LOST WKND

Issue N˚ 1

Words by Michael Lovan
Picture(s) by Damien Maloney & Molly Matalon

Down the hall from where we sleep, there’s a bedroom with a sign on the door that says DO NOT ENTER. Inside that room, the carpet is grass green, the ceiling sky blue, and clouds shaped like bears and rabbits drift along the walls. At first glance, this looks very much like a child’s bedroom. Lining the shelves, however, there’s a cacophony of sex objects.

This is the childhood bedroom of my partner, Amy Everson—artist, outspoken activist, and subject of the Jason Banker-directed feature film Felt. It was in this very room that Amy endured a number of sexual abuses, both throughout her childhood and sporadically throughout her life. She’s since converted the space into an elaborate statement about the corruption of youth.

“This room is emblematic of a sexualized childhood, and how early perversion creeps in,” Amy says. We’re sitting on her bedroom’s lawn, as it were, and I’m reclining against the blue sky of the south-facing wall. As she speaks, I scan her assemblage of needle-felted penises, stuffed animals, dildos, and children’s literature.

“We know that child pornography is inherently bad,” she continues, “yet people are much more accepting of little girls wearing high heels, lipstick, and even thongs or bikinis. Symbols of femininity: they exist to oppress and sexualize women.”

I look down at Amy’s work. She’s stitching together two pieces of felted fabric to make one penis, which will then be stuffed and added to a toddler’s mobile.

“It’s not meant for children.” Amy laughs. “None of my art is. Which is not to say that we should shield children away from the concept of sex; I think there should be age-appropriate sex education. But it has to be sensitive to the fact that young girls are groomed to be objects for male consumption.”

She pauses, considers her surroundings, and fetches a postcard for Felt. “Not that it stops at childhood. I mean, I have my very own Mr. Skin page, for Christ’s sake.”

We pull up her profile on Mr. Skin, an adult pay site that rips and compiles photos and video of nudity and sex from films. “Amy Everson is an actress, artist, writer and hot piece of ass!” her bio attests. “She’s gained lots of notoriety for her felt-based body of artwork. We’d love to cop a feel on her actual body!” Poetic stuff.

“The description says, ‘prosthetic, underwear,’” she tells me. “So, I guess they’re trying to sell photos of me in my costumes?”

I can see Amy tensing up, and she closes the laptop. She’s angry, and I have an idea why. Her costumes are naked man-and-woman suits; essentially, underwear sporting handcrafted genitalia. When going to clubs, Amy used to wear the penis under her skirt as a way to project a sense of security and turn unwanted come-ons into a joke. In time, she became notorious in the San Francisco club scene for the costumes, which, ultimately, led to Felt, the pseudo-documentation/fictionalization of her life.

And now her coping mechanism for dealing with a lifetime of sexualized abuse is being sold for masturbation fodder.

“It’s ironic in a very, very grating way,” Amy says. “But I can’t say that I’m surprised. It was a false sense of power anyway. Penises only have value in my world when they’re chopped off and mounted. Like wild, dangerous animals.”

Amy isn’t kidding. Since leaving the club scene behind, she’s taken to attaching felted, taxidermic penises to wooden mounts. Near the exit of this room, for instance, there’s a disembodied trophy penis—testicles and all—floating in the middle of the sky. A felted vagina, surrounded by golden rays of sunlight, sits on the floor nearby. She hasn’t found a place for it yet.

Between the honorable vagina and the sexualized baby mobile, Amy has been exploring the concepts of birth, and whether people can undo their upbringing and be reborn. “Socialization begins the moment you’re born,” she says, “and depending on what’s between your legs, that journey looks and feels entirely different. Excavating the path laid by that journey, unlearning all of these toxic ways of thinking, that’s hard.”

In Felt, Amy is metaphorically born again after walking through a large vagina on her birthday. The scene momentarily offers the possibility of healing for Amy. Unfortunately for her, the new world she’s born into turns out to be just as sexually exploitative as the last one, and so she is reborn, yet again, into the embodiment of the toxic masculinity that’s harmed her.

“When I made the film, I had a very loose sense of self,” she says. “That’s the thing about sexual violence: it’s teaching victims that their needs and their wants don’t matter. So the ending offers an alternate, harsher take on my life, one where I escape my trauma by indulging in a twisted fantasy of becoming the abuser, rather than be abused. Which is, by no standard, what I would call healing.”

I ask if she’d change anything about the ending of the film. She thinks for a moment. “That’s the inevitable ending to all of this. We live in a society that grooms little girls to be fuck dolls, abuses them, and then denies their experience. The consequences of that kind of violence can only be more violence. So ushering in a happy ending would not only have been dishonest, but disrespectful.”

For the first time since we’ve sat down, Amy turns and makes eye contact with me. “People are so fixated on that pick-yourselves-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality. But how can anyone truly heal if nobody acknowledges, or is at least aware of, the problem?”

Amy stands up and spins the sexy baby mobile—semen-oozing penis dangling like a chandelier down the middle, breasts, lips, the works down below. She gives the top rim a push, and the drips of semen brush onto everything. “I’ve taken to building healthy and healing relationships, setting boundaries, adopting a feminist perspective, and having a partner that supports my voice and my values,” she says. “It’s taken a lot of time, but I’ve come to understand my experiences in a greater context of patriarchy, sexism, racism, and misogyny. All of this has allowed for me to speak out, dismantle my old ways of thinking, challenge the ways people think around me, and call out bullshit when I see it. This has been essential in finding and establishing a sense of self.”

Amy pauses, seeming to reflect.

“In that sense,” she continues, “I guess that being reborn is a process of undoing all of those toxic messages from childhood. And if I can unlearn, so can anyone else.”

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Amy Everson,

Your Discursive Gender Insubordination Is Showing

Originally published in

Lost Wknd N˚ 1, October 2015