This was one of the more alternative perspectives my late father shared with me, as a younger ‘un, when it became apparent to him that my curiosity in The Sex had been more than just piqued.
His guidance on sex went something like this…
“You have something between your legs that men will go to war for. Don’t abuse your power or use it to manipulate men to get what you want from them.”
He went on to roll his eyes slightly and let me know what dumbasses men can be when sex becomes involved in things.
He called this lesson The Power of the P*ssy.
He was something else… my dad. A highly intelligent man who saw things uniquely and all too clearly. And a very fuckin’ funny man to boot. The kind of person who could sum someone up in the blink of an eye and was always entirely spot on, he seemed to have an almost mystical intuition about people.
It wasn’t anything mystical though.
It was his ability to see Truth.
I now know it requires a great deal of fearlessness to see the negative side of humanity as much as the positive, instead of trying to sidestep or bypass the not so nice stuff because it’s often scary or uncomfortable.
It must have been hard for him to see that clearly at times.
I know it was hard for him to see that clearly at times.
But that’s another story…
I think it’s tough for all people who see the nuances, complexities and all too humanness of being human more clearly. It’s often not considered polite to be that kind of honest anymore. The elephants in the room have become an accepted part of social interacting, yet it’s not considered acceptable to point them out.
We smile and wave.
We dance around the unspoken.
And I strongly believe this is why so many of us feel like “strangers in a strange land” in this complicated system we call Western Society.
But this post isn’t about etiquette.
Although I did consider writing about etiquette for this prompt because fuck knows old school manners seem to be dying as well in the haze of half conversations drummed out on keyboards intermittently.
Left to interpretation
Inevitable miscommunication
Open to manipulation
A weird way of communicating
No eye contact or real validation
that it even really happened…
This is how our youth are learning to interact and socialise in full now.
I wonder how that’s gonna to pan out for them?
I thought of writing, or receiving, old school thank you notes for gifts or events for the prompt. And the look and feel of them in hand.
This because I wanted to make a video to say thanks to this community yesterday.
A thanks for all the encouragement and support I’ve received over the last week. A totally unexpected surprise and the antithesis of my experience of mainstream social media platforms.
But then I overthought it.
Is it still okay to say thank you like that these days? Or would folks think I was only trying to drum up more upvotes? Or think I’m cheesy and overly sentimental
*spoiler alert: I am sentimental. Who wouldn’t be at this stage?
And then I got stuck into chatting with people around here and boy can we talk a lot when we get goin’, huh @dreemsteem? I guess that’s what happens when you’ve been wandering alone in the desert for three years and you find kindred spirits.
So please take this as a simple thank you to everyone who stopped by, or who I ran into, on PeakD over the last bit. And let’s get on with what this memory is supposed to be about before I bore the dressing gown off you.
My dad also suggested I go and study Fine Art.
I won the art prize in Matric unexpectedly and it was the one time he managed to take a break from business to attend a school function. He was there and he was as surprised and delighted as I was.
I guess he’d also seen me work on my paintings at night, often still awake to greet him as he left for work in the morning. The blue paint, accidentally spilled, on the expensive cream carpet in my bedroom was never even mentioned.
He always encouraged me to pursue my passions in lieu of financial gain.
He made this suggestion by mentally adding up all of the days I would work at a job throughout my life… calculating this by hours, into weeks and then into years verbally for dramatic effect…
and then snappily finished off with, “That’s a LOT of your life to spend working so you’d better fuckin’ make sure you love what you do!”
He swore a lot as well.
I’ve heard somewhere this is a sign of intelligence and honesty and, although I can’t prove that supposedly scientific fact to be true, I do know he was indeed both of these.
I’d also almost been expelled by two schools for non-attendance by the time I discovered painting. An arty boyfriend and a brilliant art teacher at the now third school drew me to it. My grandmother, who also was my mother for some years, painted as a hobby as well.
I would sit, riveted, watching her at her easel in the afternoon sunlight. The smell of oil paint has always been wonderful and feels a bit like home to me. Although to be honest I’ve never really found a place that truly feels like home.
There was some upheaval in my youth that made stability illusive for some years.
If not permanently…
I began to skip school as a result.
Seeing me so absorbed in this particular school subject must have been why my father thought art a good idea for me. Always the self allocated outcast, I moved between schools and the groups within them, belonging nowhere specifically… adapting like a chameleon to the people and places around me.
There’s a school photo of one of my classes from those times and I’m there… a bit to the left of the group…with more than enough space between me and them for a story to be told without words.
But, despite my obvious aversion to educational institutions, university was non-negotiable. My dad was set on providing his children with a higher education. Something he’d not had the privilege of acquiring.
But again… that’s another story…
And so I did it.
