The ‘Fleshies’ come to life, seeking sexual equality and personal pleasure.
Peaches, a Canadian singer and musician, has never been afraid to bring her sex-positive attitude on stage.
During her live performances, she has sported costumes decorated with multiple prosthetic breasts and even a vulva-shaped mask. Additionally, her album Fatherfucker, released in 2003, was born to challenge gender stereotypes: on its cover, the singer appears with a beard.
This time, Peaches chose to express her ideas about sexuality through a multimedia art show, Whose Jizz is This?, held at the event location Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany.
Male masturbators as a symbol of sexual objectification
The show is all about the “Fleshies”, i.e., Fleshlight-style male masturbators that look just like dehumanized female genitals and mouths. In Whose Jizz is This?, the personified Fleshies rebel against humans, that only view them as objects, and express their will to find pleasure on their own.
A print shows a Fleshie bleeding from its vaginal opening after being sexually exploited by the user, while another creation, called the Clusterfuck, shows multiple disembodied sex toys coming together.
But the most surprising piece of art is probably a 30-minute composition, titled Requiem for a Fleshie, where the sex toys themselves “sing” about their objectification.
As stated in a press release on Peaches’s own website, her art show portrays a world where the Fleshies “break away from humans and human interactions, do away with words like sex toys and masturbators in a quest to find sexual equality among themselves.”
Why are Fleshies important?
In a recent interview for Billboard, Peaches explained that she was inspired by a video review of a male sex toy, featuring a fake vagina on one side, and a fake female mouth on another. The musician was negatively impressed with the sexism of the reviewer who claimed, to put it shortly, that the toy was better than an actual woman because it had no feelings.
“It got me thinking about the disembodiment of sexual parts”, Peaches confessed to Billboard, “and not seeing the whole or how this can just be abdicated to do away with whatever people can’t deal with.”
For this reason, don’t be fooled by the funny and explicit shapes of Whose Jizz is This? The truth is that they hide a profound reflection on modern sexuality and gender stereotypes.
Concurrently with her multimedia art exhibition, Peaches will also perform the provocative show There’s Only One Peach With the Hole in the Middle in different European locations.
