YOU’RE SOMEONE’S PORN

Who counts sheep and who the freckles on your imaginary body before they go to sleep? Writer Zuzana Trachtová portrays how our fantasies claim and appropriate strangers' bodies for our own amusement and arousal – and vice versa. The essay is accompanied by illustrations and animations by Lucie Frýdlová.
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you’re someone’s porn

You can touch your body whenever you want. You have yourself under your skin. You can look at yourself, stroke yourself, be yourself. Your body is yours, you’re physically closest to it out of all the people in the world. You own it. You know almost every wrinkle, scar, birthmark, fold, hair. But a concept of your body, a certain modified image, its reflection, can be owned by anyone through their fantasy. They can do whatever they want with it. And you can do nothing about it. They have power over you.

you’re stealing someone’s body too

You steal it and exclusively claim it the moment you’re closest to your body. When you’re alone with your body. You take a strange body for your pleasure. You masturbate and objectify another’s body for the movie that plays in your head. No one will ever see it like you do. It’s just your movie, your actors who will never act in another movie in a fashion similar to this.

 

“A female friend, a girl I met on the street, an actress, someone from porn,” lists Sára the protagonists of her movie to me.

 

I own my body but I don’t own the millions of ideas about my body in the minds of others. And nobody owns my fantasies. “The boy I slept with didn’t have the butt I needed so I made him just the way I wanted in my fantasy,” says Marika to me. It’s my freedom world where I can have any heavenly body according to my imagination. It’s an honour, it’s a compliment that someone has sunken so deep under my skin.

your body in my head

My masturbation, my fantasy, my authentic imagery of your body. One body and a million variations in a million fantasies. One person, a million heavenly likenesses of their body in the heads of people where it got stuck. A rearranged reflection of one thing that we truly own, our body. How much of it is still our body? It’s their personal property now

casting the roles

We play various roles in the most various of fantasies. “I take his body and play my dream scene with it in my head.”  Sometimes we play with others, known or unknown actors. Sometimes the director joins in, other times just observes. 

 

An ex-lover, a future-lover, a friend, a human whom you met on the street, someone who likes you, someone who you like, who’s attracted to you, who you’re attracted to, who likes you, for whom you’re a dream. In the heads all around us float the heavenly bodies of people that we borrow for our fantasies of which we never speak, will never find out. 

 

Sometimes they’re people who know our body, who touched it, who were given our body once and they continue to use it without us, without our awareness. Sometimes they’re people who don’t know our body, only have a vague idea and construct their ideal images.

freedom world

It’s our world only. We direct it ourselves. We are all pornstars in someone’s head sometimes. We don’t know which head; we don’t know our roles; we don’t know how often we’re cast. And we also staff our own movies. It’s our property.

billions of porns all around us

BIO / Text author / Zuzana Trachtová graduated from anthropology and Romani studies. In previous years, she focused predominantly on Roma-related issues and social topics, and subsequently started directing her attention towards the areas of culture and arts. Currently, Zuzana pens up articles about the topics of masturbation, intimacy and sexuality also for the recently emerged, feminism-oriented Czech magazine Heroine. At the same time, Zuzana has been developing her own project called Naked (IG: naked_cz) that is built, in essence, on opening sensitive and taboo topics surrounding sexuality and masturbation, and on motivating people to cross their boundaries and adventurously discover their bodies.

BIO / Illustrator / The cornerstone element of Lucie Frýdlová‘s art is the aesthetic plane that doesn’t overstep the conceptual frame of the work but depicts its inner content as an outer likeness. She chooses specific tools and media based on the concept and content of the artwork she’s working on. These create a synthesis. By interconnecting the analogue and digital environments, new imaginative worlds come to life that mainly feature abstract organic shapes, which capture emotions, energies and the feminine element. Lucie Frýdlová focuses on fine arts and creative project leadership. She graduated as an MA from the studio of academic painter V. Merta at FDULS (Ladislav Sutnar’s Faculty of Art and Design at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen). Lucie is currently working on the research of relationships between forms, colours and aesthetics, and their emotional impression on each other. She achieves this by using various media such as digital art, painting or clay sculpting.

CREDITS

TEXT / Zuzana Trachtová @zuzanatrachtova

ILUSTRACE / Lucie Frýdlová @luciefrydlova

Translation / Františka Blažková

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