Words
Words
Words
The Present is (the) Artist
an essay on sex & power inspired by the work of Marina Abramović
I said, “mess me up”.
You asked, “how”.
I said: a scene is a provisional space.
We are in a scene together.
You asked “why”.
I said: the mess is the destination we are becoming, so think of this mess as a usefully strange, pleasant disorder
a
tactically
performative
deconstruction
insofar as my persona (Pandora) opts to transcend mere theatricality and the limits of discursive text to instead (co)operate as an embodied critique of socio-cultural assumptions around identity, especially sexual identity and female sexual pleasure.
Do we have to go to work, work, work....
From this dissonance emerges a somatic language of seduction wherein the phallocentric assumptions around power and sexuality may be subjected to ludic interrogation, carressing the repressive hegemony as it mulls over its many latent paradoxes. Is this body the refuge of grounded selfhood?)
This confrontation, both comforting and conflicting, invites deeper inquiry.
Let’s define desire as “the paradox of wanting a thing that we do not understand” (with our minds -- humor me for a moment).
This means understanding that Pandora’s existence is an initional gambit to create provisional spaces where the politics of intimacy may become renegotiated.
(the conflicted, comforted. )
Pandora strategically occupies the fluid interstices between fact and fiction, symbolically bridging oppositions, knowing that behind this mask lies the confessed vulnerability of thinly-veiled self-exposure while presencing the conspicuous privilege that permits her to undertake such a project (royalty, PhD, etc).
These are big words to say simply that
being vulnerable matters.
Safety, vulnerability, peace; this Ménage À Trois too often is inaccessable. (Easier said than done.)
Lower hanging fruit: how do we learn to recognize when we unconciously weaponize our sexuality?
Pandora’s problemization of sexual politics utilizes true vulnerability to signal the possibility for authentic connection through ritual unmasking.
Recontextualized through this character, the Hegelian master-slave dialectic foregrounds the hermeneutics of consensual domination and submission rather than the 🥱 tired cockfights of overt power differentials.
This confrontation, both comforting and conflicting, invites deeper inquiry.
Let’s define desire as “the paradox of wanting a thing that we do not understand” (with our minds -- humor me for a moment).
This means understanding that Pandora’s existence is an initional gambit to create provisional spaces where the politics of intimacy may become renegotiated.
(the conflicted, comforted. )
Pandora strategically occupies the fluid interstices between fact and fiction, symbolically bridging oppositions, knowing that behind this mask lies the confessed vulnerability of thinly-veiled self-exposure while presencing the conspicuous privilege that permits her to undertake such a project (royalty, PhD, etc).
These are big words to say simply that
being vulnerable matters.
Safety, vulnerability, peace; this Ménage À Trois too often is inaccessable. (Easier said than done.)
Lower hanging fruit: how do we learn to recognize when we unconciously weaponize our sexuality?
Pandora’s problemization of sexual politics utilizes true vulnerability to signal the possibility for authentic connection through ritual unmasking.
Recontextualized through this character, the Hegelian master-slave dialectic foregrounds the hermeneutics of consensual domination and submission rather than the 🥱 tired cockfights of overt power differentials.
This means playing with power
(as opposed to letting power play with us.) And yes, such reframing antagonizes the comfortable patterns of our sexual existence but in exchange offers regenerative, boundless possibilities in the mutual exploration of limit(less)-experiences: outside of the fealty to roleplaying reproductive imperatives lies a boundless adjacent-possible that is fertile with pleasure and connection.
Please do not forget:
In destabilizing enduring binaries like reason/passion, mind/body and real/artificial, Pandora reflects the fragmented and decentered self-endemic to postmodern and late capitalist hegemony.
Here are my targets: our barely conscious, primordial discomforts, which Pandora gleefully subjects to exposure and overthrow.
Pandora’s existence posits elements of a dawning utopia that at firs threatens most essentially not the heteronormative status quo as it is practiced (as it is fucked) but rather our understanding of fucking.
Nothing so rote as a cock is inverted (I generally don’t travel with a strap-on) but rather the dialectics of psychosexual permission: the shadowly underbelly of our social conditioning around gender, propriety and boundaries.
We are at body, you and I.
In playfully posing the forbidden (the skullfuckable submissive, the princess slut, the anal savant) Pandora interrogates repression and what fears lie in their liminal shadows.
As Cohen reminds us, “there’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in”.
Yet, Pandora’s natural tongue is body talk. The forenotes of seduction becomes a vehicle for ludic inquiry rather than a performative commoditization.
(this revolution cannot be vocalized)
Through intimate but legal interactive performances situated as “dates,” Pandora complicates power relations and the politics of intimacy.
In this context, donations for her time confuse the empowered “economic rationality” that valorizes the female body as a one-dimensional capital asset while simultaneously attempting to destigmatize the idea of sex work vis a vis the presencing of her privilege, resisting the dollar’s phallic symbolism that penetrates as unwanted technocapitalist imposition.
By suspending quid pro quo within these playful yet consensual spaces, Pandora attempts to chart a provisional discontinuity wherein we may explore how corporeal femininity may be co-opted as currency within patriarchal paradigms and how intimacy may co-opt the patriarchal paradigm.
Yet the invitation she broadcasts for the bodies of others to touch her/my body is consistent, authentic, explicit, specific and consensual.
The liminal ontology of Pandora is both a research question and an authentic opportunity for mutual somatic experience – which we could more dangerously extend with language like, “orgasm,”, “body fluids”, or even (oh my!) “sex”.
Under Pandora's watch, identity itself becomes strategically fluid (i.e., Derrida’s différance). Weaving in the unlikely intertexts of dynastic legacy highlights the multiplicity intrinsic to all selfhood. Pandora wears the vestiges of aristocracy as carnivalesque adornment, a terrestrial tiara repurposing its symbolic power to attract rather than deflect the uncomfortable inconsistencies around sex and power that, to this day in 2025, remain deeply problematic and repressive.
Pandora’s protean persona highlights the intrinsic multiplicity within all subjectivities. In other words, conceptually I am encouraged by the not-uncommon feedback, “you can’t be real”.
Hah. Real. "Real"
As Morpheus asked, "What is real? How do you define real?"
> I am the woman in the red dress ready to unplug you from the Matrix
These words are not the thing. The explicitly kinky intimacy I hope to share with you, is. You may bring your desires, and I’ll bring mine.
I ask, can you:
Take as much pleasure as you can.
Notice how fully it is given.
Feel your body alive in undiluted presence?
I ask:
Who is Pandora DuPont
chiefly not as question at all but a discursive tactic to interrogate the cognitive politics of sexual desire.
To instantiate this offering, we may envision Pandora as an alchemical bridge (i.e., “DuPont”, De’Le Pont, ‘of the bridge’ in French) over uncertain terrain, a technique that invites us to confront our own masked desires and unstable selves (selves that are -- I repeat -- ready to be unmasked).
We may envision potential wholeness ready to be reconstructed coherently from the fragments of our being that we have heretofor hidden and ignored.
We may anticipate and then appreciate an ephemeral rupture and concomitant opportunity for authentic intimacy to arrise from the reappropriation of shame.
No shame, but no promises either: Pandora does not offer a pretty box of solutions, but rather the possibility of strange becomings (and cummings).
Fuck the walk of shame:
I strut.
May we 🫂 together.
At the very least, I wanna see your
click