What is it about the words “naked” and “therapy” being forced to sit calmly next to each other that drives people so crazy?

On April 19, 2012, I was accepted as an artist into the West Chelsea Artists Open Studios (WCAOS), which is happening this weekend. On May 1, 2012, I was removed from the event by the director, Scotto Mycklebust. The removal came after I submitted the image you can see here as my feature art for the event’s promotional materials. I was told in an email from the director that I was being removed because my art was an “ad” and that I am a “commercial entity” and “not an artist.”

As you can read here I was essentially booted because Mr. Mycklebust assumed that my placing my url – TheNakedTherapist.org – on my art meant that I was one of those entities (I imagine he’s met one) that “take advantage of this free event to promote their own businesses.”

Problem is, TheNakedTherapist.org is not my Naked Therapy practice website. That’s at SarahWhiteTherapy.com. TheNakedTherapist.org was going to be the location for a web-based performance piece I planned on doing as part of my Open Studio event. So it’s an art site, not a business. Further, I have a series of pieces in which I use my url as a symbol in my art, along with some other parts of my artistic vocabulary, including my body, Internet icons, and photos of men. So why was I “promoting my business”?

I think there are basically three issues here.

On the issue of ads vs. art…

So, what’s the difference between an ad and art? To answer that, I’ll first ask some questions (since I am, after all, a therapist). If an artist signs his paintings, does that render them illegitimate acts of self-promotion, i.e. ads? If a performance artist sends in her face as her feature art for a festival, is she submitting a piece of self-promotion, or art? If Damien Hirst placed TheRichestArtist.org on an orange field, would it sell as art? How is the use of my face and my url any different than Keith Haring using the exploding dog or Murakami using Mr. DOB?

Fact is, I actually take Mr. Mycklebust’s assertion that he removed me from WCAOS because he thought my art was “promoting my business” as being an accurate statement of how he felt, but I also find it to be the exact issue that is so troubling. And it’s troubling because I believe that I was removed because what I do for a living is considered by some to be illegitimate and illegitimizing; because I am a woman using the performative body provocatively, positively and unironically inside and outside my art; because some in the art world have yet to recognize the realities and modalities of the 21st century in which the Internet deeply blurs the lines between self-promotion, commerce and art; and because I am not yet a “famous” (i.e. “money-making”) artist. All of these reasons for my removal point out some very interesting and unwritten rules and assumptions and even prejudices in the art world and our society that need to be discussed and considered, as they are being here.

On the issue of commercial entity vs. artist…

I am a practicing artist. That is why I was accepted into WCAOS. For over a decade I have been a photographer whose work centers on themes of desire, body, sexuality, visibility, catharsis, Americana, e-connections and the forbidden. For the last two years I have been creating art in conversation with my Naked Therapy practice, which focuses on arousal, display, transient spaces, the Internet, the cultural quotidien, relationships, aspiration and the interplay between mentalities.

I put the phrases “Naked Therapy” and “The Naked Therapist” on my art as a political statement. I have been censored and banned from Facebook, Master’s programs, licensing institutions, and now an “open” arts festival. Why? Simply because of those words. That’s why I put them on my art. To call attention to them, to rouse and challenge the emotions they cause, and to stand up for what I believe in…therapy (and art!) that accepts and engages eros.

Despite initially accepting me as an artist who he knew practiced Naked Therapy, it would seem that as I started requesting to be identified as who I am – Sarah White, The Naked Therapist – Mr. Mycklebust began to feel that my practicing Naked Therapy, along with my desire to include it in my identity as an artist and my artistic work, meant I didn’t have the right to call myself an artist. I find this deeply troubling as well. As I mentioned above, it implies that if a woman uses the performative body provocatively in her professional life, she is delegitimized from using it in her art. My art is informed by the Internet, by performance art, and by commercial activities, which I don’t believe should take away my “right” to call myself an artist.

On the issue of censorship vs. freedom…

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp tried to enter a urinal as a piece of art into the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists. Entitled “Fountain,” it was rejected by the committee, even though it was stated in the rules of the exhibition that the event would accept art from any artist who paid the fee.

In 2012, I tried to enter an image that montaged a photo of a man, a photo of myself, and one of my url’s into the West Chelsea Artists Open Studio. I was then removed from the event by the director, even though it was stated on the application that the event was “open to all West Chelsea artists.”

