notes.husk.org/likes images.

Top, photograph by James P. Blair, Women use compact mirrors in packed crowd to catch sight of the queen in London, June 1966. Via. Bottom, screen capture from Alex Prager, Face in the Crowd, 2013; three-channel video installation (color, sound); Edition of 3. Via.

–

And it doesn’t help matters that a number of prominent voices in psychology, sexology, and medicine have conditioned us to believe that female sexuality is far less straightforward than male sexuality. Blank notes that respected scholars—including pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis, whose twentieth century writings offered early scientific perspectives on homosexuality and transgender identity—have upheld the idea that female sexuality is in greater need of deciphering than male sexuality, reinforcing the notion of the male experience as “normal” in the process.

When male sexuality is considered self-evident, there’s no room for deceit. We simply “assume that whatever any given man does is what men do,” Hanne Blank told me. The comparative opacity of female sexuality renders women capable of deception—and thus assumed to be deceiving. “Women’s sexuality becomes that thing that must constantly be examined and questioned and validated or invalidated.”

Lux Alptraum, from Sex, lies, and women: The long and troubling history of faking it, for Fusion, May 2016.