As traumatic as that first experience was for me, and as grateful as I was that I did not have to draw a penis in my very first nude model experience, my Life Drawing class was one of my most favorite classes in college and certainly one of the few classes which fundamentally shaped who I am as a person today. To be able, as an artist, and even more importantly, as a human being, to witness other human beings bearing, not just their naked bodies, but in some ways, parts of their souls, to a room full of strangers, and strangers who are, generally speaking, physically in the prime of their life, is a profound gift that I doubt very much I even had the capacity to fully appreciate at 19 years old.
To be a model, to be a good model, you have to do so much more than be willing to get naked for money in front of people. You have to be willing to share part of yourself, parts of your passion, parts of your story, parts of the twists and turns and flexions and posses that only you can bring to a session. You have to be willing to let people look closely, possibly closer than you would ever allow a lover to look at you, under glaring hot lights, for 30 seconds to an hour or more. You have to allow strangers to critique your cellulite, your scars, your uneven breasts, your sagging ass, pierced nipples, fading tattoos, spider veins, crow’s feet, pubic hair, dimples, missing testicle, uncircumcised penis and everything else you might cringe from in a dressing room mirror, but which ultimately makes you a beautiful model to teach students how the human body works and how your body moves and behaves differently from everyone else’s body on the planet.
I think ever since my Life Drawing class, even while in the class, I thought about how I would do things differently if I were the model, but for some reason, it never occurred to me to ask my Professor how to get into this line of work, even though I had a great relationship with her. At that point in my life I was still battling my anorexia and child abuse and had never been to a clothing optional resort, nor was I comfortable identifying as a nudist. I still had a very long way to go in my own journey before I was ready to take the steps that lead to me taking my clothes off today.
Nevertheless, the idea of being a model never left my head and it wasn’t until this summer, when finally visiting a clothing optional resort very close to where we currently live, I met a guy (I shudder to think of him as a man) who claimed he was a model in the area, and while blatantly staring at my bare breasts, he told me that I should “get into the business.” He offered to show me all his moves, and give me his contacts, if I took him back to my room, (most nudists I’ve encountered are not this smarmy be the way!!) at which point I repeatedly declined and wondered what the hell was taking my lover so long in the bathroom. The conversation, as disturbing as it was, ignited a fire in my brain though and almost immediately when we returned, I started researching modeling in “the Valley”.
Who knew it would be so freaking frustrating! Maybe I should have brought that guy back to my room after all-with my lover as the body guard to make sure things stayed legit! I had no idea you needed experience to take your freaking clothes off! I thought you just took the damn things off, strutted a few poses, held them for awhile, stayed as still as possible and viola, everyone is happy! Yeah, not so much. Not only is it not that easy, not only do you need experience, you need references! Well, how the hell do you get references if you don’t have experience?
I called one school, and in sheer desperation, and asked if taking a Life Drawing class and being a nudist counted as experience. The Administrative Assistant didn’t sound terribly impressed with my credentials, but told me to write a cover letter and e-mail it to her and she’d see what she could do. Ok great. What the hell was I supposed to put in a cover letter? “Hi so and so, I’d really like to get naked for your young art students. I have a pretty good body, although I’ve put on some weight in my middle. My breasts are a 38D and they are pierced, as is my nose. I’m a nudist and an artist so I’m comfortable being naked in front of people and coming up with unusual poses….” I felt like I was trying to be a porn star. In the end, I said more than I needed to (go figure) and didn’t hear anything for months. Oh, and I only sent my cover letter thingy to one school because I was so discouraged by how the phone call went (so much for following through on your dreams baby!).
And then, lo, one day, towards the end of October, when I was feeling all sorts of fat and down on myself, a guy named Jason e-mailed me about my availability and I said yes to every date he had (doctor’s appointments be damned!) and the day after that THE WOMAN I was supposed to train with in the Valley contacted me about a workshop she was running in few weekends (for only $30) for wanna-be models! It was all starting to fall into place and I couldn’t believe it!
