“You ever watch her laugh? She’s crazy.” Is this a trope straight out of the gender discrimination playbook or the campaign rhetoric of a leading presidential candidate? Eliciting snickers from supporters, a certain former president’s flagrant sexism is just the latest example of the pervasive male bravado that feminist artist Betty Tompkins has spent her entire career combatting.
Emerging as a crucial and potentially determining factor in the future of our democracy, the terrifying amount of cultural and political power that misogynistic attitudes continue to wield in society lies at the heart of Tompkins’s third solo exhibition at P·P·O·W, sardonically titled “Just a Pretty Face.” On view through August 9, the exhibition includes three distinct bodies of work from 1990 to 2024, all of which cleverly employ soft and hardcore porn imagery to unseat self-pleasuring, debasement-prone men, reasserting women as the true power wielders.
Timely as ever, the new and little-seen works on view at P·P·O·W. coincide with Kamala’s newly announced campaign which is galvanizing women far and wide to take down her opponent. Concurrently, a friend near and dear to me is facing a legal battle against a husband who harassed her for nine long years using the very rhetoric depicted in puckish pink text in Tompkins’s Insults & Laments series (2018–2024). Airbrushed portraits of female genitalia intended to unsettle, the paintings feature zoomed-in vulvas and ass cracks with their pubic hair and openings all crude and exposed, amplifying the derogatory power of the misogynist insults Tompkins employs. Standing before the works, I felt reduced to the lady parts laid bare before me, defiled by them, but also emboldened by the certainty that no, I am not as forgiving, unworthy, weak, malleable, or empty as his debasing rhetoric is meant to make me feel.
Tompkins, 79, may have once called herself an “accidental dissident,” but, like all women who come of age in a culture or relationship that primes them for failure, there is nothing accidental about refusing to be subjugated by a society complicit in the self-aggrandizement of violent men. The rebel’s now-legendary Fuck Paintings garnered attention in the 70s, becoming an unplanned talking point for the polarizing pornography debates that roiled the “Sex Wars” of second-wave feminism. Using her ex-husband’s porn stash as source material, the works pitted sex-positive feminists against their anti-porn counterparts who struggled to come to terms with Tompkins’s pronouncement that the X-rated imagery of penetration—raw, untouched, and up close—could and should be employed as a form of sexual freedom and free speech. Ever since, the artist and activist has fought persistently against censorship while continuing to paint the “naughty parts” that men use for their own pleasure, yet still become nonplussed when it is a woman putting such imagery out into the world.
The 23 Insults & Laments paintings on view at P·P·O·W hit like a brick—statements Tompkins sourced from yet another woman’s disgracefully predictable tale of abuse. NO ONE WILL EVER LOVE YOU. YOU ARE FAT. SHUT UP. YOU DON’T DESERVE ME. MAKE ME A SANDWICH. WHY DO YOU MAKE ME HURT YOU. I THINK YOUR INTELLIGENCE HAS GOTTEN IN THE WAY OF YOUR ABILITY TO BE INTIMATE. NO ONE IS GOING TO BELIEVE YOU. This last one-liner was hurled at my aforementioned friend more than once as she shakily dialed 9-1-1 in March, surrendering to the state to protect herself and her daughter from a man who had hit her one too many times. When the police arrived, three men, she was beaten and bruised yet they told her to “grab a pillow and sleep on the couch.”
Her soon-to-be ex-husband embodies the stereotypical yet prevalent misogynist Tompkins confronts—the kind of man I naively thought existed outside of my inner circle. (My inability to see him for who he truly was might reflect Tompkins’s notion of “embedded misogyny”—the idea that such thinking has even infiltrated the mindset of women.) As women must do to stay sane, Tompkins uses humor as a saving grace, lightening the weight of her work while increasing its sting. My friend’s husband was a pond-builder and equipment lover; in Tompkins’s Tool Series (1990–2000), on view in “Just a Pretty Face,” his favorite garden tools become taunting readymades featuring coy nudes posing for male enjoyment. Inspired by softcore imagery from vintage porn books like Taschen’s Wheels and Curves: Erotic Photographs of the Twenties—certainly more comical than erotic by today’s standards—the tools’s seductive subjects ridicule the man who might easily cause the frying pan or garden shovel depicted to be wielded as a weapon of self-defense.
Piece of Cake (1999), for example, serves up a reclining booty on a cake knife, poking holes in the societally entrenched objectification that equates fleshy curves with an edible treat. In this series, Tompkins also clearly cites the centuries-old art historical tradition of male artists painting nude females frolicking in idyllic landscapes similar to the loosely rendered settings she recreates, raising vital questions about what constitutes a successful “reclamation” of such erotically charged, male-centric imagery for the modern viewer. Taken out of context, like a stripper on a city street, does the derogatory power of Tompkins’s scantily clad subjects dissolve, or do they still participate in the patriarchal ideology that spurred them to performatively pose uncovered in the first place? Questions without quick answers. As I see it, Tool Series makes a deliberate pun on domestic objects—objects that objectify—while turning a tool into the man who fails to see past, through, or beyond the objectification that he and his tools participate in.
Defacements (1992–2003), the third and last series in the show, transforms the actual pages of vintage softcore porn publications into oil crayon-covered works on paper. Painted during summers spent in the greenery of New Hampshire, Defacements frames the cigarette-smoking, boob-exposing, cloche-hat-wearing women in verdant landscapes of the artist’s own making, where they prance and purse unencumbered. In Hood Ornament (1999), a woman straddling the hood of a vintage Renault raises her skirt to reveal (drum roll…) nothing but multiple layers of undergarments. Set against a water-filled landscape of soft, exaggerated brushwork, Tompkins empowers her female subject to take part in the joke. Self-deprecating and ready to ridicule, she rocks it as a hood ornament, revealing nothing but her own subversive power.
Since leaving her husband, my friend’s core self has burst from sullied soil: she’s learned to drive a car and throw an ax, she sings to live guitar now and has befriended more than one divorcee down the street. Like Tompkins’s women, funny, frisky, and free, nobody can reduce her to a mere object of derision, rather, she now carries the insults he hurled at her like a jetpack, fueling her own ability to overcome. Bias against women may be one “hell of a drug” as Nadia Brown of the Women’s and Gender Studies program at Georgetown recently put it, but as Tompkins can attest, the satisfaction of combatting it is twice as potent. After six decades of being censored, glorified, shut down, and silenced, Betty Tompkins remains indefatigable, offering my friend—and other victims of physical and psychological abuse—a model, a megaphone, and a community.