Keep This Sex Out Of My Sight

Ever since women artists gave themselves the right to express their sexual fantasies, their work has reserved surprises for those who once expressed their fantasies for them. In a raw language that ignores taboos and describes images that are sometimes hard to cope with, these women speak of sex like Courbet painted The Origin of the World. Keep This Sex Out of My Sight is a hymn to women's sex, a sanctification of a feminine desire so often erased, hidden, and forgotten. For the artists whose texts and images appear here, obscenity has become a territory in which lurks the source of the fear of their bodies. In it can be conjured the mutilating weight of masculine observation and its post-religious, obscurantist remnants, where pornography is the response to the fear of the female sexual organ. Showing the unshowable parts of the body flies in the face of social constraint, of plays for power where sexual liberation and liberation are all too often confused, where sex becomes political because of its integral role in the field of individual control.