Kickstarter Play with an Asexual Character

[mirielenfield]

I found this while poking around Google's blog search. I've never heard of the playwright before, I have no idea if the play is any good, and I've got no clue if the treatment of asexuality will be any good. Nonetheless, I thought many of you would be interested in taking a look at this. Presented for your perusal:

http://www.kickstarter.com/

Comments

[swankivy]

Interesting thought. Though it always irritates me when anyone suggests that passion or aesthetic attraction or beauty "belongs" to sexuality and thus is some kind of contradiction in terms for asexual people to appreciate or possess. I've been told explicitly at least a dozen times that artistic drive and creativity "come from" sexuality "in its root sense," and it's mind-numbing to me to imagine that people truly believe sexuality is necessary for life's vital juice.

[nightengalesknd]

I'm still grumpy - 2 decades later - about the high school English teacher who told us that Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick were the only two books in American Literature that weren't about sex. I swore then and there to read Moby Dick, and I did start a borrowed copy a few years ago and mean to finish someday. What I really wanted to do was find other examples and shove them at her, but I suspected if I did that, she'd find a way to make them about sex and I wouldn't have been able to convince her otherwise. I'd blame it on being 1992, but. . .

[ysabetwordsmith]

Well ... it's kind of like when people think of sex and gender as one thing because they've never seen those things separate. The urge to create, to make something grand, is nearly universal. Procreation and artistic creativity are two subsets of that. But people tend to see the world as they are; and for many folks, their artistic creativity is all tied up with their sexual passion. It's okay for them to express that. What's not okay is if they insist that's the ONLY way it ever happens and deny other people's equally valid experiences. That's just stupid. Ignorance can be fixed by broadening one's awareness; stupidity, not so much.

[inamac]

My thought too. Given the sometimes intimate nature of tattooing I would have thought that it is one of the most fitting vocations for an asexual.

[bart_calendar]

My thought it that he's coming from a Freudian and Lacanian interpretation which links tattooing to both penetration and the territorial "marking" that can both be a strong driving force in many sexuals sexuality

[cheriola]

Er... but how can it satisfy an urge to mark a territory when the artist neither gets to choose the design, nor gets to sign their work? This isn't like grafitti-tagging buildings; nobody will be able to tell who the artist was just by looking at the person wearing the tattoo. And that person most likely thinks of the artist like a craftsperson, hired to give the customer's creative vision form, not to use the customer as a canvas for their own artistic ideas.

And the penetration thing... Seriously? I could see it satisfying a sadistic/dominant urge to cause pain and have others under one's control for a while, but can the minute depth of the needle really do anything for a penetrative urge? (If there really is such a thing. I'm a woman, so I wouldn't know.)

[faecat]

Seriously. Ridiculous.

[ysabetwordsmith]

Thank you for sharing! I'm delighted to see more folks talking about crowdfunding in more venues, and especially, using it to expand representations of things that the mainstream media ignores. I'm boosting the signal over in crowdfunding and I encourage you to talk about the project there too.

I really like the core relationship in the play, between an asexual tattoo artist and a client. That's not a story I've read dozens of times before; I've seen very little that's close to even a part of it. That doesn't guarantee it will be any good, but I'm delighted to see someone writing something fresh instead of Yet Another McRomance.