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Scenology — By Adele on 17 December, 2008 8:40 pmThe Guardian yesterday had an article about Parisian life models staging a naked protest in front of the city hall; they demanded proper pay and professional contracts, and all those good things:
They also wanted to quash the misconception that life-modelling was merely something students and retired people did for pocket money. Sean Connery may have posed naked in Edinburgh to make ends meet when he was a struggling actor and Quentin Crisp may have spent the war years posing at Derby School of Art, but in France life-modelling is widely seen as a serious career choice.
France sounds like a nice place to take your clothes off for a living, even if they do have to stage naked protests.
I’m not equating life-modelling and spanking modelling, but the article subtly confirms something I’ve discovered in my up to now single experience as an artist’s model: posing can be a submissive experience.
It’s a beautiful craft and very physically demanding. You have to forget yourself and move beyond the contours of your own body… You are naked and defenceless in front of a room full of people.
I suspect not every model can extract pleasure out of this physical strain and mental vulnerability, but I hope lots of them can, and get to enjoy it.
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4 Comments
They must have the most interesting union meetings.
Prefectdt
I wouldn’t be in too much of a hurry to cross their picket line!
They shouldn’t stand too close to the coke brazier, though. Goodness knows what might get singed.
I did life-modelling to help pay bills while in law school. It was at a small college and at a community college both about 20 miles from where I lived (in different directions); and where I didn’t know anybody.
Adele is right, it was a submissive experience. You held a pose for hours, using little tricks to ease the tension. You had a certain pride in your body, but you had to go within yourself, and sublimate yourself. You couldn’t do it well if you visually flirted, or even looked, at any co-ed in the room; but you couldn’t do it at all if you didn’t give yourself to all of them.
In a sense, you were nothing but, in another the center of all.
N.B.:
The more I think about it, the more I agree with Adele. I could have made the same amount of money, without driving 20 miles at inconvenient times, as a bartender or a student aide to a faculty member.
I don’t think, in retrospect, that I would have life-modelled if I hadn’t been a heterosexual male submissive with a certain, albeit sublimated, exhibitionis streak. At the time, it just seemed like a job.