Making Privates Public Poem by gershon hepner

Making privates public can
appear to be a little corny,
but usually turns on a man
by making him extremely horny,
I don't think it is required
for women to exhibit what
is like a burning bush that's wired
with curly hair around the twat.

To turn me on it's quite enough
to show me naked butt and thighs,
while hiding traces of the muff
that twist two female femurs lies.
I'll sleep and slumber with a slut
who outs her urges that are inner,
and while I gaze at thighs and butt
imagine that I've found a winner.

Inspired by an article by Kay S. Hymozitz January 12,2007 ('Scenes From the Exhibitionists The fairer sex shows (and tells) too much') . She writes:

Some of my best friends are women-heck, I am a woman-but I've come to the conclusion that we've seen too much of the fairer sex. For me, the final straw came last month when Britney Spears jauntily revealed her waxed nether-regions to waiting photographers as she exited her limo. Britney's stunt made her the Internet smash of the season. But in providing America's workers with this cubicle distraction, Britney was doing a lot more than making her own privates public.
In fact, Britney was following to its logical end what has become the first rule of contemporary American girlhood: to show that you are liberated, take it off. Liberty means responsibility... to disrobe. Paris Hilton, Britney's BFF (Best Friend Forever) , taped her sexual escapades with an ex-boyfriend, though even she was tactful enough to pretend that she hadn't meant for the video to go public. Courtney Love, Lindsay Lohan and Tara Reid have also staged their own wardrobe malfunctions. But flashing is hardly limited to celebrities. The girls-next-door who migrate to Florida during spring break happily lift their blouses and snap their thongs for the producers of 'Girls Gone Wild, ' who sell their DVDs to an eager public. Nor is it just young female flashers who are driven to expose themselves to the masses. Older women, whether because of lingering traces of reticence or doubts about the camera-readiness of their intimate anatomy, use the written word to bare all. There are legions of women bloggers who write about last night's bed tricks, their underwear preferences and their menstrual cycles (yes, Virginia, there is a tamponblog.com) . More sophisticated exhibitionists turn to tasteful erotic memoirs. In 'A Round Heeled Woman, ' Jane Juksa gives us a detailed description of her varied sexual adventures after, at age 66, she advertised for sex in the personals of the New York Review of Books. In 'Surrender, ' the ex-Balanchine dancer Toni Bentley tells of the spiritual transcendence she experienced during the 298 times she had anal sex with a former lover-making this the first transcendent sex ever to involve a calculator.
Now, this is the point at which the enlightened always begin grumbling: What's wrong with women showing that they are 'sexual beings'? In this vein, the show-or-tell-all is an act of bravery, demonstrating a woman's determination to throw off society's taboos against full expression of her sexuality. 'Female exhibitionism is... an act of female power, ' Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice has written. 'We should redeem the slut in ourselves and rejoice in being bad girls, ' Naomi Wolf once urged (but has since modified now that she has an adolescent daughter) . It follows that reservations about self-exposure are a sign of anti-sex, anti-woman prudery. They may just be the first step in a long-planned, mandated return to the missionary position, female frigidity and meatloaf dinners, cooked and served by apron-clad wives.
But this Puritans-are-coming! stance, validating, as it does, someone as cracked as Paris Hilton, finally implodes. The problem with a Britney or a Bentley is not that they are floozies. It is rather that they are, paradoxical as it might seem, naive. They underestimate the magnetic force field created by intimate sexual information and violate the logic of privacy that should be all the more compelling in a media-driven age. People in the public eye always risk becoming objectified; they are watched by hordes of strangers who have only fragmentary information about them. When that information includes details that only their Brazilian waxers should know for sure, it's inevitable that, humans being the perverse creatures that they are, all other facts of identity will fall away. Instead of becoming freer, the exhibitionist becomes an object defined primarily by a narrow sexual datum.
The writer Daphne Merkin offers the perfect cautionary tale about the dangers of giving the public Too Much Information. In 1996 Merkin published an essay in The New Yorker describing the erotic pleasure she found in spanking. Her sensational article hardly stalled her career; if anything it increased her name recognition. Understandably Ms. Merkin doesn't regret her essay, which she continues to believe to be 'both intellectually and emotionally daring.' But she kids herself when she says 'I'm known more for the rigor of my thinking... than I am for revelations about my erotic preferences.' Her article is still the major fact of her public identity; she will forever and always be Daphne Likes-to-Be-Spanked Merkin. This is not because the shocked public wants Ms. Merkin to cover herself up. It is because Ms. Merkin has invited us to know her by information that has far more power than her insights into Virginia Woolf.

1/12/07