A few months back, gay blogs everywhere exploded over the news of art student Clayton Pettet losing his virginity in a performance piece. Because let’s face it: your first time is invariably awful. If you can at least get college credit off it, I suppose it wouldn’t be a complete waste, right?
Except it turns out, none of that actually happened. Unless you count force-feeding bananas to art students as sex. (As far as I can tell, it isn’t . . . is it?)
According to Dazed Digital, the actual art piece involved Pettet, with words like “NSFW” and “teen whore” painted on his body, getting scrubbed down and shaved in front of an enraptured crowd, before instructing audience members to take bananas and shove them in his mouth. Once again, that’s not sex, is it? And if it isn’t, would it be weird to have an erection? I’m asking for a friend.
After the fact, Pettet spoke with Dazed about his show, explaining, “I’ve always said I didn’t believe in virginity, so it kind of defeats the point if I’d actually lost my virginity for my art show! It was always about me stealing the word ‘virginity,’ rather than having it stolen from me. That’s why I pushed the date back about 75 times. Because of the press the piece got, galleries assumed I was going to trick them and do what everyone thought I was going to do. But I’m not going to give what everyone wants, it’s not the point.”
Well, if you wanted to make a point, you made several. First, art students are the worst. Second, regardless of what you think about virginity, people spend way too much time obsessing over a moment in time that’s brief, awkward and unpleasant for everyone involved. Third, Pettet has a weird thing for bananas, and I think he may have too much potassium in his diet.
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