Goddesses and doormatsOn an encounter with Picasso’s nudes and a memory of ‘male masturbatory devices’ at a sex toy convention.
Recently, at the Picasso museum in Antibes, I stood in front of a female nude—her body fractured and twisted, butt and breasts existing impossibly on the same plane—and I kept thinking about “male masturbatory devices.” That’s me trying to gently ease you in here. I mean pocket pussies. I mean disembodied butts and breasts. All the hyper-realistically rendered body parts that I used to browse back in the day—in a state of almost disassociation—while in Las Vegas reporting on the Adult Novelty Expo, looking for a story on my beat of sex, technology, and gender. It was a B2B gathering of sex toy businesses from all over the world and coincided with the Adult Entertainment Expo and AVN Awards, the so-called Oscars of porn.
I am pro-masturbation, of course, and also: those devices always looked like severed body parts to me. Like a woman had been hacked to pieces and then presented on a table in a massive air-conditioned exhibition hall for hundreds of people (mostly men) to browse, while poking, slapping, squeezing. I hear someone object: “What about dildos, though, aren’t they just disembodied penises?” Sure. I'm just telling you how it felt to me—living, as I do, in a world where women’s bodies are routinely reduced to objects and instruments. Am I the first person standing in front of a Picasso to think of a pocket pussy? I wonder. But that painting brought to mind all those devices laid out on the table, all the fractured body parts served up on the same plane. Then I found myself in the gift shop buying a copy of Life with Picasso, a memoir written by Francoise Gilot, an artist, Picasso’s partner for a decade, and the mother of two of his children. And thus I spent the rest of my vacation in France reading about how this genius—the most important artist of the 20th century, some say—abused and mistreated the women in his life.
I am fresh off that vacation, having bopped around by car and train with C. and our kid, from Paris to Saint-Rémy-de-Provence to Cotignac to Verdon Gorge. We ended up in Antibes, where the famed Picasso museum sits in the Old Town, right along the coast, overlooking the blue blue blue of the Mediterranean. Somehow, I’d forgotten about how Hannah Gadsby’s 2018 Netflix special, Nanette, skewered Picasso’s relationship to women and girls. “I don’t like Picasso, I fucking hate him,” said Gadsby. “He’s rotten in the face cavity... I hate him and you can’t make me like him.” That hate arose from his misogynistic behavior. Gilot’s book came out in 1964, after Picasso tried to sue to prevent its publication, and detailed her own experiences with that behavior, which included everything from Picasso burning her cheek with a cigarette during an argument to threatening to throw her in the Seine. She also recounted choice quotes from him, such as: “I'd rather see a woman die, any day, than see her happy with someone else.” Then there’s his famous line about how there are only two types of women: “goddesses and doormats.” Gilot was not alone, of course. Claire Dederer summarizes his monstrosity well in Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma:
In her book, Dederer is less interested in tidily resolving the question of whether you can or should separate the art from the artist, but rather in “the stain” left by a monstrous biography on a body of work. It’s not just that the awareness of the monstrous biography leaves a stain for the viewer—the monstrousness often makes its mark on the art, too. The poked-and-prodded hyperrealistic pocket pussy memory feels like an accurate enough symbol of Picasso’s relationship to women. Then again: I can’t say whether I was reading Picasso’s subconscious so much as reacting with my own subjectivity as a woman in this world. A woman who has felt herself sliced and diced, reduced to doormat and object.
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