Reykjavík Grapevine - 07.06.2013, Síða 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
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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