As I've made clear before, I would probably be identified as sex-negative, if mainly because sex-positiveness doesn't seem remotely hot to me.

However. Given the choice between the glitter-painted, bethonged sex-positives and body-denying right-wingers (who made all this freaking sex-positivity necessary in the first place: thanks), I stand firmly with the persons who paint and/or display a many-penised worm; pastorals of cunnilingus; all those Edward Westonesque look-at-the-nipples-in-half-shadow photographs; a glowing grid of cast penises (even though this really makes the poor small penises really stand out); and even a golfer who has just swung from the "rough" of a woman's pubic hair toward the flagged hole of her belly button, even though such a thing totally stretches credulity, considering that the pubic hair and the belly button are quite close together and yet the man has swung his club all the way into the air when, plainly, all that is required is simple putting.

It becomes slightly more difficult for me to stand firmly with the spectacle of the seated woman who is bound in about eight different unpleasantly Abu-Ghraibish ways while party people pose on her for photographs. Or the sculpture of a naked woman on all fours trapped in a wire web with only one opening. Sexual freedom involves lots of ladies in cages and wires, which is not to say they mind one bit, but just to say that I didn't see half as much dominatrix imagery as ladies-being-dominated imagery.

Seattle Erotic Art Festival continues all weekend and is completely free on Sunday. I really do recommend you go, not in search of erotica (I didn't find any but there's nothing saying you won't), but because it's sort of fascinating in its own right, almost like a giant sex survey laid out in pictures.

And attention art people: There is a new sexction this year, of 27 not-necessarily-erotica-identifying artists selected by artist-curator Sharon Arnold. Gretchen Bennett has a hilarious deadpan video (interview with Arnold here). Emily Ann Pothast made geometric erotica. Jenny Zwick, Troy Gua, Joey Veltkamp, Kimberly Trowbridge, Jennifer McNeely, Robert Hardgrave, Diem Chau—it's a whole new angle thinking of their work in this context. Another artist, in the "regular" show, that I'd have put in this "real artist" section: Alison Sweet, whose teeny-tiny strips of vintage porn-film negatives mounted on a lightbox are sweet, smart, and work on many levels.

^{Top, Vicki Marie Stolsen, That Ain't Right No 3; below, Derek Nobbs, Unearthed}