Head

The following is an essay about Head, a video by Cheryl Donegan, written as part of an assignment for a course about media art.

The main word I would use to describe Head is ‘arousing’. To me, it feels like a piece of inexplicit porn, meant to sexually stimulate the viewer, especially the heterosexual male viewer. Perhaps that’s the reason why this work is the only one that stuck around in my head out of all the pieces of media art shown in class. 

NOTE: The following paragraph contains personal, sexually explicit details. It is not my intention to shock or discomfort you, but I feel describing this is necessary to give additional depth to this essay. You may skip the paragraph if you do not want to read it.

At the risk of being seen as some kind of pervert or anti-feminist, I have to mention that I masturbated to Head. I found it as good a piece of porn as any, perhaps even better. I mean no disrespect towards the artist, and I have some strange (and perhaps unfounded) notion that somehow she would welcome this intimate experience of her work. I think it allowed me to more vividly experience all the emotions that arose (excitement, lust, shame, guilt, disgust…) and created a stronger drive for introspection. 

At first, I felt ashamed to have a sexually charged reaction. It was similar to the type of post-orgasmic guilt and shame experienced when watching regular porn. I felt that the artist was trying to tell a story, to express criticism of the male gaze and the objectification of women, and by being aroused, I was complicit in the damaging patriarchal behavior she was trying to eliminate.

Thinking about it now, I no longer feel ashamed. I do not wish to speak for Donegan, but I like to think that whatever her philosophical or socially critical intention, if any, there was clearly also an intention to sexually arouse. The imagery of the video leaves little up to the imagination, and I think there is no way of not interpreting the acts of the artist as a representation of oral sex, especially with the title of the video being a common euphemism for it. It would be hard to find a heterosexual man who is not aroused in the slightest by the video, no matter what views this man might hold about women and feminism. To feel shame or guilt is thus unnecessary and unconstructive. It is much better to experience this arousal consciously without repressing it, so that one may be completely free to re-evaluate the way one perceives and interacts with women. I hope Donegan would agree with me on this.

It is also not absolutely clear that there was any socially critical intention behind this work in the first place. Perhaps all the artist really did want was to sexually arouse the viewer. Perhaps there is no ideological statement, no meaning behind the work. Maybe Donegan really just wanted to please men, the statement being that porn does not have to be explicit to be satisfactory. Or perhaps the intention of the artist does not matter, and all that matters is my personal experience of the work, which was both exciting and enlightening.

I was curious as to why the artist put the song ‘A Good Idea’ over the video. To me, the song goes well with the vibe of a porn video: it feels ‘dirty’. The lyrics were unintelligible to me while listening to it, so I looked them up (link), and this unlocked some interesting insights about the work. The song seems to be about a guy and a girl having some type of intimate experience, and the lyrics are somewhat sexually charged due to the line ‘The air was thick with the smell of temptation’, which is where it aligns with my experience of the video as porn. The following segment adds a new layer of meaning:

One of the interpretations I can think of for these lines is that they describe some form of abuse, where he pushes the girl underwater, drowning her, and making her an object of his pleasure. This aligns with my initial notion that the video is socially critical and touches on the objectification and oppression of women by men. 

The lines ‘She said she said that’s a good idea’ keep being repeated throughout the song, making it seem like the girl is consenting to the abuse and to the objectification, as if she were unaware that something unjust is being done to her, like her consent is engineered. I see a parallel with how patriarchal values are structurally and subconsciously ingrained in society to the point where it is possible for neither men nor women to be aware of them, and it is exactly this ignorance that allows some of us to ignore their presence and the oppression that results from it. 

Up until this point, I wrote from my own personal experience. I refrained from reading about the work so as to not let my expression be affected by the views or intentions of the artist or the interpretation of other parties. I then found I had plateaued in my expression and went looking around on the internet for a new starting point to further describe Head. Unfortunately, but perhaps for the better, I did not find any specific commentary by Cheryl Donegan herself, but I found this article by Collier Schorr.

Schorr’s initial reaction to the work was similar to mine: ‘When I first saw Head I had only one thought: I thought this girl must be one hell of a ride.’. Interestingly, Schorr is not, as I had initially assumed, a man. She comments on the androgynous appearance of Donegan on the tape, which ‘allows the viability of the homoerotic within essentially heterosexual perimeters’. This is in contrast with my initial view that the video is solely aimed at heterosexual males. And indeed, this aligns with my earlier comment that the problem is not only situated in the heads of men, but also in the heads of women, who are subconsciously conditioned to comply with an unfavorable system. 

To me, Head is fundamentally two things. First of all, Head is a piece of art which criticizes the culture of pornography, which is characterized by the illusion of female pleasure meant to satisfy men’s sexual fantasies. Second of all, it is a piece of pornography in and of itself. This is the most interesting insight to me: in order for Head to grab people’s attention, it had to become part of the culture it despises.

I’m happy to have seen Head and to have written this essay about it. It allowed me to think about how I have objectified women in the past and how I should see and interact with them in the future. 

Liam Vereecken