Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.06.2013, Blaðsíða 30

Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.06.2013, Blaðsíða 30
Cindy owns an amazing all-black apartment where the video for Notorious B.I.G.’s “Nasty Girl” was shot. Unique, unfiltered brewery from the North Happy Hour every day from 16–19 Laugavegur 20B, 101 Reykjavík List of licenced Tour Operators and Travel Agencies on: visiticeland.com Licensing and registration of travel- related services The Icelandic Tourist Board issues licences to tour operators and travel agents, as well as issuing registration to booking services and information centres. Tour operators and travel agents are required to use a special logo approved by the Icelandic Tourist Board on all their advertisements and on their Internet website. Booking services and information centres are entitled to use a Tourist Board logo on all their material. The logos below are recognised by the Icelandic Tourist Board. 30The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 7 — 2013 Date cating finger-wagger, emphasising that Make- LoveNotPorn is not anti-porn. “The issue I’m tackling isn’t porn, it’s the complete absence in our society of an open, honest, healthy, and authentic conversation around sex in the real world,” she said, spelling out her site’s tagline, ‘Pro-sex, pro-porn, pro knowing the difference’. “If we had that, amongst many other benefits, it would mean that people would bring a real world mindset to the viewing of sexual enter- tainment.” Cindy continued: “Because of our attitude as a society towards sex, we’re all ashamed and embarrassed around it. We all do it, we never talk about it and we’re all screwed up about it. My main point boils down to—talk about it.” Tight cracks One of her goals at Startup Iceland was to en- courage entrepreneurs to try to change the world through sex. “At a time when we wel- come innovation and disruption in every other sector going, not enough people are designing tech ventures that could help us all have better sex,” she said. Cindy has particularly strong opinions on how difficult the tech world, the business world and the financial sector have made it for her to get MakeLoveNotPorn funded and driven. Since launching the site on no money, she has spent the past two years pitching her heart out to venture capital investors and com- ing up with bupkis. Finally, 18 months ago she found one private investor who put up a small amount of seed funding, and the investor re- mains anonymous. It still took her two months to access that money, since no financial institu- tion would allow her to open a bank account with the word “porn” in the name, nor would any mainstream payment system, like PayPal or Amazon, allow her to set up shop. “Many people said to me, ‘Cindy, why not just change the name of your company? Call it something different, take the word porn out of it and make it an innocuous holding company. It’ll make your life so much easier!’” Cindy said with an exasperated edge. “I refuse to do that. I refuse to bow to and reinforce existing societal prejudices and biases. I want to change them.” She cites that she has many friends who are feminist pornographers that are trying to change the template of hardcore violent porn and create a new dynamic. They too run into the same problems she has had with Make- LoveNotPorn in terms of access to funding, mentoring and putting payment systems in place. She is already envisioning a new tech venture—a long way off, of course—which is to start “an incubator-accelerator for radically innovative tech startups operating in the field of sex and porn.” “We pride ourselves in the tech world on freedom of the internet and open access to ev- erything for every venture,” Cindy said. “Tech world, I call bullshit. Until they change their mindset about tech ventures that are designed to change the world through sex, all they’re doing is perpetuating the same old world or- der closed-mindedness that they pride them- selves, in theory, on exploding.” Spreading it After seeing all the penises we could handle, we moseyed up to the Bubbletea Pancake Café where Cindy ordered some decadently sweet caramel-banana pancakes and a strawberry bubbletea. Surrounded by mothers with their 7-year olds, she went on passionately about her coital mission. “I really want to exhort Iceland to think dif- ferently about this whole area and I would like to really move people’s mindsets,” she said. “There is a very unique opportunity for tech ventures in Iceland: they can be the tech com- munity that is open-minded about all of this and seize the potential of tech ventures that can help all of humankind.” “Iceland needs to understand that you can- not ban or block porn,” she continued, circling back to her solution of opening things up as far as porn in general is concerned. “It’s a little like the criminalisation of the drug trade. If you force something underground you make it more attractive, as anything forbidden is, and you enable very bad things to happen. When you take the shame and embarrassment out of sex, you have a very profound impact on many areas of existence.” But as her orgasmic