Duchamp said the urinal was art; I say I am art.

You decide…

And there are two ways you can do that. Comment below, or come to my Independent Open Studio on May 13 from 4 – 8 pm at the Hôtel Americano in Chelsea (518 West 27th Street, NYC) being held in protest of my removal from the WCAOS. At that event I will show my work and host an open discussion forum on the issues of ads vs. art, commercial entity vs. artist, and the professional segregation of women who use the performative body provocatively.

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Hear the news? Next to friends and family, online dating is now the second most common way to meet your mate. Now, some of you might be thinking, “Ugh! When will this insipid e-xodus into virtual non-reality stop? First we upload our libidos and sex goes cyber. Then a ‘friend’ becomes someone you accept or decline with a click. Now the wonderful mating dance is nothing but scrolling through personals and sending out pasted pleadings to likely matches. The Internet is the new opium, the world’s waiting to be asked to dance, and if we wanna really get it on we’ve gotta turn it off!”

But hold on a minute. While I’ll freely admit that it’s awfully enticing to fritter away far too much of our personal potential surfing around in a state of useless distraction, I’d like to point out that we often don’t know what something does for us until we stop obsessing over what it’s done to us. Yes, the Internet has ushered in some quite degrading, if not destructive, ways for us to blow our precious time, but to paraphrase McLuhan, the medium is a mirage. An incredibly alluring, accessible, and anonymizing mirage, but a mirage nonetheless. If you don’t look at it, but through it, you’ll see that it’s not there. It’s merely a figment of our infatuation.

And as such, it’s a wonderful thing. It’s a reference library. It’s a gaming world. It’s a community meeting. It’s a political movement. It’s a family reunion. It’s an information booth. It’s a soapbox. It’s a fan zine. It’s an art gallery. It’s a performance space. It’s an awesome singles bar. It’s a fundraising opportunity. It’s an emotional vent. It’s a personal broadcasting channel. And now, it’s the second most common way we find that most important and instinctual of all needs: love.

So I say it’s time to remove the angst over Internet usage, because too much of a good thing may be a bad thing, but it never gets to be a good thing if all you worry about is if it’s a bad thing! Let’s stop feeling guilty, and start feeling giddy, for hanging out online. Let’s realize that it’s not what you’re doing, it’s what you’re doing it for. If you’re spending 50% of your life in the cloud, stop beating yourself up and start patting yourself down: Why am I doing this? What am I getting out of this? How is this making the most of me? Because as long as you plug what’s real about yourself into what you’re doing, then what you’re doing is real, even if it’s virtual.

On February 6, 2012, the second place matchmaking status of online dating was announced. So I say we make that Internet Appreciation Day. On that day we’ll all throw out our “shoulda woulda coulda” about how much we’re on the web and toss ourselves guiltlessly into the cyber sea. We’ll revel in all the files we download, the comments we post, the blogs we read, the friends we accept, the tweets we blast, and the love letters we send to available members, and when we’re done, we’ll log off and fall into the arms of our friends and family, who, need I remind you, are still, and will probably always be, Number One.

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On trips to Florida, Arizona, Maine, and Hawaii over the last couple years they’d spent a large portion of the time eco-tourizing – hiking, canoeing, camping outdoors. It’s what they like to do. It gets them close to beautiful and remote natural places, invigorates their bodies, and provides them with a challenging, immersive experience that they can share together.

He first noticed the phenomenon I’m going to describe in Florida. They’d just come out of the Everglades, where they’d experienced an incredible plethora of plant and animal life, the most exciting of which was a lagoon full of manatees. As they kayaked quietly in circles, the giant sweet sea cows rolled about beneath them, coming up occasionally for air. He said it was amazing to be so close to these fragile, massive, peaceful water mammals.

That night, they made love in their tent, and there was something new about it. Neither of them mentioned it during sex, but afterward, as they lay together talking, she mentioned that she felt like sex had been somehow different, and he said, “Yeah, I felt like a manatee.” They went on to discuss how there’d been a different vibe, pace, breath, motion between them that was informed by the natural world they’d just been immersed in. They were somehow channeling this world into their own sensuality, and it was completely thrilling.

