That I could be the type of woman you didn’t bargain for, but aren’t we all?
          Jimmy Page who was also fucking a sixteen year old at the height of his stardom, though I never knew that at the time while listening to Zeppelin’s albums on repeat and contemplating the lyrics about squeezing his lemon/my lemon till the juice runs down my leg.
          Lemon and salt—that’s what Judson once said I tasted like in a poem. It was a sexy poem. We were always writing sexy poems for each other. Now my husband tops that, or I top my husband. I didn’t have the vocabulary to know what a top and a bottom was. Now I know. Now I know a lot of things about sex, about myself, about my own limits and desires.
*
Reading through Madonna’s early history is fascinating; how she dropped out of college and moved to Alphabet City with only $35, saying it was the bravest thing she’s ever done. She was forced to give a blow job at knife point by two men late one night while returning from rehearsal. I never knew that. She never again wanted to feel that powerless.
          Perhaps her Erotica/Sex book phase is part of taking that power back. Originally published on November 29, 1992 when I was twelve, I don’t remember looking at the book until that night on mushrooms, now when I look through it I realize it really is a book, there is a story there. It is Madonna, even though she says that it’s all fantasy and made up. She is very clear about the importance of condoms, having lost so many friends to AIDS. The silver mylar wrapping of the book itself was meant to imitate a condom wrapper. She is very clear about safe sex and not dangerous sex. It might truly be the first sex positive book of my time and its voyeuristic/journal-like nature makes it a particularly unique artifact. There has been no other book like it. It really is the epitome of the art object.
          I didn’t remember how much lesbian imagery there is, and there is Isabella Rossellini, I don’t think I put together at the time that this is the same woman who was on the cover of Blue Velvet. Now it seems to make sense that Isabella Rossellini was also interested in this subversive sexual nature. Though the photos of her and Madonna are joyful.
          When Sex was published in 1992, it sold 1.5 million copies at $50 each in a few days. Now copies sell for about $250, but you can still find them. It is apparently the most sought after out of print book. She could easily reprint it but she doesn’t. Thirty years later, they celebrated the anniversary of the book by an auction at Christie’s with all sales supporting an orphanage in Malawi. The photographs were all taken by Steven Meisel, now a renowned fashion photographer, and the auction raised 1.3 million dollars.     
          The book has been praised for being a bold post-feminist work of art and with it she became S&M’s first cultural ambassador. S&M comes from the words Sadism and Masochism or the portmanteau, Sadomasochism. It seems no coincidence that both words are derived from writers who wrote about such sexual activity. Sadism originates from the French writer Marquis de Sade in 1888 and its counterpart Masochism from the Austrian writer and utopian socialist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch in 1883. One the lover of giving punishment, as a “subconscious lust that cruelty satisfies;” the other a lover of receiving it. Sacher-Masoch explores his own submissive sexuality and pleasure from punishment in his novel, Venus in Furs.
          However, the umbrella term BDSM, a combination of the abbreviations B/D (Bondage and Discipline), D/S (Dominance and Submission), and S/M (Sadism and Masochism), which now includes all erotic behavior among consenting adults, doesn’t appear in English language until 1991. Clearly laying the groundwork for Madonna’s Sex book a year later. Here she is completely fearless and unapologetic, continuously reinventing herself, this is what I most admire about her.
          At a time when everyone was scared to death of sex, how politically radical to create an album and book about sex and her desires. I grew up terrified by AIDS. By the time I started having sex we knew how you got it. What I didn’t know at the time was how women like Madonna, Elizabeth Taylor and Princess Diana were among the first to physically embrace people with AIDS as well as among the first to create fundraisers in support of AIDS research. That the very act of talking, singing, writing about sex is political defiance.
          Madonna will say a quote that will stick in my mind in connection with the book: “I don’t think sex is bad. I don’t think nudity is bad. I don’t think that being in touch with your sexuality and being able to talk about it is bad. I think the problem is that everybody’s so uptight about it and have turned it into something bad when it isn’t. If people could talk about it freely, we would have more people practicing safe sex, we wouldn’t have people sexually abusing each other.”
          This is sex positive. We’ll watch the show, How to Build a Sex Room, and discover that most people are never asked what they like in bed nor have they ever even considered it. They’ve rarely been asked to think about what really feels good, instead they’ve just learned to imitate what they’ve seen in movies and pornography.