pancakes arrived at the table, her bleeding heart coagulated and her business-sense took over. “By the way, here’s a message to Icelandic investors and financial in- stitutions: oh my god the money you can make when you make sex socially acceptable. Sex is the single biggest market you will ever have.” “We pride ourselves in the tech world on freedom of the inter- net and open access to everything for every venture. Tech world, I call bullshit.” The Final Member By Donald Gislason The Phallological Museum of Reykjavík in- ducted its newest member on Friday, Sept. 28, at a reception held to celebrate the RIFF screening of ‘The Final Member,’ a documen- tary by Canadian filmmaker Zak Math. In a moving ceremony, hunter Arne Sólmunds- son (right) presented a reindeer penis, on ice, to current museum curator Hjörtur Sig- urðsson (left), as his father, the museum’s founder Sigurður Hjartarson (centre), looks proudly on. Long housed in Húsavík, this stimulating collection moved to its new set- ting near Hlemmur last year, where it contin- ues to attract a steady stream of tourists and curiosity-seekers from around the world. I tend to get a lot of questions about all things Icelandic when people find out that it’s my nationality. The most common ones are related to Sigur Rós, Björk, elves, Au- rora Borealis, and how to pronounce ‘Eyjafjallajökull.’ The resulting conversations get very tiring very quickly. Occasionally, however, I face a topic that sparks some lively discussions. Currently the most enjoyable one is Iceland’s Phallological Museum. I have unfortunately not had the chance to go and enjoy its wonders, but I have most certainly found myself deep in philosophical discus- sions about its role and meaning. During these discussions an almost inevitable ques- tion arises: How on earth could Iceland have the only one? First of all, you’ll find more species of mammals in an average Australian backyard than you’ll find in the whole of Iceland. Mammal species native to Iceland can be counted on one hand, and yet the biggest collection of penises is in Reykjavik!? And second, I absolutely reject the idea that Icelanders are any more obsessed with the 11th digit than are other nations around the world. Peculiar pricks The world’s dressing rooms support this belief of mine. Through the years they have provided a canvas for their inhabitants’ pent-up creative energy. Artists never stay there for longer than a few hours, but all those rooms seem to inspire the same need for a creative outlet and therefore you´ll find them full of elaborate and intriguing drawings of dongs. These are the same kinds of cocks you’re likely to find scribbled on the school desks of juvenile boys, but the ones that live on the walls of the world’s dressing rooms tend to be a touch more creative. I’ve encountered dicks in all sorts of disguises. The pricks are often portrayed as monsters, animals, plants, clothing and fashion accesso- ries or even various types of vehicles ranging from unicy- cles to spaceships. The variety is endless, and the amount of creative thought that goes into these drawings is very compelling. But I can’t help but wonder: Why penises? Don’t get me wrong, I do see a fair share of boobs and vaginas, but those tend to be accompanied by a manhood monster of some description. Female reproductive organs also tend to be drawn relatively characterless. They’re normally just presented as body parts, rather than aliens or dinosaurs. I doubt I’m the only one, but I have always been of the opinion that a drawing of a uterus provides countless opportunities for characterization—Google ‘cuterous’ to jog your imagination. But this seems to be a yet untapped (pun intended) field of dressing room art. Curiously absent cuterous One possible explanation is that the vast majority of people who spend their time in these rooms are bored boys. Girls are, sadly, in a small minority when it comes to inhabitants of putrid rock club dressing rooms. Another could be that men are more inclined to express their ob- session with their own genitalia. I’ve got no proof of this, but I do find it easier to imagine Högni sketching his pri- vate parts in the backroom of a dingy German joint than Sigríður drawing hers. Unfortunately though, the misrepresentation of geni- talia art is not the worst consequence of this gender dis- crepancy in rock ‘n’ roll. All discussions benefit from a variety of contributing voices, and like in so many other fields, rock ‘n roll is in dire need of more female input. But, as the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and we need to start somewhere. I therefore strongly recommend that women start con- tributing to the newly launched International Association of Genitalia Art Enthusiasts. Further down the line this will hopefully result in a competitor to the highly revered Phallological Museum, a celebration all things vaginal. There are too many dicks in Rock ‘n’ Roll! Árni Hjörvar is a travelling musician and a genitalia art enthusiast currently living in London. Dressing Room Dicks Wayward wanderings of a confused expat Continues from page 28
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