GRAVITY-LOVER, on Benjamin Fredrickson's Wedgies published with Baron Books
October 20, 2024
October 20, 2024
I fashion a ladder—a stack of crates, plywood, bags of concrete; all belonging to my studiomate. Up top, there, clung to the gas line like fringe from the nearly-collapsing ceiling is a bungee cord. I’m only 5’8 (the national average height for a man so stop calling me short), and can’t reach it without the help of the mound. After grabbing it, I let myself down. I am negligent of the scuffs from my sneakers made across his primed surfaces. It will be through these scuffs that he discovers my secret.
In the shared bathroom of the building’s 6th floor, I walk into one of the stalls, and strap the bungee cord over the steel framing, looping it through the back of my briefs. With gravity as my accomplice, the cotton screeches from strain. I reach the ground only with the tips of my toes and whine from the pain. A wedgie is non-poetic and refreshingly immature. If you pull someone’s waistband, then fabric will shoot up—how Aristotelian. Someone walks into the bathroom and I am sure to be quiet. The idea of being caught is different from actually being caught. The only other person usually here at this time is the furniture-maker. He will think I am a fool and I can’t bear that.
The next day, when I see the man I’ve been slowly courting (this one’s sweet and driven and firey, so I’ve been trying to take things slow this time), he asks “What is this trail of broken skin running from your gooch to the lower of your back?” (he didn’t use the word gooch, instead he just touched it with her index finger [emphasis on touched, NOT pressed, NEITHER inserted. {Remember, I’m taking things slow this time.}]) I point to Fredrickson’s book on my bedside and tell him what I want him to do to me—granted, I no longer care about taking things slow.
In Benjamin Fredrickson’s book, spanning four-years of work, Wedgi– wait… How to write articulately and with critical approach while stamping a hard-on? How to shed my “bias”? I thought about pitching it to A*******, promising the publisher an exclusive photo of the writer receiving an atomic-wedgie. In this plan, I’d approach Fredrickson saying that the prestigious art publication wanted to run a piece on the book, with one caveat. He’d have no choice! Maybe he’d do it to me with a maze of ropes, pulleys, and metal armatures present in many of the book’s images. Looking at these ad hoc contraptions, I’m reminded of my childhood friend Jacob—now looking back, perhaps a first foray into sculpture–and his face as we suspended one another. For brief moments, the Crepe Myrtle’s hardy branch and the feeble elastic would work together as scaffold, until: rip, always followed by: thud.
A boyfriend: always semi-disengaged when we would have sex. It wouldn’t be a year into the relationship that I would find out why. One day, after having dropped a quarter on the floor, rolling under his bed with that ever-increasing ding-ding sound, I peered down and squinted at the object of his fetish. I’d never heard anything about a double-life as an Olympic swimmer and was confused discovering countless swim-caps and goggles.
With his eyes looking anywhere but in mine, his bright red face led his calm, cool, collected excuses astray. Why hadn’t he just told me? If it had made him love me, I would’ve returned with the fresh scent of chlorine steeped into my pores. I told him how before I decided to study art, I had toyed with the offers to be a collegiate swimmer—cutting and pasting the little I remembered from stories about my brother. I performed nonchalance in my mentions of the sport. The subtext of these lies lay: please, just let me know YOU. After the incident with the coin and the cap, he was paranoid I’d keep searching for more of his secrets, and in the nighttime he’d shout at me if I got up to get water or use the bathroom.
In Fredrickson’s Wedgies, there is no shame, except that which is performed to erotic effect. Tensile strength is brought to its brink by faceless contortionists—faceless not for anonymity’s sake, but for imagining the humiliated body as yours or mine (albeit, you and I as male). The pragmatics of the fetish rely on gravity, making physics your daddy. Just as the face of the bitch and the invisible Newtonian force remain out of sight, so too does Fredrickson, visible only through marginal moments. A hand clutching a pulley-ed rope or the white leather of Nike Air Force 1s—no longer “another skinny, nerdy, implicated, incriminated, sly player popping up among his subjects” (Amorous Minneapolis, Allen Frame).
Face-less-ness is to be contended with by every fellow fetishist. (Unfortunately for me and my tattooed body, the face is no longer my photographically-identifying marker. Fortunately for me, I am an artist and my practice is one of deleting repression.)
What I consider the most impressive accomplishment of the work is the image's ability to exist across boundary-lines, resonating within multiple aesthetic registers, transcending the art world to have equal footing in the very subculture it depicts—which many of the models emerge from. Exhibitionist tendencies drive the photographs production (each viewer confirms). Fredrickson’s images thus are not simply representations of sexual culture, but active and traveling entities—popping up on Reddit forums, becoming totems for the practicing. (Lingering question. What industry is more invested in aesthetics: the art world or the sex industry?)
postscript:
What was the source of the fissure? (There’s a double entendre there.) This inability to say the word wedgie? The ease of saying I once wanted to fuck a dead rabbit (more on this later), but I’m nervous to say I want to be wedgied? In the midst of writing this piece, I wish I could say that all remaining embarrassment for a legitimately hilarious kink was shed, but momentarily it was amplified—almost as if the erotics rely on a semblance of humiliation (surprise!). Just as the act of writing this was an attempt at kicking the useless thing free, my choosing to publish it would be another attempt. Let’s see how that one goes. If I’m lucky, it won’t make me any less embarrassed.
What was the source of the fissure? (There’s a double entendre there.) This inability to say the word wedgie? The ease of saying I once wanted to fuck a dead rabbit (more on this later), but I’m nervous to say I want to be wedgied? In the midst of writing this piece, I wish I could say that all remaining embarrassment for a legitimately hilarious kink was shed, but momentarily it was amplified—almost as if the erotics rely on a semblance of humiliation (surprise!). Just as the act of writing this was an attempt at kicking the useless thing free, my choosing to publish it would be another attempt. Let’s see how that one goes. If I’m lucky, it won’t make me any less embarrassed.
from Wedgies (2019 - ongoing)