[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_35

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, collection of writings, 1978 – 1982, Audre Lorde

Years ago, I created an Instagram account to share my photographs and drawings, but I was repeatedly blocked due to a pair of female nipples appearing in some sketches. It lasted a few months, and I deleted the account to move to Behance, a platform for creatives. I discovered that even in a virtual space designed for artistic expression, there were "rules of coexistence" and that even here, the female nipple was the bone of contention.

On October 1st, I started the 100 challenge: a project that involves the presentation of a book, a doodle, and an article a day for one hundred days, to which I have chosen to give a feminist imprint. I also created an album on my Behance page to keep track of the project and to be able to show it more easily to those who are interested, censoring the drawings to comply with the platform's guidelines. Last week the album was blocked for a drawing in which a little heart hides a vagina. I wondered how it is possible not to distinguish the difference between nudity and pornography, between expression of hate and artistic expression. Suppose the simple nudity of a body is so harmful to minors. In that case, they should also be prevented from entering museums, studying the history of art, or watching themselves naked in the mirror!

On the same day, I was reading some news from Italy where all the media attention was concentrated on the topic of pornography. It would seem that to access porn content, Italians will have to register using the SPID, an electronic recognition system that is hard to use. Every time you have to access the post office service, your bank account, or the public health system, you must use the SPID. It’s like having in front of you an ancient Sumerian code that refers to forgotten ancestral knowledge you don’t know or, more plausibly, sends you back into a loop in the system preventing you from accessing it. You think you simply have to access your reserved area; in reality, you face the enigma of the sphinx. I tell this funny episode of contemporary Italian news because it clearly shows what interests are in evidence: how to control a fourteen-year-old with agitated hormones by putting a lock on all porn for everyone. And it is also an interesting example to show how easily all people's attention is shifted away from topics that risk being truly important for citizens.

In any case, what interests me here is: what is pornography? What is eroticism? What is their boundary? Who decides what is harmful to whom? And based on what? And, compared to this, where are art and information positioned to be called "expressive freedoms truly"? These are not easy questions to answer; above all, they cannot be considered without relating them to civil coexistence, respect for sensitivities, the right to express oneself, and inclusiveness.

We live in a contradictory landscape in which one can be scandalized thinking that Galileo Galilei abjured when the Church did not accept the truth of his vision. We are scandalized because it violated the sacred lawof the freedom of expression. But at the same time, one can also be challenged, if not annoyed, by the continued republication of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” even if its censorship could be considered an injury to freedom of expression.

Messages of hatred, violence, discrimination, and racism can be posted on Twitter and porn channels. Onecan watch hours of free rape simulations towards bounded or fainted women, but if you post a nipple on Instagram, you will be blocked; if a nude is posted on platforms for artists, the profile is censured. We dream of freedom and freedom of expression, but this sometimes conflicts with what is permitted by the Media we use and the communities we belong to.

I have no answers to this issue, but I find it terrifying that our naked bodies are turned into something wrong instead of being celebrated as wonders. Censoring our nudes means sexualizing them, associating our intimate parts only with sexual intercourse, which, in turn, is not seen as usual but as something shameful or dangerous, something to hide. We define "retrograde" ancient censorship practices (Michelangelo's nudes in the Sistine Chapel are all censored with colored cloths), but perhaps we should also find a definition for ours.

I want to share some fragments of Audre Lorde's text "Uses of the erotic" because it enchantingly shows how eroticism is pure and free energy, especially for women, contrasting it with abuse, represented by the world of porn: “There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feelings. To perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives. We have been taught to suspect, vilify, abuse, and devalue within Western society.

On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by its existence […]. The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornographic is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling. The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our most substantial feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. Having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect, we can require no less of ourselves”.