The genteel world of New Zealand pottery has been rocked by a row over plans for a ceramic dildo-making workshop, sparking allegations of bullying and online abuse.
Ceramicist Nicole Gaston said that she wanted the Wellington Potters’ Association to hold the event with Iza Lozano, a visiting Mexican artist who has conducted similar workshops in her homeland.
Gaston said that pottery dildos are easily sterilized, can be warmed and, unlike latex versions, do not pose the risk of leeching chemicals into the body.
“Some of the oldest ceramic works ever found are of phalluses,” she said. “This isn’t exactly brand new. People have been doing this for thousands of years.”
However, the 41-year-old public servant said the backlash against the proposal was so extreme that she quit her voluntary role as president of the Wellington Potters’ Association.
“Some committee members said it was needlessly provocative, someone else said it wasn’t appropriate,” she said. “There was this very reactionary, pearl-clutching response, like ‘how can we talk about sex, we should be ashamed of it.’”
Gaston said many men seemed to find the idea of women making dildos emasculating and she resigned when opposition began to include personal attacks.
“It’s not like we would have forced anyone to take part in the workshop,” she said. “If you’re not interested, stay at home.”
Gaston said that she was also attacked online.
“I saw on Reddit that someone called me a ‘nutcase’ and I thought: ‘I may be a little outspoken, but I don’t think I’m crazy,” she said.
The dildo furor is not Gaston’s first experience with spicy ceramics — she won an award in 2018 for her work entitled Vagina Teapot.
She was surprised at how polarizing the dildo workshop plan became, saying that she had envisaged it as an empowering project that was positive about sex.
There has been support from some Wellington Potters’ Association members, including Vivian Rodriguez, who acknowledged that the workshop would challenge the moral ideas of some people.
“At the same time it will provide an excellent avenue for those wanting to explore different types of creative expression, gender identity and sexual empowerment through art,” Rodriguez wrote in a letter to the association’s governing committee.
The association did not respond to requests for comment.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
SECRETIVE SECT: Tetsuya Yamagami was said to have held a grudge against the Unification Church for bankrupting his family after his mother donated about ￥100m The gunman accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe yesterday pleaded guilty, three years after the assassination in broad daylight shocked the world. The slaying forced a reckoning in a nation with little experience of gun violence, and ignited scrutiny of alleged ties between prominent conservative lawmakers and a secretive sect, the Unification Church. “Everything is true,” Tetsuya Yamagami said at a court in the western city of Nara, admitting to murdering the nation’s longest-serving leader in July 2022. The 45-year-old was led into the room by four security officials. When the judge asked him to state his name, Yamagami, who
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
DEADLY PREDATORS: In New South Wales, smart drumlines — anchored buoys with baited hooks — send an alert when a shark bites, allowing the sharks to be tagged High above Sydney’s beaches, drones seek one of the world’s deadliest predators, scanning for the flick of a tail, the swish of a fin or a shadow slipping through the swell. Australia’s oceans are teeming with sharks, with great whites topping the list of species that might fatally chomp a human. Undeterred, Australians flock to the sea in huge numbers — with a survey last year showing that nearly two-thirds of the population made a total of 650 million coastal visits in a single year. Many beach lovers accept the risks. When a shark killed surfer Mercury Psillakis off a northern Sydney beach last
RSS