Schneider - Orgasm: interviews on Intimacy

Originally published as Orgasm: Photographs &Interviews

Linda Troeller and Marion Schneider

Breaking Taboos Prof. Jacques Poulain

About Female Orgasm Dr. Betty Dodson

2014 Daylight Community Arts Foundation

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ISBN: 978-1-942084-26-6

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I firmly believe that womens mysteries, when explored by artists, will change the way the world looks and the way we look at the world. You have ALL the power; you only have to decide what to do with it.

Jerry Saltz, art critic and columnist, New York magazine

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Contents

Women seldom talk about their most intimate feelingsnot even with their girlfriends, husbands, or boyfriends, let alone with anybody else. This is one of the main reasons why weLinda Troeller, photographer, and Marion Schneider, writerstarted this project. We wanted to open up a space where women could talk about their orgasmic thoughts and feelings. This book was created for all those who want to understand more about women and the female orgasm.

On the very first evening we met in 1994, we discussed the possibility of launching a project regarding female eroticism. It took four years to bring about our first book, The Erotic Lives of Women. It was called one of the most gutsy and imaginative erotic books of the decade by the New York Times when it was published in 1998. Our goal was to show eroticism from a female perspective. We did not influence the women in how to present themselves, what they would wear, and how they would show their feelingsthese were left to the women interviewed to decide. Thirty-four women from all over the world found the courage to talk and to show their feelings to the camera.

Orgasm is an even more intimate topic. Women and men are confronted with prefabricated models of it. Is what they see and read in the media really what its like? Does it represent their feelings? Very young people are already dealing with these questions, because the world of images and intimacy is entering every part of the global community. They switch roles and explore who else they could be in playful sexual situations.

The world of orgasm is physical, but it is also a world of fantasy, culture, historyand very much a world of the soul. Some women were eager to express themselves because they had suffered from strict taboos or from other forms of repression of their feelings or their individuality. Some women simply wanted to share their joy and pleasure and wanted to help other women to find out about it, too. The chance to be in an intimate situation with a female photographer and a female writer offered safety and security for the interviewees, enhancing the probability that their statements would be a genuine and authentic revelation.

This book and this project are intended to foster the discussion of female sexuality. The concept of gender and gender roles in the Western world is attaining greater flexibility thanks to a quickly emerging plurality of forms from mono- to trans- to pan-gender culture. Due to the growing global impact of visual media, all parts of the world are affected by this process. The book encourages women to express their thoughts and feelings on orgasm, and to share them with others. It involves 25 women of different ages, nationalities, and cultural and social backgrounds. Nine of the women are German, six are American, three are Dutch, three are Israeli, two are Colombian, one is French, and one is Portuguese. Many of them participated in editing the photographs that show their feelings best.

Marion Schneider & Linda Troeller

Writer Marion Schneider asked the questions and taped the interviews.

Photographer Linda Troeller took the pictures right after the answer to each question, intending to stay as close as possible to the womens original statements.

The women gave us their stories, their emotions and the expression they wished to share, and for some it led to orgasm.

For me, photography is a glow of the present, and the possibility of entering the next atmosphere. When I was 20, I experienced a deep kinship with my first camera, a Rollei, at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, when Georgia OKeeffe told me, Let the powers out there in the desert guide you. Leonora Carrington, the surrealist painter from Mexico, sent me to take the waters in San Jos Pura to expand my consciousness. Both women guided me to learn about mythic absorption.

A few years later, I learned the power of intimacy and how to make ones relationship with a sitter evolve while I was on the other side of the camera as a model at Nude in the Landscape at the Ansel Adams Workshop. Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe and French photographer Lucien Clergue photographed me differently. Hosoe molded me, choosing an appointed spot, and Clergue challenged me to choose my own way and captured an interpretation of how I presented myself. These seminal constructs guided me to develop my own ways to identify very, very personal triggers to heighten, charge, and divulge instincts to recognize transcendent, compelling moments.

Since my first published photograph of a woman with a cut-off wedding dress ripped off at the waist, standing over a huge cactus, was published in the Village Voice, Ive often chosen to explore taboos. This project goes deeper into the chasm of sexual identity. Photography, like radiation, is dangerous, uncanny, but also potentially healing.

Judith Butler writes that one may feel the need to be recognized in order to live, but that at the same time, the prerequisites for being recognized make life unlivable. My practice is to reflect on things we need that take us forward, or give us pause: Who am I? What is natural? What is borderline? What is eternal?

Linda Troeller

Dr. Betty Dodson, Sexologist and Orgasm Expert

There is an enormous variation in how people describe and experience an orgasm. Its a very personal experience. An orgasm happens after a woman gets turned on over a period of time and eventually releases her sexual tension with the end-pleasure of a climax. What that feeling is like varies. After building up sexual tension for some time, getting more and more excited, at some point, the body takes over and releases the sexual tension in one or more orgasms. For men, thats usually an ejaculation. For women, our orgasm doesnt include ejaculation, but it can for the few who are being clitorally stimulated at the same time. Now because women can have more orgasms than men once we get started, we can rest a few moments and with some form of clitoral stimulation, go on to have another orgasm. Thats what they call being multi-orgasmic. This doesnt mean that we have one orgasm after another. Each one requires some form of continued stimulation.

I wouldnt even try to describe an orgasm, thats asking too much. Every person will have their own definition, and theyll describe their own sensations. Our main problem today is that society is still using the male model of sexual arousal, which seldom works for us. We operate quite differently, as most women need some form of clitoral stimulation instead of vaginal penetration alone. Men have a pretty straightforward climb up until they reach a climax. Then everything goes back to normal. Our buildup is far more indirect, because we will be thinking about the laundry, what we will have for dinner tonight, and floating around out there until finally we nail it. Thats when we have our orgasm. Then, after we have rested a moment, we can go back to some form of clitoral stimulation and have another orgasm.