And the same thing happened in the next three locations. In Arizona, in a remote slot canyon surrounded by granite walls, saguaro cactus, and scrambling lizards, they had sex that just somehow felt completely infused with the mysterious desert surroundings. In Maine, canoeing on the wild Allagash river, with its bald eagles, beavers, and glorious foliage, they had sex that felt riparian, aquatic and vast. They soared and swam through each other like the creatures they’d seen along the route. And in Hawaii, sleeping on remote beaches, eating guava and oranges right off the trees, and frolicking in the water falls, their sex was full of the energies, flavors and motions of waves and fruit and fresh rushing water.

Now, one could certainly say that this was all in their heads, but isn’t that the point? These natural surroundings had gone to their heads (and their bodies) and they had changed the way they moved, felt, related, and, inevitably, behaved sexually with each other. Without these natural places, they would probably never have experienced such sensual revolutions.

And that’s what I told my client. I assured him that I thought the synaesthetic experiences they were having were perfectly normal, and quite beautiful, and I told him that he’d enlightened me to something in my own life. His story had shown me why I am an avid environmentalist. Biodiversity is sensual diversity, is spiritual diversity. With every ecosystem we preserve, we preserve an opportunity for our minds and bodies to experience a different reality and to share different sensations with each other. Deforestation, species and habitat loss, and the mono-culturing of nature is robbing us of our very selves. For after all, we are to a great extent what we are in, and if all we are in are homogenized, de-naturized places, it’s not just great sex we’ll miss out on. Our lives will become vastly less interesting as our minds and bodies lose their input from the wonderfully diverse world of nature. And that would be a tragedy of planetary proportions.

The post The Erotics of the Environment appeared first on The Faster Times.

No, I’m not trying to start some “spread the peace” movement, though that would be a wonderful byproduct. Rather, I pose this challenge to help you see that all the hate you feel for someone who’s “done you wrong,” all the disgust you hurl at your neighbor’s “lifestyle,” all the scorn you pile upon those who seem “different,” all this loathing might be a gateway drug to higher forms of love, and if you embrace the object of your disfavor you may discover one of life’s most transformative realizations: we can’t know what someone does for us until we stop obsessing over what they’ve done to us.

Take the case of George, one of my clients. As soon as his kids fly the nest, his wife starts openly cheating on him. She calls him on the phone and lets him hear her having sex with her new boy toy. She refuses to make love with him because she claims he can’t compare to what she’s getting from the newbie. And she constantly tells him that were he a real man, he’d leave her. So what do I tell George? Leave the bitch? No. I tell him to write a love note to his wife’s new stud muffin, letting him know how grateful he is that he’s bringing pleasure back into his wife’s life.

Does he do it? Yep. Does it help him? Big time. Because, deep down, George loves his wife’s new playboy. He’s been feeling inadequate for years. His marriage had become sexless long ago. He had stopped seeing his wife as alluring. But her infidelity (a misnomer for what is in fact often an act of deep and desperate faith in the potential of a relationship) roused his dormant emotions and made him feel excited again!

So what does he do with all that excitement? Something truly brave. He embraces the cuckold lifestyle. Yes, in one of the more productive reaction adjustments of the modern age, being a cuckold, which for centuries was cause enough for a man to murder his wife (e.g. Othello), is now a growing fetish in which a man gains sexual gratification from his partner having intercourse with other people. That’s right. George and his wife are not only having sex again, but he’s also enjoying the experience of watching her make it with his rival. His world has been blown wide open, he’s exploring new erotic horizons, and he’s feeling better than ever. Happy Valentines Day, Mr. Other Man. I love you!

Now if only I can get Rick Santorum to send some candy hearts to Dan Savage

xoxo

Sarah White The Naked Therapist SarahWhiteTherapy.com

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In a recent Journal of Personality and Social Psychology article entitled “More than a Body: Mind Perception and the Nature of Objectification,” researchers published a fascinating study that investigates the verity of the claim that “looking at someone sexually objectifies them.” As the authors point out, this assertion has a long history, going all the way back (at least) to Immanuel Kant who said in 1780, “sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry.” But, of course, the objectification of the love object has found its most recent opponents in feminists of the last forty years who have fought the good fight in trying to get men not to “objectify” women by looking at them as mere fruity produce to be desiccated with sucking.