I managed to get in to one of the most prestigious departments at the University of Cape Town — the Michaelis School of Fine Art. Only 60 students were accepted to enter the program out of, literally, thousands of applications per year.
I mostly did this because my arty boyfriend was studying there and he said I’d never get in.
So I did. Of course.
And I managed to complete my degree despite threatening to drop out every single year of the four year experience. If it weren’t for a good friend I probably wouldn’t have made it. “One more year.” she would say, every time I said I’d had enough and was leaving.
This would happen a couple of times a year.
Every year.
I was working part time, delivering pizzas and also as the belligerent clad in black leather, bourbon swilling door lady of an alternative (Goth/Rock) night club, to supplement my living expenses while I studied.
I would deliver pizza until the restaurant closed and then head to the club straight afterwards. My shift at the club ended way after dawn and there was often a party going on somewhere even after that.
Although my dad was a successful, wealthy and generous man he’d come from very little and had achieved his financial success on his own. He insisted we make our own way in the world as much as possible as well. Another good lesson that probably kept me alive in many ways over the years.
Especially these last few.
Over the years I’ve resented his guidance at times. I suspected he was patriarchal and chauvinistic by not encouraging me to study medicine, business, law or rocket science because I’m a girl.
I tell you something…
These days it seems he also saw me more clearly than I ever saw myself back then as well.
I graduated with a B.A Fine Art Degree and went on to forget who I was in my pursuit of leading a responsible life and fitting into social expectations of “normal” and “successful”.
Artists rarely make a decent living, you see.
Despite my father’s wise words he never walked them in action. He drove himself into an early grave by his own hand when he lost the business. A successful business that took most of his time, kept him from being with the people he loved and prevented him doing the things that filled his soul.
It went to follow then that everything he said remained only words despite the intelligence of them. Children learn from what we do. Not what we say. This is how our core beliefs, perspectives and… ultimately… the choices that stem from them are made.
It’s unavoidable.
His suicide did reveal some startling truths to me, however, and my direction in life began to change remarkably as a result.
In a way this is turning out to be my memories of him, it seems…
because if there is any nostalgic moment I could recreate by some miracle I would choose to sit with him for a while again.
To sit with him with the learning and understanding of the who I am today.
We parted ways for some years before his passing. Stupid disagreements born of fear and ego. Which are the same thing really. What a waste of precious time.
I’ll tell you something else that I know is a truth…
Those arguments and battles that keep us from connecting with people?
None of that matters in the end.
I promise.
Not when death comes knocking and there’s no more time to make things right. In fact… I can’t even really remember why we began to fight and lose touch with each other at all now.
This is another misconception we humans have because of the same inability to sit with “truth” I spoke of above.
We think there will always be more time.
But the undeniable truth is that our time here is limited.
These days I live every day with this in mind. It helps me appreciate each moment more consciously and it helps me not sweat the small stuff.
I’ll say it again until you believe me…
It’s mostly ALL the small stuff!
But this post was about something I’d have to explain to my son today from a life back then.
And although I share, of course, the same wise words my father shared with me (because I have walked them in action and I know them to be true for me now), this story is about the art degree my dad suggested I go for. And the photography major I walked away with despite my professor openly saying to the class he was gonna fail my ass for…
for…
you guessed it!
Non-attendance.
I was kindly alerted of my impending doom by a couple of classmates and the cool student lecturer. The student teacher was a gay woman just slightly older than me and I was flirty and provocative back then. She took a shine to me. And I did to her.
This was third year, by the way. Almost there but still enough of a haul to the finish line to make me rebel. It was about two weeks until final year exhibition and I had fuck-all to show for it really. Not even a topic or an idea of what I might present.
My situation suddenly dawned on me in full. I had to pull some kind of miracle out of the proverbial hat or face my father’s disappointment at my failure. And the financial implications of it.
University was only for the privileged few in Apartheid South Africa. It was costly and it was still hard to get into despite this. A repeated year would also have been a complete nightmare for me. It was make some magic happen or… probably… drop out completely.
I sat with a final year student and shared my predicament. We were friends from that same club scene and talked often. While I sat there in somewhat wide-eyed terror the conversation somehow drifted towards my dad’s “Power of the P*ssy” life orientation 101 class.
Advertising had taken off as an industry in the years prior and I had a keen interest in it. I was also a natural feminist. You can probably tell by now.
A boy girl.
Gender fluid and non-binary because of the respect, freedom and resulting personal responsibility my dad had afforded and encouraged in me. Pissed off at the way I was seen and treated because of my gender because of his influence as well.
It’s not that I don’t like men. I love men.
Some of my best friends are men. (*stolen and revised)
And my best lovers have been men as well.
