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2. Would You Like Me to Seduce You?
- University of Arkansas Press
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of embarrassment or recognition). “They think I’m cute!” she said with the self-satisfied little-girl chirp and smug smile that Clark and I made fun of behind her back. Fair enough: she was cute. Then I thought to myself, But I’m cuter. And although I wouldn’t begin posing for over a year, this was the first time in my young adult life that art modeling registered with me as an acceptable means of earning money, a job that nice, normal people can and do do. Not that everyone would necessarily agree with my application of the words nice and normal. There have been occasions where people have seemed eager to employ words like “kinky” and “desperate” and “not too bright.” In fairness, some of these descriptors would be apt for models I’ve met, but for every kinked-out wannabe stripper I run into, there are a dozen down-to-earth, intelligent, confident models who have decided to supplement their incomes with what can be a fulfilling and satisfying second or third job. And this debate over the acceptability of offering nudity for money leads me to the next room of the Memory Palace: the kitchen, because it was in a kitchen, or rather, in Zander’s Café in Downers Grove, Illinois, where I took my mother to lunch to soften the blow of my coming out to her as a nude model. My mom is in the kitchen, sitting at the table, and so is Madonna, because she used to be an artist’s model before she hit it big. Depending on who I’m talking to, this Fun Fact either makes my means of supplementing my income through nudity sound more legitimate or increasingly unseemly. Writing about photographer Lee Friedlander’s Nudes—which, incidentally , includes four semi-identifiable shots of Madonna—Vicki Goldberg states that the explicit pictures “don’t embarrass me, nor do I see anything wrong with male curiosity about female anatomy, but no doubt some will think these pictures exploitative and/or pornographic, two words that increasingly elude a consensus definition.” She wonders, as I do, about the “double issues of the photographer’s intention and the viewer’s reaction.” How was an image made; how will it be seen? What does it matter if the creator is no smut-monger, if that is how an audience insists on seeing? Goldberg concludes that “as to intent, Friedlander’s art credentials were impeccable and his models were consenting adults, fully aware of what was visible between their legs when they parted them, and so far as I can tell entirely undamaged by the images.” This all sounds 38 Chapter One OK. But the phrase “consenting adults” seems to imply that the act being consented to is a disreputable one. This is definitely what my mom would think, and this is why I kept the truth from her for so long, over two years. Although my sisters knew, I lied to both of my parents about it—lies of omission mostly, which seems to be the preferred tactic among my fellow models who have also felt the need to keep their job hush-hush. My friend and fellow model Bruno, the one I helped get into modeling in the first place when he was looking for something to supplement his income as a security guard at the Museum of Fine Arts, told me: “Some of my relatives in Portugal, I don’t even tell them, because they’d be like, ‘Why are you doing that?’ Older relatives [ . . . ] I don’t think they see it as anything obscene and it’s not that they disapprove , I just think it’s not something that most people think about. I think in that way, some people might get the attitude that if you’re posing nude for a little extra money, then you could do other things for money.” There it is again, this conflation of selling images of your body with actually selling your body itself. Interestingly enough, as Theresa M. Danna points out, “Historically, modeling for artists has been considered by those outside the art community to be a lowly profession—even lower than prostitution . It has been reported that a young girl in a French café who agreed to pose for a painter insisted, ‘Don’t tell my mother, she thinks I walk the streets.’” It is also reported that on the other side of the channel, in...