I scheduled my debut with Jason for today and my workshop with Pat for a few weeks ago. Pat and I really hit it off and since then I’ve observed her at another school where she introduced me to the person I need to know to get scheduled for next semester and I will be posing with Pat on Thursday near where I used to live and will hopefully get hired there as well. I’m trying to keep my enthusiasm in check, but I had a great time today and the feedback from the Professor, who knew it was my debut, was that “It was like (I) had been doing this my whole life” and it pays a whole lot better than most jobs I’m likely to find in Public Health…except for the fact that there aren’t any benefits and the work is very sporadic.
No matter how long the “gig” lasts though, someday I’ll either write a book about it or tell great stories about how I was a live nude model. Hell, maybe I’ll do both! After all, how many people get to say that at a cocktail party and mean it?
Showing posts with label breasts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label breasts. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
The Bi Phase
This weekend, while humoring my partner and seeing, “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World,” I was reminded of a “trend (?)” which incenses me. And that is, “The Bi-Phase”. For those of you who haven’t seen (or suffered) through the movie, the main female character tries to escape her past “ex’s”, which her none too bright, sorta boyfriend keeps referring to as her ex-boyfriends. Although she constantly corrects him by calling them her seven evil ex’s (we never learn why they are evil, despite how long the movie drags on, but that is besides the point), he never notices the corrections she makes. Nor does he make any connection to the female who accosts him, ninja style, in an alleyway.
Now, before you go all nerdy video-gangbusters on me here, I understand Scott Pilgrim was hardly a glowing example of anything other than “the nerdy guy beats every guy who ever beat up on him and still gets two hot chicks in the end” kind of movie, and that isn’t where my beef is (well, not in this blog anyway). What’s got ants in my pants, bees in my bonnet and whatever other trite expressions you can think of for being pissed off, is the whole concept of a “Bi-Phase.”
In this particular movie, you would have to be beyond a nerd or live in a darker cave than I do, to not realize that Ramona (female character with 7 evil ex’s) has had a relationship with a woman. That’s certainly cool with me and I speculate that it is probably cool with the nerdy 95% male dominate population in the movie theatre. What’s not cool with me; you know, me who identifies as bisexual, is that when it comes time for Ramona to ‘fess up about her relationship with her evil fem ex, she merely shrugs it off as, “I thought I was Bi. It was just a phase.” And, to kill the ending of the movie, much like “Chasing Amy,” Ramona decides that she’d rather be with a man. How convenient.
How sad.
How fucking much it pisses me off that in the few movies I’ve seen, bisexuality is still being presented as a phase, a joke, a temporary, desperate period of exploration until a man is found.
How oddly, eerily biblical-as if finding a man is the true answer to what every woman is really looking for, and yet, if she can’t find one, she might be able to get away with being edgy enough to be “bi,” but only if it is a passing phase. And of course, that discounts all the bisexual men in the world!
Clearly for me, this is a deeply personal issue. For most of my life I was torn, often to the brink of suicidal ideation, over my sexuality. My very first crush, as I’ve already blogged about, was on a boy my age that lived across the street. However, in hindsight as an adult, I often wonder if he would have been my first crush if I hadn’t had heterosexuality rammed down my throat and bashed into my head at least since the time my first, and only, male cousin was born- a mere six months after I was. We were constantly referred to as “kissing cousins” (whatever that means…By the way, it turns out he’s gay and I’m bi, so that whole forcing heterosexuality thing upon us didn’t turn out so well!) And ever since I can remember I was asked if I had a boyfriend-I mean from the time I was THREE or so on!
Come ON! Talk about inappropriate questions for kids! We don’t even give children a chance to develop their own sexuality in our American society. We form their sexuality for them: based on religion, based on fear, based on tradition and our own expectations of weddings and what have-you and we start bombarding them, at the earliest ages possible, that they are to be heterosexual and that is that. It is almost a carefully re-written version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”, except here children aren’t being taught to hate, they are being taught whom it is permissible to love and when and how.
