#sexual transgression

Cosey Fanni Tutti:

I didn’t want to make any sense out of it, not my sense anyway, because the whole point of the project, was that it was what had made sense to the sex industry. I surrendered myself into that industry to be used as they use any other girl, but I didn’t let them know who I was or anything or why I was doing it, otherwise it would be pointless, because I wouldn’t be treated the same way. What I wanted to reveal was the, the thinking of the industry and how different magazines were for different markets. Like you were saying, magazines are so portable, little pocket-size, so people can potentially have them with them all the time, this gives the industry a head start. What was exciting to me, and what I wanted to show, was the differences and the different kind of varied customer-led images that the publishers wanted, even down to the certain positions, the clothing… You’d get the top end, very glamorous ones, like Men Only and Penthouse, which remove a lot of reality away, so that it becomes very much fantasy. But in a different way to the fantasy of the small pocket-size book that’s in black and white with just a couple of colour pages, more or less ‘Readers Wives’ kind of photographs, as if it was the woman next door and the reader is looking through the keyhole. If that was what they were going for, then they’d bring someone who looked like that in and put you together, to do whatever you do together, you know. So that interested me a lot, very specific.

The language in some of those magazines was sometimes quite shocking. There was one phrase in a magazine I did some work in The Piccadilly. So the whole 80 odd pages were framed up in three frames, a real eye-opener, at the end of one of the magazines and it said ‘Does she stink?’ and then there was like an open crotch shot. To me was just like so insulting and really what they were saying, I mean it was a double meaning obviously, but what they were saying was, ‘Is she any good or is this one better, whichever one you decide we’ll put here in the magazine next month.’ But to see it, ‘Does she stink?’ it was just absolutely horrible, and it wasn’t like the lowest of the lowest genre by any means.