#1 11-05-24 03:36:30

MS2020

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Registered: 06-11-20

Posts: 198

From 1994 Hot Press Tori Amos Interview

Ever since the candid Billie Eilish interview that came out recently with the focus on sex, identity, and self-care I've been thinking back to this. I was so deeply moved when I read it many years ago and it's still so timely. TW: Tori opens up about her healing from sexual assault, her reconciling her sexuality with her religious upbringing, and so much more. And of course how she incorporated this theme into her music.

https://www.joejacksoninterviewer.com/2 … tori-amos/

MS2020

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Registered: 06-11-20

Posts: 198

Re: From 1994 Hot Press Tori Amos Interview

Part of what drew me to this interview years ago was wanting to know more about the song "Icicle." It was such a rare things at that time for women to public talk about masturbation in a positive way. To write a song that combines masturbation with religion was even more daring. Yet I couldn't have expected to have gotten such an angry, but strangely beautiful defense women of the practice. I think of her words (in this last sentence) often when I watch some of the women here at IFM.

In Under The Pink’s celebration of masturbation, ‘Icicle’, Tori sings, when they say ‘take of his body’/I think I’ll take from mine instead’. This juxtaposition of Jesus Christ and the orgasm seemed to be a problem for at least some readers of her last interview in Hot Press, when Tori revealed she nurtures sexual fantasies about Jesus Christ. She also did, of course, write that sweetly subversive line which is loved by women yet, no doubt, secretly detested by many men: “So you can make me come/That doesn’t make you Jesus.” Can Tori understand why Irish Catholics, in particular, might find such thoughts ‘blasphemous’?

“I am a minister’s daughter, for heaven’s sake! So, of course I can see why some would regard sexual fantasies about Jesus Christ as unacceptable. But that’s part of what I’m saying in ‘Icicle’, when I tell of how I used to masturbate at home as a teenager, while my father and his fellow theologians were downstairs discussing the Divine Light. I was exploring the ‘divine light’ within myself! (laughs).

“And anyone who sees that as ‘blasphemous’ can go to hell! Like I said to you before, that’s how women are paralyzed, disconnected from their own power by religion. Talk about patriarchal power structures! For centuries the Church has slammed a crucifix between a woman’s legs and even masturbation is a way of dislodging that cross, of self-empowerment. And how dare anybody say that my honoring my woman-ness in that way, my relationship with my own body and my opening to this energy between my legs is a ‘sin against God’, is ‘blasphemous’.

Hangdog90

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Registered: 24-01-16

Posts: 1,578

Re: From 1994 Hot Press Tori Amos Interview

Thanks for the thoughtful post and link to what was an excellent article by Joe Jackson in Hot Press in 1994.

That date is important, So much has happened in Ireland since then, as far as scandals about widespread sexual abuse and abuse of power by the Catholic Church and other educational institutions. The impact of these scandals has been the annihilation of Catholic Church influence. Less than a third of Irish catholics even get married in a church nowadays.

Eroticism and religion have always been closely intertwined - especially Catholicism with its iconography of the crucified Christ, the Sacred Heart, the Pieta and various bodily relics of saints through the ages. On a slightly related matter, it does intrigue me that this web site has had to remove very light rope bondage scenes to satisfy credit card brokers, but these same brokers are compeltely happy to facilitate the purchase of actual bondage gear in sex shops, and depictions of a crucified Jesus can be puchased on Amazon.

Sexual secrets have featured in other Christian religions too, with the sae shame and secrecy providig opportunity.  The iconic American actress, Louise Brooks, was raised in rural Kansas in the bible belt, at the start of the 20th century. She was molested by a neighbour at age 9. She said in the bible belt where she grew up, "they prayed in ther parlor and practised incest in the barn."

Louise Brooks was also a great advocate for masturbation. The great critic Kenneth Tynan said of her:

"She was the most seductive, sexual image of woman ever committed to celluloid. When Hollywood bored her, she walked out on Hollywood. When men bored her, she walked out on them. She was the only unrepentant hedonist, the only pure pleasure-seeker that I've ever known. And this comes over in her films."

Hedonism and masturbation go together, and Louise's friend, the photographer William Klein, said in an interview with Barry Paris, who published her biography in 1989:

"During the period that she was taking Valium, she asked me,

'Would you help me write a letter? I want to write a letter to the government to tell them that I actually think that Valium and the use of it is damaging to women. It numbs the chance you have for pleasure with something like masturbation.'

She felt that masturbation was the highest, highest art form in the sexual area."

Last edited by Hangdog90 (11-05-24 18:12:24)