I am the product of piles of women’s studies and feminist art classes. I can look at almost any image of a woman (especially one from a magazine!) and tell you how she is being objectified, how the lighting, pose, make-up, and airbrush are giving the model a look that is impossible to achieve, and how that makes real women constantly feel physically inadequate. I can talk about ‘male gaze’ and how images of sexy women make it seem like the entire female gender is one-dimensional and simply waiting for sex.

I’m less pessimistic now. I consider myself a part of a forward-thinking, growing group of women who believes that yeah, there is truth to those beauty issues, but that philosophy also makes me feel guilty about sex and dammit, I like sex.

Here, I’ll describe my ideas with a little more eloquence. In regards to the current way women are represented in mass media, the fact of the matter is that advertisements make viewers feel bad about themselves (physically or otherwise) so that they will purchase a product. No amount of political artwork or feminist writing is going to change that.

So let’s make the best of the current state of affairs. Sure mass-media beauty is the result of hair, make-up, lighting, camera angle, and airbrush, but if beauty is this produced, that also makes it democratic. As TV shows such as “The Swan” have proven, anyone with enough money and time can possess good looks. Anyone can feel sexy.

With that in mind, it has become my mission to create sex-positive images of self-confident women of all shapes, sizes, and ethnicities.

Artwork

What happens when you take some revolutionary sexual politics and mix in a kitch-y craft medium? Besides making an object that is sure to be ultra-hip, you’re producing artwork with a whole new layer of meaning.

When I first developed the process for turning photographs into latch-hook rugs, it made perfect sense to me to hook Playboy-style soft-core pornography. The women in those images still possessed the plasticky beauty that in that point of my art career I loved to hate, but this time I was more interested in placing medium against subject in order to point out the dichotomous relationship between a crafty, 'motherly' type woman and a sexually confident 'slutty' woman. In our society it is nearly impossible for a woman to be both types, when really the two should be able to coexist.

That first body of work appropriated images exclusively from Playboy.com and was especially successful in embodying the aforementioned beauty-standards-are-oppressive vs. sex-is-good argument. I used the Playboy imagery because I wanted to spark a discussion about mainstream beauty principles.

My work was successful largely because of the giggly irony of seeing a sex-pot image in a medium that you associate with your grandmother. It also embodies a reaction against mass-consumerism, both in the handmade element to the work and the sex-for-sex’s-sake imagery, rather than sex being used to sell a product. In that way pornography is more honest than advertising.

In my current artwork, I’ve started to make and sell kits so that anyone can make their own rug of a sexy woman. This is the culmination of efforts to make my artwork more affordable, accessible, and to strengthen the personal connection that one has to the work by having the viewer actually make the work. I have limited the number of Playboy images that I use and make kits more in line with my politics: I use photographs of self-confident women of all shapes, sizes, and ethnicities.