And, never content with the status quo, thinking more about how she might monetize her events, in mid-April 1969 Kusama placed a quarter page advertisement in the Village Voice to announce the opening of the Kusama Enterprises boutique located at 664 Sixth Avenue where she offered “mod-hip styles, nude fashions, see-throughs, orgy dresses, homosexual and  lesbian dresses” a body-painting studio, and photography studio offering “nude girl models” with camera rentals available at $25 per half hour.

Less than five years later Lynda Benglis would take a page from Kusama’s book, strike a pose, and place an advertisement in the November 1974 issue of Artforum injecting her cocksure self-portrait avec dildo into the magazine’s pages. To finance her Artforum insert, Benglis produced a run of hand-painted t-shirts memorializing her infamous ad.

While the Artforum work would become a pillar of feminist discourse, Benglis preceded it with a string of similarly suggestive images that taken together would embolden women to follow suit in the years to come. Decades later, Beverly Semmes launched her Feminist Responsibility Project, taking the porn industry head-on by censoring magazine pages torn from vintage issues of Hustler and Penthouse to create a series of absurd, sexy, enigmatic abstractions that simultaneously obscure and complicate. The partial concealment of the underlying image amplifies the highly constructed tableaux and conventions of the genre forcing us to look more closely, not only for the naughty bits but towards the grey space that marks ever-changing attitudes surrounding the depiction of human sexuality.

Yayoi Kusama (b.1929), Lynda Benglis (b.1941), and Beverly Semmes (b.1958) represent three generations of women who have co-opted and manipulated the pornographic genre to advance their personal agendas. Whether to reach a larger public, respond to their male peers on their own terms, or shine a light on an industry and its players ripe for review, these women have reclaimed power and agency by taking control of the medium and the message. As a wise man once said, if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em….

-David Platzker