New York Gender Politics:
Idiomatic Pussy

Kofi Fosu Forson

What if all women were like the ones featured in drawings by Diebenkorn? In a postmodernist world they would want to be Vanessa Beecroft’s models.

And what about men…would they prefer to be in a Brett Easton Ellis novel? Probably Richard Kern is the closest thing to how modern art begot contemporary pornography.

Language was Anna Nicole Smith in a Guess Jeans ad…statuesque, blond, beautiful and feminine. The black woman preceded that notion with Pam Greer.

If language is metaphorically female then our only options are common women found in cyber-erotic films, female pop stars and Hollywood actresses. Personally I prefer lady volley ball players.

In New York, women train their minds to be Kathy Acker and yet carry themselves with the grace of a character from a Joyce Carol Oates’ novel. New York women are less Edith Wharton and more My Mother, Demonology.

Prose is a foundation. Semiotically, advertisement is the bible by which we locate a sum of things that are estimated to form what is said at a bar, cocktail party or lecture.

The pattern for communication isn’t intellect. It’s centeredness, whether as a mail man, construction worker, secretary or waitress. What is said however warrants a means of conviction as to what one demands or deserves. The in-between is purely systematic. There’s a common ideology but logic is nothing but fodder.

Within means of a heterosexual world, men and women are driven by personal success. It often brings about fornication. Much is assuaged by religion, morality and family. Other than that pressure to perform coitus lingers in the mind, as cyberspace has made it more pronounceable.

New York sex is two people, a man and a woman sitting across from each other in a subway car. They lust. Nothing is said. The same evening these two serendipitously meet at a party. Later that night, they walk their separate ways having had sex in a bathroom.