The researchers basically showed men pictures of women either clothed, naked or doing something sexually suggestive, then asked them to judge the extent to which the women they were looking at were capable of self control, planning and acting morally (called “having agency”) and the degree to which they were capable of feeling fear, desire and pleasure (called “having experience”). The results showed that when a woman’s body has more “salience” (with parts protruding out, i.e. seeming sexually suggestive) she was considered to have less “agency” but more “experience.”

The moral of this story is that a woman who pulls up her shirt and jiggles her jugs for the camera (Research Targets Gone Wild!) is judged by men to be more out of control, mindless of the future, and morally loose (she has less “agency”) than the girl who keeps her privates private. However, Lil’ Miss Okay is judged by men to be more capable of feeling fear, desire and pleasure (she has more “experiences”) than Lil’ Miss No Way. The conclusion of the researchers: pornography doesn’t lead men to look at women as objects – to view them, for instance, as a block of wood in need of drilling – rather it leads them to “redistribute the mind” of such women – to judge them as less capable of thinking ahead in a reasonable way and more capable of having deep experiences.

So, what to make of all this? When we ask why men look at pornography, the answer rarely gets much more in-depth than “because they’re pigs.” We might label them addicts, or perverts, or simply one-track minded, but that’s about as far as we go. The whole question of why so many men seem so incredibly driven to savor shots of naked bodies that they went and created something as massive and complex as the Internet to make it easier to do so (only a slight exaggeration) doesn’t seem to hold much interest for researchers. But I think the study above shines some very interesting light on the why of all those quintillions of salient megapixels.

Men are not just looking to be sexually aroused by images of the human body; they are looking to have an interaction with a kind of human being whose distribution of mind, even if they are the ones doing the distributing, is different than their own. They are looking to encounter someone who takes more risks, has more feelings, experiences more pleasures than they do. They are looking, in short, for someone less rational and more sensual.

And they do this because men are both nurtured and naturally inclined to be strong, rational, calculating, planning creatures – in short, to have lots of agency. But what they are missing in their lives is the ability to experience life at a more emotional, visceral, vulnerable, risky level – as expressed through open sexuality, deep emotion, and careless abandon – an ability they see in their objects of desire. In other words, they are not just looking to get off when they click through porn sites, they are also looking for the redistribution of mind toward more experience and less agency that the people on those porn sites represent – a redistribution that they long to take place in their own bodies but aren’t sure how to make happen, so they get it vicariously through porn.

Certainly, most of this is unconscious. Men don’t say to themselves when they go to log onto their favorite porn site, “I’m looking to vicariously absorb a deeper reality by becoming aroused by someone I see as having more emotions and richer experiences.” But that is in part what they’re doing. Our goal should be to help them realize that and for this unconscious urge to start finding its way into other searches – for real women, for their own emotions, for more actual experiences.

But at the same time we need to stop punishing them for this search expressing itself through actions that we typically take to be “objectifying of women.” The ones doing this punishing are, of course, typically women, who do not appreciate at all their mind being redistributed by men and want to be seen by them as having more agency. But women should realize first that the women performing salaciously are doing it, for the most part, of their own volition, and second that what has been typically deemed “objectification” by men also contains a deep admiration by men for women seen as possessing abilities – deeper experiences, emotions and sensualities – they themselves wish they had. In other words, while there certainly might be some “looking down” when a man “objectifies” a woman, there is also some “looking up,” too. Women who are more comfortable with this mix will lead to men who are more comfortable accepting that their porn searches are in part a search for something much more interesting and valuable.

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I have talked to hundreds of men in my therapy sessions, and there is a recurring theme with many of them; it’s what I call “macho trauma.” As they recollect on their lives, they start to look back at their teen years, and they get angry. Yes, they’re angry at parents that fail them, friends that betray them, strangers that hurt them; but they’re also angry at their culture, and an aspect of that culture that comes up again and again is the incredibly oppressive, and yet extremely revered, world of men’s sports, especially high school and college football.

Look at the facts. Every day somewhere in America, young boys are brought out onto a sparkling green field of grass by older men and told to fight, hurt, bang, bash, tackle, knock and beat each other. It’s just a game, they say. It builds character, they say. It’s good clean fun, they say. But guess what? It has its victims.