          We’re told that the men who commit mass murders of women, or any murder of a woman, do it because they’ve been rejected by women. We’re told this generation is having the least sex. Is this because they’ve never learned how to ask for what they’ve wanted? The excuse of the husband of Gisèle Pelicot, the French woman whose husband of fifty years secretly drugged his wife and actively enlisted over eighty three men on the internet to rape her while he filmed it, was that he wanted to do what she wouldn’t have agreed to otherwise. But kink is agreement. Kink is safety words.
          Philogyny—the love and admiration for women—is intertwined with sex. When women in Afghanistan are being systematically erased because they’ve been made to be responsible for men’s supposed sexual thoughts and they can’t sing, speak, leave the house by themselves, or even read poetry aloud, this is what is happening at this very moment. So sex is inextricably linked with the love and admiration for women and girls because rules about sex and fear of sex prohibit women from everything.
          Though as a Jewish white woman growing up in Los Angeles, who fits all the typical beauty standards—thin, brunette, neurotypical, heterosexual, cisgender—I believed I never experienced discrimination because I was a woman.
          But I do know what it means to be violated and be told to say nothing. How so many women when #MeToo happened had to question, “wait, did this happen to me? Was it a big deal?”
          How brave Jennifer Hermoso, the champion soccer player for the Spanish team that won the Women’s World Cup in 2023, was to say that the manager kissed her without her consent and still didn’t apologize. How this can happen in front of the whole world and we can still doubt the validity of her claim. This is misogyny. And what if misogyny was treated like a disease akin to Alcoholism? We know misogyny is responsible for the assault on our freedoms (from women in Afghanistan and Iran to Poland, Italy and the United States, let’s face it, every country in the world); what we don’t know yet is that its antonym, philogyny, is its cure.
          So I research. I look at how the international medical community determines a disease, specifically comparing how Alcoholism became classified as a disease but Sex Addiction is not. What I become particularly interested in is whether we can classify racism and misogyny as diseases. Pathology-zing people outside of cultural norms has long been the playbook to oppress women, the LGBTQ community; anyone at odds with society has been and continues to be labeled crazy, imprisoned or worse. This hides the real culprit, actions stemming from hate.
          I look on the International Classification of Diseases website to see if misogyny and racism are listed, indeed they are not, they do have Violence and Domestic Violence, but like Sex Addiction they have not been approved by the medical community. What they have added is “Gender Incongruence,” and I start to wonder what are the implications of classifying “Gender Incongruence” as a disease and what that will mean for future generations of transgender people and for all of us. Some of the earliest feminists were transgender women, we need the freedom of non-binary genders. Men most of all need to be allowed to love, admire and imitate women. So listing something as a disease has consequences. I fear this is so close to the idea of the “Conversion Therapy” that they have now made illegal in France, Canada and the United States.
          What is entailed in proclaiming a disease? Are there ways to actively petition for misogyny and racism to be put on the list of mental illnesses? In 2024, the United Kingdom succeeds in classifying misogyny as terrorism, this is a start, but no other countries have followed suit yet.
          I start to wonder if there is a direct correlation between how much sex you have and how violent you are. And if you have more sex wouldn’t you naturally be more happy, less depressed? I guess it depends on what kind of sex you’re having. Actually sex is not the right term, it’s really orgasm, that’s really what I’m thinking of, anything that makes your brain release those chemicals, and does it all come down to brain chemistry? The people who become violent, do they have less dopamine? Less oxytocin? And what to say then of where violence and arousal collide?
          One quote by Madonna particularly sticks out: “I talked to a dominatrix once and she said that the definition of S&M was that you let someone hurt you who would never hurt you.” This is the trust I feel in my marriage. In 2019, before I reflect on what impact the Madonna Sex book might’ve had on my own self concept, I, like her, create an alter ego, writing in third person, but even writing in first person is to create another persona. The persona of the piece, of the “scene” to use the kink terminology.
          I was interested in sex in my teenage years, it feels like I have to say here, who wasn’t? (Perhaps sadly teenagers in this generation.) But I had no idea of the ins and outs of BDSM; that it might be something I would be into later in life, I probably would’ve predicted it by my younger self. Revisiting that moment of us in a circle around the images of Madonna spread out on the hardwood floor, I choose what I can take from it now, which is that I was loved and admired then, and in loving and admiring Madonna, I’m loving and admiring myself. We talk about internalized misogyny, this is internalized philogyny. This is philogyny in action.
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