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"I am disappointed in you, Peter," Anton interrupted me. "We've barely met, and already you talk more and more about sex. I've been warned that all the American men are sex-crazy. Maybe it's true."
"As I recall, you brought the subject of sex up, Anton," I countered her. "I merely invited you to dance yesterday, and today we are dancing."
"But you had a different dance in mind, hadn't you?" Anton interjected.
I nodded. "I had a kind of dancing in mind that hadn't been done for centuries, if ever, that only a few pioneers had dared to venture into, but which becomes evermore essential for the survival of civilization and mankind as a whole. So it's not a frivolous issue."
"You men are either disgusting or are driven by a spirit that's beyond my comprehension," said Anton and shook her head. "I just can't figure out which it is."
"Allow me to help you with that," I countered her. "But I can assure you that the urgency for the kind of dancing that is necessary is not a male issue. The greatest modern pioneer that I know in the sphere of this kind of dancing is a woman, the world-renowned artist by the name, Judy Chicago. She changed the world to some degree with this kind of dance. She raised the awareness in society of women's issues and women's art and the hypocrisy of society's sexual isolation, and in the lager sense also society's isolation from its humanity. She raised the self-awareness in society to a whole new level, at least to the degree that she dared to expose the hypocrisy of the sexual isolation that has been built up over the centuries. For this daring intervention she brought together a team of over 20 researchers. They scoured the pages of history for women of achievement and selected 999. From these the most outstanding 39 were selected as guests for an art installation in form of a 'dinner party.' She created a triangular table for this dinner party. Each side of her table represents a period of history that is unique in terms of society's relationship to its women. The first side represents the period from pre-history to the end of the Greek Classical era in which women were once revered, in some cases as goddesses. The second side represents the dark ages of religious and cultural warfare in which the status of women was trashed. The third side represents the modern period from the 17th Century on when countless women struggled to reverse the dark age trend of sexual isolation that has been so devastating on women and on society as a whole. The women that she 'invited' to the Dinner Party were pioneers that fought to get their life back as a woman and their equality with men as a person, even their humanity as a human being.
"The 39 women that Judy brought together for the Dinner Party where seated on a common table that spans the three ages. The party was designed to be a celebration of their individual achievements and the achievements of women in general. It wasn't hidden. It was displayed in many galleries around the world. So it was designed to be a party that primarily the modern society was invited to. Judy Chicago created a place setting at the dinner table for each of the 39 women. The place setting highlighted her nature and significance with a uniquely painted porcelain plate. The resulting vast installation presents in this manner an open invitation to modern society to 'eat' of every one of the individual plates of these women of great achievement and to so let themselves become 'nourished' by their achievements and their contributions to the development of mankind and civilization. That invitation to society to be nourished by these women was the real purpose of the 'dinner party.' Against this background Judy Chicago becomes really daring, because all the images that she painted on the woman's plates were designed to be symbolic of a butterfly and a woman's vulva. The complexity of the resulting symbolism evolves from plate by plate. It begins with a simple vulva-image to represent the primordial goddess and ends 38 images later with a deeply sculpted and anatomically expressive image of the vulva at the final place setting for an extraordinarily outspoken artist in the fight for society's recognition of the equality of its humanity. In this sense Judy Chicago invites society to not only to 'nourish' itself with the profound achievements wrought by those women, but to also to 'eat' of those woman's vulva, of their womanhood. In doing so Judi Chicago invites society to acknowledge to itself that it already does this very thing in real life in its sexual practice. She invites society to acknowledge that the entire sexual isolation is a myth that for centuries has isolated women and pushed them into the background. She demonstrates this isolation to be a myth by the simple fact that countless people throughout society lovingly and joyously 'eat' at the vulva, both men and women. This fact stands confirmed in many surveys. According to the submitted survey ratings by sexually active women 'eating' of the vulva is the most enjoyable sexual interaction know and the most widely practiced. In other words, the self-isolation of society that has been engineered over the centuries, which has resulted in the deeply cutting sexual division that is still tearing society apart, is a myth. The myth thereby renders every other form of isolation and division likewise a myth, including our political, ethnic, and religious divisions. These prevailing divisions belie the fact that we are all human beings together and share universally a common humanity and a common universal human soul. Judy Chicago demonstrates that society's countless forms of isolation and division, no matter how time-honored they may be, are basically nothing more than just hypocrisy."
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