BOSTON — The young Japanese woman appeared against a massive
backdrop screen projecting machine guns and babies tumbling from
the sky. Wearing a Red Cross helmet, Cono Snatch
Zubobinskaya brandished a submachine gun. As the stage lights
of the Coolidge Corner Theatre brightened, it was clear she had
come in peace: The barrel of her gun was a sex toy, not steel.
Zubobinskaya then did what one might expect from a performer on
the Sex Workers’ Art Show tour. She put a condom on her
“gun,” stuck it in her mouth and fellated it for an several
uncomfortably long minutes before unceremoniously shedding her
clothes and declaring, “I will suck your cock as much as you want,
if doing so can end the war. Just don’t force me with your guns or
I will kill myself.”
How might history-yet-unwritten be altered if we could only get
a videotape of this performance into the hands of the world’s
elected leaders, dictators, religious authorities, the freemasons
or whomever else might be pulling the strings? I wanted to rise and
shout: “Please Cono, tell us how we might channel the theoretical
precepts you’ve laid out here into a broad based movement to
achieve peace, preserve workers’ right to organize, enshrine
environmental standards in global free trade agreements and help
elect Barack Obama?”
Before I could, Zubobinskaya donned silver go-go boots and
camouflage underwear. As she danced '50s style across the stage to
the blaring strains of an Elvis Presley, it was clear the window of
opportunity had closed.
ONE OF THE MOST interesting aspects of the Sex Workers’ Art Show
was how many middle-aged, well-to-do couples were part of the
hundreds standing outside in subzero temperatures at midnight to
gain entry to it. To be sure, most in the massive line snaking
around the theatre were indie rock twenty-somethings playing their
Goodwill retro-chic non-conformist-conformity to the hilt. But it
was also speckled with fifty-something women in fur coats and
diamond earrings alongside shivering men in golf hats and expensive
overcoats.
Perhaps they believed advertisements promising sex workers had
constructed a show which “entertains, arouses, and amazes while
simultaneously offering scathing and insightful commentary on
notions of class, race, gender, labor and sexuality!” After all,
even the respectable sounding Theatre Journal endorses the show as
“an active force in articulating, shaping, and contesting the
meaning of the identity ‘sex worker’ in the public sphere.”
Sadly, articulate and insightful weren’t exactly one’s initial
thoughts when the first performer bounded through the aisles in
military fatigues handing out potatoes before making a topless
victory run with purple biohazard warning stickers covering her
nipples. Is this about the military industrial complex, trans-fats
or the insidious way Mr. Potato Head ogled her as a young girl?
Sometimes it’s tough to decipher the message.
Other times it’s far too easy.
To wit: The plus-plus sized burlesque dancer Miss Dirty Martini
offered an interpretive dance version of the PATRIOT Act that began
with her holding some shaky cash-filled scales of justice and ended
with her flipping the audience off and pulling an endless string of
rolled up dollars out of her posterior. This might have been more
awe inspiring if, pretty as she may
be, there wasn’t room enough back there to hide the gold bars
that backed those once-greenbacks up until 1975. Martini did all
this with only a tiny American flag covering the body part Eve
Ensler has been known to dialogue with to create monologues. My
sense is it designated something other than support for the
troops.
This is not to say the show was valueless. A young female writer
read a searing, touching piece about the creeping degradation of
working in a call girl flop-house dubbed Mel-Ho’s Place. Julie
Atlas Muz’s contortions into and dance within a giant latex balloon
was a dignified and elegant piece of performance art. (“On any
given night in New York City,” her bio reads, “you can see Julie
Atlas Muz swimming in a salt water aquarium as a mermaid, peeling
off the outlandish costumes she dons, or covered in fake blood in
the basement of a gay bar.”) Stephen Elliot — author of the
“almost all true sexual memoir,” My Girlfriend Comes to the
City and Beats Me Up — opined, “So much of what we’re talking
about here tonight is labor,” and read a poem, “What If I Was a
Stripper and You Were a Whore,” at least loosely connected to the
topic.
To be generous, let’s assume Reginald Lamar, whose operatic
musical number would likely constitute assault in some states, had
some intellectual/historical purpose when he offered that he
“thinks about lynching” and racial prejudice in America “while old
white men are sucking my cock.”
Mostly, though, the show felt like attending a sex worker trade
conference.
For example, Jo Weldon — winner of the prestigious Best Bump N
Grinder award at the New York Burlesque Festival and an activist
who, as show founder Annie Oakley noted, “Spoke at the f—-ing UN!”
— advised strippers not to wear glitter. “Men tend to carry it
home on them,” Weldon explained. “We call it ‘divorce dust.’”
Don’t accept free drugs from clients, callboy/author Kirk Read
counseled: “When ecstasy is involved, condoms are impossible.”
Whether to take advice from a man painted up like David Bowie circa
Ziggy Stardust, who tells stories that begin with asides
like, “Basically he wanted to put sex toys up my ass while smoking
a cigar — which was fine,” is, of course, a matter of personal
discretion. In a blog post from the tour, Read surveys news
coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death and Britney Spears’ shaved
head and sniffs, “This culture has gone completely insane.” You
think?
“Naked ladies are what make the world go around, right?” Oakley
asked to applause as the show opened. She hastened to add she also
wanted to move naked women “out of the mythological realm” where
they are forced to be “anonymous.” The implication was that the Sex
Workers’ Art Show was an empowering forum where objectification did
not exist.
The question attendees were left to wrestle with alone, however,
was whether simply plastering a look of exaggerated irony on one’s
face while bouncing up and down to twirl shiny nipple tassels
delineates empowerment. If one’s sole qualification for an
alternative strip show is having a body type that mainstream
America will not pay to see unclothed, are you rejecting
objectification or merely marketing your niche to a niche
audience.
Chances are even the sensitive boys in corduroys aren’t staring
at your breasts to make a feminist political statement.
