WHERE ARE THE EROTIC IMAGES OF MEN?

These images do exist, and there are plenty of them, but they often remain hidden in drawers or imaginations, or don’t leave the distribution networks referenced as homoerotic. In the dominant visual culture, eroticism is mainly associated with femininity. Women and minoritized genders are not the target of visual production: where are the representations of their desires? When men do appear, the images are often identical and smooth: the film, advertising and pornographic industries focus on showing them in positions of domination and control. Erotic representations all too often follow the binary and caricatured assignment of gendered roles according to the formula: woman-object / man-subject. They contribute to the perpetuation of a system that freezes desires and identities, subjecting them to the order of patriarchy and heterosexuality, and validating the latter as “natural” and the only acceptable ones.

LUSTED MEN therefore calls for images of eroticized men, by unearthing them, encouraging their creation and working to disseminate them. LUSTED MEN presents itself, first and foremost, as a collection of photographs open to all, professionals and amateurs alike, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. Its aim is to enrich the field of erotic representations of men, already covered by homoerotic photography. In so doing, we hope to build up a visual archive of contemporary intimacy, bringing it to life and making it accessible to all.

Our collective is rooted in the feminist generation of the 2010s, which is witnessing a renewed attention to subjects related to affect, bodily and sexual intimacy, and apprehends them from an intersectional and transfeminist perspective. In this perspective, questions of gender are addressed in relation to issues of class, social race, and the physical and psychological situations of individuals. We created the Lusted Men project just as the #Meetoo wave swept through France, taking the name of the association founded in 2006 by African-American social worker Tarana Burke in Harlem, New York, in support of survivors of sexual violence in working-class neighborhoods. This movement to free people to speak out and listen is having a worldwide impact, first and foremost on the Western film industry, tacitly structured by the desires of men in positions of power. The submerged part of the iceberg of sexist and sexual violence – underpinned and perpetuated by the integration of a rape culture – then emerged from invisibility.

How can we not despair in the face of mounting evidence of abuse of power? Refusing to give in to discouragement, and to transform our anger, Lusted Men chooses to take a path of militant joy. To do so, we’re seizing on an affect that sets us in motion – desire – and a democratized medium: photography. How can we deviate from the heteronormed model by taking as our starting point the image industry, the place where dreams, fantasies and structuring imaginaries are made?

LUSTED MEN unfolds in several directions.

Searching for images

LUSTED MEN identifies artists who have eroticized men from the development of the photographic device to the present day. Let’s delve into a corpus of photographs depicting men in a variety of erotic forms.

LUSTED MEN collects the images of amateurs who photograph partners, lovers, friends and lovers in intimacy, and who photograph themselves.

Encouraging production

LUSTED MEN invites the creation of new erotic images of men. We consider anyone who takes photographs to be a photographer, and propose photographic “play” as a catalyst for transformation. We invite individuals to seize the camera to seek out, short-circuit and reshape our relationships.

LUSTED MEN constitutes a living archive of these representations, inscribing them in a heritage and genealogy rich in these different points of view.

In this way, LUSTED MEN encourages women and non-binary people to become more and more actors of their own desires, by seeking out what is erotic in others. These acts contribute to building a culture of consent, based on confidence in one’s own desire and awareness of one’s limits. We invite women and non-binary people to try, to try out, to risk, to allow themselves to discover what they like to look at. In this way, we hope to alleviate the suffering that their objectification can generate, and provide channels for speaking out and offering a view.

LUSTED MEN invites cisgender men to turn away from the roles assigned to them by becoming desired subjects, seeking out what is erotic in themselves. Faced with the obligation to be the one who knows, acts, conquers, keeps control, we invite men to take the risk of not knowing everything, to look at themselves and let themselves be looked at as desirable and worthy of interest in intimacy.

Beyond binary divisions, we want to help build relationships that take into account the reality of beings rather than the fantasies linked to traditional gender constructs. We demand images of bodies in all their diversity. Since the path is still to be traced, let’s open up paths of desire in which everyone can recognize themselves!

Exhibiting these images and opening a public dialogue about them

If erotic images of men seem non-existent, it’s also because they aren’t shown enough. By devising new channels of distribution, mobilizing different platforms – exhibitions, encounters, interviews, performances, publications – reaching a wide audience, we can make a difference.

Producing in opposition to habits and expectations requires a courage that’s hard to muster when you’re isolated. We want to be there to encourage, to discuss, to understand, to do together, to be enthusiastic about the plural representation of desires. We are the community looking forward to these images, welcoming them with joy.

In the face of clichés that confine, we defend an anti-sexist point of view that aims to abolish compulsory differentiation and hierarchization between genders and sexualities. We affirm that nudity, sex and intimacy should not be areas of shadow, subordination or shame; on the contrary, they can be places of learning and emancipation. Following in Audre Lorde’s footsteps, we see eroticism as a source of power and information in our lives. In our eyes and senses, eroticism has no single definition. It can refer to desire, envy or curiosity. “Commonly, “to have a lust for” means to burn with desire for something or someone. “Lusted is a neologism that allows us to approach eroticism through the plurality of what is desired, rather than through a limiting definition.

Formatting our desires is a way of disciplining our bodies and imaginations, and limiting our power. Exploring these desires and imaginations, on the other hand, enables us to take hold of them. To achieve this reversal, we believe in the power of images. We assert that representations are never neutral; that they not only duplicate reality, but also shape it. They can therefore both build and dismantle power relationships. Under these conditions, producing and sharing images that give us pleasure, and that play on convention, is a political gesture.

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1. Racial ontological theories, developed in the West during colonization, led to the condition of non-white people being associated with a race. This racist hierarchy invented a superiority of whites over non-whites that still has a significant impact on the contemporary world. The notion of “social race” underlines the fact that race is a social construct with no scientific value. Against the universalist currents that have sought to do away with the term race (color blindness), we believe that maintaining its use enables us to name and take into account social realities and the experiences that result from them.
2. Rape culture refers to a set of integrated and sometimes unconscious behaviors that trivialize, deny or excuse sexual assault.
3. L’hétéronormativité est un phénomène social et une institution politique qui conçoit l’hétérosexualité comme seule orientation sexuelle légitime. Etablissant également une correspondance dite “naturelle” entre sexe biologique et identité de genre, elle contribue à invisibiliser et dénigrer le vécu des personnes homosexuelles, queer et asexuelles. L’héteronormativité s’accompagne de toute une série de gestes, d’habitudes, de rapports de forces genrés qui la structurent et tentent d’assurer sa permanence.
4. A person is cisgender when the gender assigned to them at birth is the same as the gender by which they define themselves.
5. In the tradition of Audre Lorde (1984). Uses of the Erotic. Sister outsider, 59.