‘Golden Ass’ looks at prostitution, sex acts

President Robert Zeigler opened Women’s History Symposium March 8 saying how significant it is for students to learn about women’s health and history.

“This is a great opportunity for you to learn some things and talk about some things that you may not talk about,” Zeigler said. “That is what education is all about.”

Art Professor Marleen Hoover then talked about this college showing more than 50 films pertaining to women’s health, including “The Vagina Monologues” and “I, Doll.”

Hoover noted presentations from the past 20 years that pertained to women in education, abortion, arranged marriages and female pioneers. “This year, we are channeling timely and very challenging topics,” Hoover said. The theme for the 2012 celebration of Women’s History Month was “Texas Women: Laws, Health, and Survival.”

A one-day symposium featured lectures and presentations on “Boystown” in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico; Planned Parenthood; and the murder of women in Juarez, Mexico.

Nuevo Laredo’s Boystown

On March 8, artist Julia Barbosa Landois presented “The Golden Ass: Performance and Artistic Research” on Boystown, a legal prostitution zone in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

Landois said she used to think men who went to Boystown were “women haters,” but she admitted some family members and friends have been there.

“I’m trying to pick apart these men I care about or have a certain type of relationship with and what makes them go also,” Landois said.

She did her research by interviewing men and prostitutes who frequented Boystown.

Some men she interviewed said they went to Boystown when they were “young and crazy” but now believe they are different people.

In the presentation, Landois showed a picture of Tlazolteotl, a goddess who inspires sinful acts but also offers redemption. Tlazolteotl offers redemption only once, but if someone is redeemed and ends up sinning again, they are damned.

Landois thought Tlazolteotl represented a lot of the men who visited Boystown, because though they sinned, but in the end, they are forgiven, unless it became a continuous habit.

Landois’ project, on display at the Blue Star Contemporary Arts Center last summer, included an exhibit of a popular attraction along the border, a “donkey show,” a live sex act of a woman engaged in intercourse with a donkey.

For the Blue Star exhibit, she created an imitation Mexican bar that she named “Donkey’s Show” to capture the atmosphere and went into detail about the practice in a silent short film titled “Indelible.”

Through a series of slides in “Indelible,” Landois shares her own experience at a “donkey show” and the surprising reaction of her companion to the live sex acts. Spectators were allowed to take photos and pose with the act. Her friend took a photo, but somehow, the photograph got lost.“It’s on the record. Yeah, it’s like it’s on file somewhere,” Landois wrote in “Indelible.”

Landois has never been to Boystown, she said, because when she started researching the zone, drug violence was creating danger for tourists.

“I cannot understand why somebody will become a sex worker,” Landois said. “How people get to the point where they’re selling their bodies? I can’t understand how that happens.”

Students reacted with shock and dismay. Psychology sophomore Becky Li said, “I feel bad this is going on.” Landois, who teaches new media at the University of Texas at San Antonio, was presenting at this college for the first time.