Hasta La Gadget!

A bounce house made of boobs. A mirrored maze leading to the G spot. A climbing wall made of genitalia. No, this isn’t a bizarre dream of a carnival-obsessed pubescent boy. It’s an art show.

Coming soon to the Museum of Sex is “Funland: Pleasures & Perils of the Erotic Fairground,” an art installation slash naughty carnival by conceptual artist duo Bompas & Parr. The London-based designers are conjuring the latent sexual undertones of the carnivalesque with an exaggerated onslaught of private parts, ticklish sensations and spry libidos. So long pristine white cube, hello massive inflatable breasts!

The immersive installation is comprised of five attractions, all meant to conjure the strangely sexual aura of childhood carnivals. You may be thinking — fairs, sexual, really? But take a moment to travel back to those awkward days of roller coasters and funhouses, hot dog bits churning in your excited belly, experiencing extreme thrills of the frightening and titillating variety.

Remember hoping to sit next to that brace-faced hottie on the ferris wheel, your bodies bumping together amidst the centripetal force? The carnival is an early childhood glimpse of adult society gone topsy turvy, where norms are put to rest and physical sensation trumps all else. Carnivals, fairgrounds — whatever you call them — almost begged for transgressions to occur on the premises, from a sly hand-hold to a stealthy kiss.

Sam Bompas and Harry Parr are known for giving conceptual art a heavy dose of silliness, which in our book is the most noble of causes. We covered their previous unconventional take on food photography, in which a chef swallowed a pill-sized camera and projected the workings of her stomach to an audience. Here the artists shift from food to another, more elicit bodily pleasure — exploring and exaggerating those nascent feelings of sexual energy.

Explore and exaggerate they do, with aesthetically overblown carnivalesque activities meant to incite competition, play, physical exertion and a heavy dose of endorphins, which The Museum of Sex Kindly reminds us is “similar to those released at the point of orgasm.” Professor Vanessa Toulmin, Director of the UK National Fairground Archive, will supplement Bompas & Parr’s art with some cultural context on the dense history of fairground eroticism.

While you’re unlikely to see this NSFW installation traveling to The Met anytime soon, we’re always happy to see art reveling in its sillier side. If you aren’t at least a little bit curious about what it feels like to bounce amidst a see of giant breasts, we probably lost your attention long ago. But, come on, at what other art show can you find a horse racing game that replaced horses with penises? Spoiler alert: definitely no other art show.

“Funland: Pleasures & Perils of the Erotic Fairground” runs from July 26, 2014 until Spring 2015.

There’s a dark side to Muay Thai, Thailand’s 700-year-old national sport. Children as young as seven or eight are often the stars of the ring, most of them poor, kicking and pummeling and injuring each other as they perform the “Art of Eight Limbs,” as Muay Thai is known. The elegant name describes something brutal: the conversion of body parts into weaponry. Fists, elbows, knees, shins and feet — all are used against one’s opponents. Tiny fists, tiny elbows, tiny knees, tiny shins, and tiny feet.

For four years, photographer Noah David Bau has visited a Muay Thai training camp in a Bangkok slum. The boys he found there are the subjects of his devastating series, “This Is My Body.” The “impressionist documentary portraits” focus on the youngest of Muay Thai boxers, all of them orphaned or neglected. Writes Bau:

The boys are subjected to grueling workouts in oppressive heat; their bodies endure brutal punishment; and they are trained to be ferocious and merciless. By the time they are in their early twenties, many of them will have compromised their physical and mental well being as a result of years of excessive training and countless savage bouts. All proceeds from their winning purses are used to maintain their squalid training camp and provide for meager sustenance.

Bau wrote to HuffPost not long after we published photos from a very different Muay Thai-inspired series. For that one, Australian photographer Troy Schooneman turned his lens on young men who traveled to Thailand to train. They went of their own volition, and the portraits reflect the control they have over their lives. Draped in flowers, and gazing off into the distance, the men pose as sensitive warriors.

“While the images are beautiful and wonderfully stylized,” Bau wrote in an email, “they have the effect of glamorizing an industry that is much more complex and frankly, brutal, than the viewer could ever know.”

Last fall, an ESPN investigation into Muay Thai boxing conditions in Thailand quoted estimates citing some 30,000 fighters aged 15 years old. “In the rural countryside, they bang away, at temple fairs and fundraisers,” reads the article “for purses of $25 to $50, and a chance for a future beyond the rice fields.”

Child fighters became a phenomenon in the 1960s and 1970s, as the sport went pro. In the decades since, the Thai government has made lukewarm efforts to protect children at the behest of various activist organizations, but they inevitably meet resistance from local communities. Often, these kids are the main breadwinners for their families, who live in destitute rural areas where crime is rampant. In this context, Muay Thai is seen as a ticket out. Kids who box are admired, and keep a strict regimen that might “keep them out of trouble,” as one professor put it to ESPN.

Still, the consequences can be dire. The ESPN story cites an “ongoing medical study” on the brain health of 13 fighters under the age of 16, versus the brains of 200 non-fighters of comparable ages. The mapping, conducted at Ramathibodi Hospital in Bangkok, “showed abnormalities as well as inferior memory response among the fighters.”

Just as with some NFL players’ brains, the damage done is traumatic, resembling “that caused by auto accidents, falls and assaults.”

But, in the vein of football stars, the boys are also raised up as heroes. Their identities are defined by contradiction, as Bau writes, “at once admired and unwanted; savage and forlorn; innocent and jaded.”