First, there are the boys who play. They are raised to be violent, hard-hitting, and ruthless in their drive to destroy. They are screamed at by older men, “Get out on that field and show me what you got!” which inevitably means act tougher, hit harder, beat all those other boys into the ground. And they are cheered on by howling stadiums of fans for their savagery. No wonder crime and violence, as former football hero and now self-described feminist Donald McPherson says, are almost entirely male problems. The cult of the macho boy, perpetuated by older men, condemns many of these boys to a desensitized life of trouble and confusion where they must prove their value by being tough.

The second set of victims are the women and men and girls and boys who must suffer the violence, sexual or not, of these macho men. It spreads out all across our land, and its details don’t need to be repeated, but it has at least some of its roots in the knock-em-dead world that reveres the brutality of football and the boys that are raised to feed its bone-crushing machine. When you’re brought up on a diet of violence, you grow up hungry for it.

The third set of victims is the boys who are forced to scramble through puberty, find their self-esteem, and make their life choices in a culture, especially in high school, in which football and popularity are largely synonymous. Should a boy choose to be a ballerino, or a clarinetist, or an actor, let’s be honest – he’s going to hear the word “faggot” about as many times as the football players hear the school fight song. He’s going to be shamed, marginalized and belittled by the macho sect, whose goals and attitudes are entirely sanctioned by, again, the older men who spur them on to ever more extreme acts of bodily brutality. Anyone starting to smell a pattern here, one not perhaps as strong, but oddly akin, to the smell coming from the showers at Penn State?

Numerous men in the Penn State system knew that Jerry Sandusky was committing sexual violence against young boys, but none of them took real steps to stop him. Why? It’s called ethical creep. When you as a man spend all your life sending young boys into pretend acts of combat, for which they are held up as the ideal image of their sex, your sense of what “sexual violence” is and how one should respond to it starts to slip into the blurry. So you let it go. You forget about it. You justify it. And why not? There are 100,000 people cheering you on every weekend for your skill at coaching them to it.

[Photo from SarahWhiteTherapy.com]

The post The Not So Secret Cult of the Far Too Violent Male: Thoughts on the Penn State Tragedy appeared first on The Faster Times.

Welcome to “Thoughts from the Naked Couch.” I’m Sarah White, founder of Naked Therapy (practiced through my website), which grew out of my undergraduate studies in psychology, my modeling experience, and my work in web development.

I often get asked, “Why do therapy via internet?” The simple answer is that it makes Naked Therapy accessible worldwide to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. So webcam sessions can be logistically appealing.

However, there are more complex patient-based issues at stake; some people may rather be on the other end of the computer than part of a face-to-face therapy session. As Lynn Bufka, a psychologist and staff member of the American Psychological Assocation pointed out in a recent NYTimes article, “Therapy delivered over the Internet…may open access to those who might be reluctant to go to an office or to those who might be physically or psychologically unable to.”

Essentially, the internet allows a new level of safety, honesty, and freedom. With various options for text or voice chat—and one or two way cam—a patient who might be too uncomfortable to talk to me in person can instead start therapy in more low-pressure environment. With something like Naked Therapy, the patient may feel freer to react naturally in a session, and to talk more openly about arousal.

I find Internet based therapy to be very productive and important, in that it embraces our current (and future) culture of utilizing new technology. The problems, personalities and passions I’m dealing with in many cases are specific to the web; traditional therapy, which was born out of a world in which the web didn’t exist, has been sidelined by this technological advance. In other words, I’m treating people who are ontologically different than the people that therapy was treating 20 years ago. So much of contemporary communication, dating, and self-expression now exists virtually; it has become necessary to develop a therapeutic practice that accepts and works within this new reality.

While I do enjoy the added intimacy and intensity of an in-person therapy session—and believe very productive work can be done in such environments—I nevertheless see Internet-based therapy as a very viable, relevant, and in some cases, more productive option.

Dr. John Grohol recently invited me to join him on a panel at SXSW in March 2012 to discuss just this topic. He described our future discussions as follows: “This panel will discuss how Internet and mobile technologies enable therapeutic interactions between professionals and individuals. It will also explore how technology can change the very shape of therapy by offering new, potentially therapeutic, techniques.” Stay tuned for more on this!

And, if you’re interested in learning more about Naked Therapy please visit my website. In Naked Therapy we explore power through arousal to help you arrive at unique self-discoveries…

And in answer to our most common question, yes, that means you can touch yourself during sessions

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