Are You Looking At My Bum? Cheeky Monkey!

Warning: Guest Blogging

People who are willing to get naked in public are often the people who should wear a turtleneck and some long, loose trousers. Hopefully the correct size, maybe even two sizes bigger.

If anyone has been privy to a demonstration in San Francisco, they can empathize. There is always a man who feels the need to protest the latest travesty by stripping and flaunting his tragic genitalia for all to gander at.

This is also the case with the male models in my life drawing class. Most, if not all have genitals that should never ever be seen, let alone concentrated upon for careful study and graphically reproduced. One guy is difficult to look at not only for what’s going on in his tighty-whities, but also due to his classroom demeanor. Various names exist, but my favorite is “Lord of the Rings Guy.” With his double chin flaccidly swaying with every energetic leap into a new pose, he raises his sword or staff (depends on his mood, I suppose) as if he were a D and D character come to life. I wish I could say that I was mature enough to handle it, but obviously I’m not. He always manages to stare defiantly at the students drawing, which is terribly unnerving as I am often trying not to completely lose my shit.

My composure failed me on a Friday afternoon. I was already bored. The graduate assistant was going to let us go home early, but then she changed her mind and asked the model to choose to leave or pose again. Lord of the Rings Guy is no slacker; he’s a font of energy and excitement. He loves being naked and flexing his flab for all to see. He said that he’d like to do a very special pose. The class as a whole groaned audibly. The graduate assistant told him to make it a ten minute pose. What ensued took easily twice that time. “This pose requires a bit of set up. It comes from a film entitled Dragonfly starring Kevin Costner,” he began. This is when I had to slowly start to turn around and look at my friends in shock and horror. For the next ten minutes he shared the lengthy and uninteresting plot points and denouement of a craptacular film that barely made half of its budget in the six weeks it floundered at the box office. As he came toward the end of the synopsis my friend Morgan insistently motioned for me to turn around. As I did I saw that the model was bending over to retrieve something from his bag of tricks. It was a small, plastic, anatomically correct male baby doll.

The model cradled the baby in his hands reverently as he kneeled on the model stand and gazed in wonder at a baby doll that had the same size penis as his own.

While I was in Japan, I “borrowed” some of my host brother’s porn out of curiosity. There is a law in Japan that states that pubic hair cannot be shown. Nor can penetration. So how does a film get around that? A digital mosaic which only gives the vague impression of what is going on downstairs. (I should mention that this law is ignored quite often; my host brother just had a crappy porn collection.)

As I stood behind my easel trying to draw the negative shapes around the model and his baby doll, without actually drawing the figures themselves, I wanted nothing more than a Japanese filmmaker to make it all go away...