Slut-shaming, in which people are bullied or harassed for their supposed sexual behavior, is a pervasive part of young adult culture—and some get slammed harder by it than others. But despite its moniker, slut-shaming has little to do with actual sexual activity. Rather, it is largely a function of gossip, cliques and social control. And though it might be tempting to dismiss the topic as the stuff of pubescent drama, in reality, the practice has hefty political import.

The prevalence of slut-shaming and its effects on women would come as no surprise to most teenagers, but researchers are beginning to formally tackle the subject, too. Leora Tanenbaum, author of the forthcoming book, I Am Not a Slut: Slut-Shaming in the Age of the Internet (HarperCollins), says the attention is a welcome development.

No one is in the bathroom with me, but I’m facing my enemy.

I pull the scale from its hiding spot between the toilet and the end of the vanity. It’s the perfect place since I’d honestly prefer crapping on it to stepping on it. I cringe.

Is this going to be a good day or a bad day? I’d better go pee first.

I drop my clothes, squeeze every ounce from my bladder, and then use my toe to tap the ON button.

A rectangular zero blinks in the liquid crystal display. It isn’t ready to break my heart yet; it needs to warm up first. The numbers look just like the ones on my alarm clock, yet these are sinister. The clock tells me what I know: I haven’t gotten enough sleep; it’s time to shuffle the kids to school; I’m late. The scale tells me what I dread: I have zero will power, zero control over my life. And that the weight I lost before I discovered my cancer and kept off during my treatment wasn’t the result of eating well and exercising, it was because my body was devouring calories to fuel the disease overtaking my breast.

The scale stops flashing, my cue to climb aboard. I hold my breath, think thin thoughts, and wait. I watch it blink, blink, blink… 147.

Shit, I’m fat.

I close my eyes, exhale and step off.

Every day starts the same: I will feel better; I will eat better; I will work out longer. And every day ends the same: I’m still so tired; I don’t feel like eating anything green; it was too hot to run.

The rational side of my brain perks up.

You have cancer, so what if you weigh 15 pounds more than you did?

But the chemo was six months ago and the radiation two. What if the weight has nothing to do with cancer or the stupid drugs I still take? What if I’m just weak?

Seven months ago I was in the best shape of my life, training for triathlons, the picture of health. Then I felt the lump.

The scans and biopsies showed my doctors five, small, aggressive tumors in my left breast, so my oncologist decided to pluck a few key lymph nodes from under my arm and test them for cancer, too. A lot hinged on that procedure, because if she found any, my treatment would be longer, harder, and involve radiation.

“We’ll take the sentinel node out and test it while you’re still on the table. If that one is positive, we will take the ones around it.” Dr. Reed said. “If you wake up with a drain, you’ll know we found cancer.”

After navigating the haze of pain medications and anesthesia, I saw the tube sticking out from my armpit.

“Fuuuuuck,” I slurred to Reed. “How many?”

“We took eight more.”

Though my road would be longer, I was lucky. The rest of the nodes were clean.

I made it through four and a half months of intense chemotherapy, spending most of the time hiding in my house when I wasn’t helping others feel better about my situation. I joked, hugged, and smiled my way through the pickup line at the kids’ school, soccer practices, and holiday parties. While I kept up the public show, often I went home exhausted and in tears.

“It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” my husband George commiserated.

“I know,” I said, “but they keep adding miles!”

I felt guilty whining. Two years before, his melanoma surged back after a six-year hiatus with such vengeance that doctors assumed he would die within weeks. I slept next to him in the ICU night after night, watching the treatment whither my oak of a man. And then I watched him come back to life.

When I was diagnosed, George reassured me that I was strong, too. And when I looked in the eyes of the man who had been my partner for more than 20 years, I believed him.

Because I had the BRCA2 gene mutation my boobs had to go. Doctors cut across each pectoral muscle and scraped out every ounce of breast tissue, then shoved in thick plastic expanders halfway inflated with saline. Once a week my plastic surgeon dangled a magnet over each breast, waiting to see where it stuck to my skin. When he had his target, he buried the needle to inflate some more.

My chest ached for days after each round, leaving me grumpy and distracted. The surgeon stretched in six weeks what had taken puberty two years; my breasts were back to their 16-year-old size and perkiness.

When the doctors were satisfied with my inflation, it was on to radiation.

“You’ll probably feel some discomfort,” Dr. Miles said.

Discomfort my ass. I felt pain and burning. By the end of two weeks my skin changed from light pink to a shade of crimson usually reserved for roses and nail polish. After six, it was crispy and blistered. I put the “raw” in bra.

Now, as I look in my bathroom mirror even the skin made so angry from radiation is only a shade or two darker than the right. And yet there is not one part of my reflection that looks attractive to me. I wonder if I will ever turn the corner and begin to accept what I see. Mastectomy scars bisect both breasts and there is a missing item of distinction from each: A nipple.

I know I should be thankful for this day, this life, this body. But right now all I see are the reminders of how much I have lost. Tears well and slowly fall down my cheeks.

A smile creeps across my face and I begin to giggle as the irony hits me: Here I am, hating my body, when I have tits just like Barbie. I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand, take a deep breath and start the shower.

Hot water pours over my face, washing away my tears and I begin to feel better. I will dry off, refreshed, and start again.

You can read more from Betsy at betsandpieces.com

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