Once my first crush moved away, my attention turned to a girl who lived on the next block from me. I was smitten with her in a way I’d never felt before, in a way part of me already knew I shouldn’t be, thanks to my Catholic upbringing. Yet on the rare times when we would walk to Sunday School together, the longing inside me to reach out and hold her hand was so intense I was certain it was worth any price that awaited me in hell. In our younger years I could get away with doing so under the guise of skipping to school to make it there faster, but all I really cared about was being closer to her. My crush on her lasted ages, or at least from second or third grade through fifth or sixth grade, when she turned to the ‘80’s Brat Pack and whatever boys Teen magazine told her where hot and I lost her forever. Two decades later though, I can still squirm in my seat as I think about my early childhood orgasms I’d have with her as we became too old for holding hands and skipping to school but not to self-conscious to avoid wrestling each other alone in my basement; our legs brushing, crushing each other’s clitoris’s, our barely developed breasts rubbing against each other’s breasts, hot, sweaty faces gasping for air, lips poised inches apart from lips, in a kiss we never dared.
Now, before you go all nerdy video-gangbusters on me here, I understand Scott Pilgrim was hardly a glowing example of anything other than “the nerdy guy beats every guy who ever beat up on him and still gets two hot chicks in the end” kind of movie, and that isn’t where my beef is (well, not in this blog anyway). What’s got ants in my pants, bees in my bonnet and whatever other trite expressions you can think of for being pissed off, is the whole concept of a “Bi-Phase.”
In this particular movie, you would have to be beyond a nerd or live in a darker cave than I do, to not realize that Ramona (female character with 7 evil ex’s) has had a relationship with a woman. That’s certainly cool with me and I speculate that it is probably cool with the nerdy 95% male dominate population in the movie theatre. What’s not cool with me; you know, me who identifies as bisexual, is that when it comes time for Ramona to ‘fess up about her relationship with her evil fem ex, she merely shrugs it off as, “I thought I was Bi. It was just a phase.” And, to kill the ending of the movie, much like “Chasing Amy,” Ramona decides that she’d rather be with a man. How convenient.
How sad.
How fucking much it pisses me off that in the few movies I’ve seen, bisexuality is still being presented as a phase, a joke, a temporary, desperate period of exploration until a man is found.
How oddly, eerily biblical-as if finding a man is the true answer to what every woman is really looking for, and yet, if she can’t find one, she might be able to get away with being edgy enough to be “bi,” but only if it is a passing phase. And of course, that discounts all the bisexual men in the world!
Clearly for me, this is a deeply personal issue. For most of my life I was torn, often to the brink of suicidal ideation, over my sexuality. My very first crush, as I’ve already blogged about, was on a boy my age that lived across the street. However, in hindsight as an adult, I often wonder if he would have been my first crush if I hadn’t had heterosexuality rammed down my throat and bashed into my head at least since the time my first, and only, male cousin was born- a mere six months after I was. We were constantly referred to as “kissing cousins” (whatever that means…By the way, it turns out he’s gay and I’m bi, so that whole forcing heterosexuality thing upon us didn’t turn out so well!) And ever since I can remember I was asked if I had a boyfriend-I mean from the time I was THREE or so on!
Come ON! Talk about inappropriate questions for kids! We don’t even give children a chance to develop their own sexuality in our American society. We form their sexuality for them: based on religion, based on fear, based on tradition and our own expectations of weddings and what have-you and we start bombarding them, at the earliest ages possible, that they are to be heterosexual and that is that. It is almost a carefully re-written version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught”, except here children aren’t being taught to hate, they are being taught whom it is permissible to love and when and how.
Once my first crush moved away, my attention turned to a girl who lived on the next block from me. I was smitten with her in a way I’d never felt before, in a way part of me already knew I shouldn’t be, thanks to my Catholic upbringing. Yet on the rare times when we would walk to Sunday School together, the longing inside me to reach out and hold her hand was so intense I was certain it was worth any price that awaited me in hell. In our younger years I could get away with doing so under the guise of skipping to school to make it there faster, but all I really cared about was being closer to her. My crush on her lasted ages, or at least from second or third grade through fifth or sixth grade, when she turned to the ‘80’s Brat Pack and whatever boys Teen magazine told her where hot and I lost her forever. Two decades later though, I can still squirm in my seat as I think about my early childhood orgasms I’d have with her as we became too old for holding hands and skipping to school but not to self-conscious to avoid wrestling each other alone in my basement; our legs brushing, crushing each other’s clitoris’s, our barely developed breasts rubbing against each other’s breasts, hot, sweaty faces gasping for air, lips poised inches apart from lips, in a kiss we never dared.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)