I just don’t like the way men generally see and treat us women. Or how a lot of women see and treat other women either, to be fair.
And I’m all about equality.
With the heavy conditioning and stereotyping we’re exposed to it’s hardly even anyone’s fault. Bias. Societal expectations. And the resulting suspicions, resentments and lack of trust because of them.
On both side, of course.
It’s those pesky elephants you see.
They get up to all kinds of shit when nobody’s looking.
So the topic of my third year exhibition became “The Power of the P*ssy” out of desperation and frustration both. It was a statement on how the advertising world was using sex to sell products.
With payoff lines ranging from:
“It takes performance to get to the top of the firm” being used to sell a bust firming gel for women. (I shit you not)
To the proverbial fast cars and hot chicks pics.
It was everywhere in the early nineties. Sex sold! People were obsessed with it. Everybody wanted it. It got and held people’s attention fast.
Easy meat.
Nom nom.
I had two weeks to shoot, process, print and frame my final third year exhibition…
I asked my step-mother to be the model.
My home for the short while I lived with my dad was really liberal. I’m guessing me sharing that hardly surprises you right now.
She posed a full frontal for me with her legs spread wide. Yeah. A full frontal beaver shot. I lit the scene so that her vagina was shadowed just enough for the technical next step of the project but not enough for it to not be shocking.
I then took carefully lit shots of the products I was using, from the actual advertisements, with the pretty outrageous payoff lines. These were reversed. Darkly shadowed around the products because I planned to overlay the negatives and print them as one photograph.
The products were to be directly over the in your face p*ssy with legs spread on either side. With the payoff line printed beneath the artwork. I’m not sure you can do something like this with digital.
It was 1992 and I was using an old school film camera, of course. Similar to this one.
We only used black and white film for art school.
I was into high contrast so I over processed the film that came in those small grey canisters. The ones kids used to carry their weed and more around in those days.
Small enough to fit in a pocket and they had lids to keep the contents safe.
Like these…
Yes. We processed our own film.
If you wanted high contrast you had to push the processing time on the film itself. And the same went for the development time for the photographic paper.
No photo or image editing software back then.
Or even personal computers.
I can still remember the smell of the chemicals in the dark room. I love the smell of these to this day, by the way. A powerful vinegary smell. Your hands began to reek of it after a while.
There were tongs to move the photographic paper around in the developing fluid inside the paper trays, after it’d been exposed, but I rarely used them. I would rub the paper with my hands instead to push the contrast up even further.
It was something, I tell you. Rubbing those massive pieces of paper and seeing my step-mother’s vagina slowly begin to appear.
Of course I went large!
I printed the shots into one meter by half-meter prints. Or roughly that size anyway.
And I did the whole lot in three days with barely any sleep.
My legs were so swollen from standing, eventually, that it became painful to walk. I would limp to the student lounge, every so often, and lie on the floor with my feet propped up on a wall to try and get the blood flow back to some kind of normal.
The student teacher left snacks outside the darkroom door to keep me going. She was a cool woman. I probably should have married her instead of my first husband looking back.
Hindsight, huh?
Although my photography professor had made his decision and already considered me failed, marks were also to be allocated by the professors of the other art departments at the university: graphic design; drawing; painting; sculpture; print-making.
In addition an external examiner was brought in for a good portion of the final mark allocated.
The exhibition was eye-catching.
Large, stark black and white photos lined at the same just above eye level all around the half of the big hall I was allocated.
On first glance it just looked kinda neat. You couldn’t really make out the images in the photos from a distance. You had to walk up to them, real close, to see the products and read the payoff lines.
This still makes me smile.
The painting professor, a woman, walked out and refused to mark my work. She was outraged and considered it sexist and over the top. Seriously. This at the leading art University in Cape Town? I find this fucking hilarious now. And very telling as well. But that day my heart sank when the student teacher alerted me of the initial reaction.
“You walk in and there’s just a massive wall of p*ssy,” commented the student lecturer… laughing out loud as she said it.
Looking back perhaps that’s why she kept leaving me treats.
I ended up getting an upper second in the end. Pretty close to an A. I heard the external examiner loved it! It was extreme, but it was also a first of a kind around those parts apparently.
My pissed off photography professor even softened a bit after that and suggested I take the topic further and elaborate on it for my final year. There had been many, many shots and artworks of male genitalia in the art world, he said. But as far as he knew nobody had done a full frontal, or even subtle half artwork, of female genitalia back then.
But I can’t even take credit for it.
This was my father’s mind and perspective expressed by my determination to impress him, my love for him and above all… his cheeky and humorous way of walking in the world. And my commentary on how few people had his kind of perspective back then, I guess.
Because he also taught me to fight the good fight.
But…
(of course)
that’s another story.
