Opposing views: The art of losing your virginity

Art and sex are at it again, stirring up controversy and getting people all riled up over someone’s personal choices.

You know, the ones they’re allowed to make for themselves.

In the latest art/sex team-up, a 19-year-old man studying at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London is set to lose his virginity with an unidentified male partner in front of an audience April 2.

The performance piece, entitled “Art School Stole My Virginity,” is based on the student’s experiences and thoughts on the concept of virginity and how it’s been perpetuated and conceived in our modern society.

So, yes, having sex in front of people isn’t something that will go over well with the traditional and conservative masses. It’s not something that I’d want to do, and I’m going to go out on a limb and assume a majority of other people wouldn’t want to do it either.

Because, for starters, people are not good at sex their first time. And if you were great the first time, congratulations, the rest of us weren’t.

But whether or not you think the idea of virginity is ridiculous in the first place, when people willingly elect to have sex, it’s their choice. So if this student in London is choosing to have sex for the first time in front of 150 audience members, and he has a space to do so, more power to him.

If people want to show up to a performance piece where it’s clear that people will be having sex with each other, it’s their choice as well.

Everyone involved in this scenario is deciding to either participate or show up. No one’s being forced or coerced into doing something they don’t want to do.

It’s no one else’s job to dictate what is good or bad sex, unless, of course, they’re talking about their partner’s performance in bed.

This whole controversial episode also drums up the age-old debate of what art actually is. Conventionally, we think of art as paintings, plays, music or films, among a myriad of other artistic mediums. But to define art is to reduce it to a bare minimum, something art should never cop to do.

The purpose of art is to convey a message, or a theme of the artist’s choice. It’s the way in which an artist chooses to express their world view the way they see it.

If this student sees art as his way to communicate how he feels society has constructed the myth of virginity, and in doing so he chooses to lose his in the process, then let him do it in peace.

If you’re horribly offended, here’s an idea — don’t acknowledge it, and certainly don’t fly to London to watch.

Just as it’s free will to create and display art, it’s free will to not engage with it.

­wdmcdona@indiana.edu
@thedevilwearsdm