Editor’s Note: This article on Peaches by Mary Katharine Tramontana was first published in the Spring 2020 Playboy.
A new era for Peaches began with an online review of a men’s pale-pink silicone double masturbator she happened upon in January 2019. The multimedia artist, best known for her sex-drenched music, found herself shocked by two facets of the clip.
“The first was the look of the object,” she says. “It was so disembodied, like ‘Danger!’ Here’s what a woman could be reduced to: a mouth with some red lipstick and a vagina.”
Then there was the reviewer himself. “It became clear he’d never had sex with a woman but was projecting that women can’t give him what he can get with this toy,” she says. “He was talking about having that ‘Shut up and suck my cock, bitch’ fantasy. I felt sorry for him.”
Over a flat white at Godshot cafe in Berlin last fall, Peaches recalls pondering the device’s features. One end mimics a woman’s mouth and the other a vulva, so the toy could theoretically pleasure itself if it had sovereignty over its body. The idea grew: If, in an alternate realm, double masturbators could speak and move, they could “get together, rename themselves and rewrite their own narrative.”
That idea became Whose Jizz Is This?, a 10,000-square-foot multisensory feat—“a deconstructed musical in 14 scenes,” in her words—that debuted last August at Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany. (There are plans to move the work to North America in the next year.) Jizz tells the story of that imagined universe in which the “Fleshies” come alive and win sexual emancipation. Animatronics, sculptures and film scenes are ignited in intervals by a combination of lights, movement and sound. The project took eight months to execute, with collaborators including experimental musician Black Cracker, technological art hub House of North and (aptly named) fetish design house RubAddiction.
Far away from her brilliantly intense stage persona, Peaches takes a sip of her drink and articulates one of the project’s central questions: “Does jizz come only from a male source?” In one piece, “Cold Turkey,” the Fleshies are seen learning about themselves, turning themselves inside out, vibrating on their own without a human’s touch. In “Saturnalia Returns,” the Fleshies and other sex toys are depicted bonding on a psychedelic journey. Here, the human viewer lies on the floor, taking on a passive role while the Fleshies dominate, mirroring a society with a rigidly enforced active-passive sexual binary.
The lure of masturbators is that they take on the submissive role expected of women without argument; they’re always ready and willing to be penetrated, and when they are, their experience doesn’t need to be considered. But in Whose Jizz Is This? a group of Fleshies unite on a large screen to speak out against their erotic subjugation and share their stories and their dreams:
“I will seek the pleasure of myself. I am deserving of pleasure. I deserve to enjoy sexual experience. I deserve to share my intimacy with whomever I please. I can decide when and how I want to give pleasure. I can decide when and how I want to get pleasure.”A useful mantra for any human who’s fed up with being jizzed into without respect or reciprocity.
Peaches, born Merrill Nisker, proved her rebellious spirit from a young age. As a child in Toronto she refused to bend to authority and disregarded any lesson at her private Jewish school that didn’t foster creativity. Theater became a valuable outlet, and after college at York University, she launched a children’s drama program at a local YMCA. She was so inspired by the students’ ability to abandon inhibitions that she channeled their wild energy into her nighttime performances across Toronto’s underground music scene.
At 30, she left Canada for a new turn in Berlin and created the alter ego we’ve come to know today, inspired by her complex relationship with pop culture and conversations around sex. In 2000 her persona crystallized with her first album, The Teaches of Peaches.Each of the album’s 11 fearless and catchy tracks is a study of gendered sexual politics. “Fuck the Pain Away” employs lo-fi rap beats and a big bass line to deliver the opening: “Suckin’ on my titties like you wanted me / Callin’ me all the time.…” The song gained in popularity despite being too raunchy to chart, finding its way into clubs everywhere and Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation.
“I’m not interested in clean,” says Peaches, who has since toured with John Waters and collaborated with Iggy Pop, both icons of depravity.
Twenty years and five studio albums later, the 53-year-old has maintained a linear artistic assault on systemic misogyny. Her latest work is a rallying cry for anyone striving to abandon objectification and be treated as equal to men.
A pre-liberated Fleshie, upon close inspection, exemplifies the problematic way we talk about sex. Just as these masturbators were created for men to insert themselves into, we speak of heteronormative human intimacy as the man performing an act that the woman receives: Penises “pound” and “fuck” supposedly passive and vulnerable female orifices. We have countless words for male masturbation, but we struggle to find phrases to mark its female equivalent.
Penises are scarcely featured in Whose Jizz Is This? The absence is conspicuous, a ghostly reminder that modern discussions of sex focus almost entirely on male pleasure. With “Glory Hall,” Peaches redirects the focus: This part of the show is an immersive play on the conventional glory hole (an aperture in a wall, just big enough for a penis, so another individual can pleasure the male extremity without face-to-face contact), but the Glory Hall is large enough for individuals to walk through and is lined with 144 Fleshies.
Learned sexual behaviors perpetuate the orgasm gap, or the decades-persistent finding that men have dramatically more orgasms than women in straight sexual encounters. A 2017 study from the International Academy of Sex Research’s Archives of Sexual Behavior reports that 95 percent of heterosexual men almost always reach orgasm during sex, compared with 65 percent of heterosexual women. Additionally, according to sociologist and Occidental College professor Lisa Wade, lesbians and bisexual women orgasm about 83 percent of the time, “or about the same frequency that men who sleep with women enjoy.” She also suggests that women orgasm easily and reliably when masturbating. “There’s nothing natural about the orgasm gap, especially given the fact that most women are multi-orgasmic and most men aren’t,” Wade says. “People are just not choosing activities that produce female orgasm, or not choosing to do them long enough.”
This discrepancy in orgasms can be partially explained by phallic imperatives—gendered sexual scripts that prioritize men’s experience and pleasure. A straight man may believe the female orgasm is incidental because vaginal sex is the only “real sex,” even though clitoral contact (cunnilingus or rubbing) may be necessary for a woman to orgasm. Of course, stigmatizing female sexuality, enforcing negative body image and socializing girls to please others also contribute to the problem. Pleasure equality, Wade concludes, will never happen without gender equality.
The only path to erotic liberation is to abandon the notion that somebody gets fucked and somebody else does the fucking—consensual kink excluded. Instead, partners must do what the Fleshies do: When one is feeling tortured and in pain (like a featured Fleshie that vomits and bleeds), stand up and say, “I can’t take this anymore.” Partners must value egalitarian sexual encounters that are about discovery and pleasure rather than achievement or status. We need an entirely new perspective on sex.
Prioritizing women’s orgasms by putting the clitoris front and center in our art and culture is an essential part of that transformation—one given new life by Peaches. She takes up space in the male-dominated industries of music, art and theater as “a form of activism that’s entertaining and hopefully inspires creativity. I’ve always said I want the mainstream to come closer to me.”
And she’s ready to continue pushing boundaries in her fight for our sexual freedom. The stakes are high. “There are more new abortion laws and more trans murders than ever,” she says. “We know how to say ‘toxic masculinity,’ but what does healthy masculinity look like? What does trans masculinity look like? That’s not my conversation, but it needs to be a real one. We need healthy masculinity represented in a way that intersectional feminism and queer culture are going to accept, help and nurture.”
In the meantime, as we usher in a new decade in which we have the chance to liberate our patriarchal sexual landscape, repeat after me, woman-identified and gender-queer readers:
“I will seek the pleasure of myself. I am deserving of pleasure. I can decide when and how I want to give pleasure. I can decide when and how I want to get pleasure.”