That Ultraviolent Gaze

by Casie Brown

I had to take off all my clothes. Nakedness was necessity. My skin was exposed while I sat in the rental car, A/C on blast as I scrolled through the WebMD entry on heat stroke; it felt cold and clammy to touch. When I got to the hotel room, taking off my CK overalls and synthetic halter before the door even closed behind me, I could feel the heat escaping: light as a feather, hot as fuck.

A naked body devoid of weight, markers, intention, and meaning was a thing I had everyday, but felt in possession of less often. Stripped of expectation, desire to please, self-scrutiny, and the avalanche of implications that come with looking at your body. Or looking at any body. Like the difference between catching your reflection unexpectedly on the street versus the burning imprint of your familiar shape right after you close your eyes. My body was a thing I had and used — maybe more intimately and instinctually than most — but rarely took the time to feel as my own. The exhaustion put me in a paralyzed panic. I was alone, eyes closed, flat on my back, tits slanting to the respective left and right of me. A rectangle of light crossed the ceiling above me as the sun set. I didn’t move for hours.

There was a time before this where I lay just as still and just as bare. I lay with my eyes closed on a beach, my naked body — cunt, tits, everything — not up for the taking. I knew I was wrong, that men and their eyes dominate over closed lids, and he sees you when you’re sleeping and when you’re fucking and when you’re buying milk, but for a few moments it was how I felt.

On July 6, 2015, I woke up wanting to be naked and wanting to be outside. Hours later I was. I removed the thin straps of a new swimsuit that had somehow already lost its elasticity, took a small hit, and sunk back, bush to sun. For a while, everything was uninterrupted light.

***

On March 21st, 1965, Yoko Ono was sitting in a spotlight at Carnegie Recital Hall, eyes open, fully clothed. In the nine-minute and eighteen-second version of “Cut Piece” available online, it’s not Yoko Ono we see first, but a man squatting in front of her with scissors. Dressed in black, shadows appear sporadically across the sections of her exposed skin, gradually increasing as audience members are invited to the stage to cut off pieces of her clothing.

Quickly, we see the audience as the camera angle switches behind Ono on the stage. The appear just as you’d imagine her to see them: hazy blobs in theatre seats. You can’t make out their faces, let alone their eyes, but they’re looking. Ultraviolet gazes. Sometimes, when my eyes are shut and my partner is eating me out, I see the same thing in my mind. Unidentified onlookers of different heights gathered in a semi-circle of raised stadium seating as my body stretches out below.

Something blocks the light, and I ignore it. Gingerly, a few audience members cross the stage and snip away fragments of her cardigan, her skirt. We stay still, while the shadows crossing both bodies grow dense.

A sharp, aggressive snip of the scissors. Her physicality up to this point had reminded me of my high school drama class. In our stage blacks we sat, practicing a neutrality in our gaze, establishing a blank bodily canvas we would paste a performance over. For Ono, the performance isn’t pasted. It’s projected. Silent, her body becomes whatever her participants want. I feel the potential for this every day; an accidental lick of the lips and a stranger calls us baby. I was just trying to get the Cool Ranch residue from the corner of my mouth, dude, chill.

The man with the scissors is taking his second time on stage with Ono, and a quick chop chop of the blades as he enters her spotlight and announces his intent. The sound is so familiar and so terrifying. “It’s very delicate, may take some time,” he hams to Ono’s audience. Critic Maggie Nelson described the scene in The Art of Cruelty: “He works on dismantling her.” Ono begins to fidget as he cuts the top half of her camisole, revealing her bra. Someone shouts “Make a Playboy piece outta it!” He snips both straps at her collarbone. Ono’s forearms jolt up to protect her breasts from being fully exposed. Her eyes roll.

***

At the beach, mine open. Between flecks of sunlight I see the silhouette of a dick and bleached-blonde spiky haircut standing over me. He’s backlit, and it’s hard…to make out any other definitive features.

I struggle against my body’s inclination to curl up. Instead I brush some sand off my inner thigh and hope that, like the guy with scissors, he makes his cut and goes away.

I questioned my own intent. I thought about my cunnilingus reverie. Is that what I really wanted? Sexual exhibitionism? No. The experience wasn’t sexually charged for me, until it was intercepted. Snip, snip. More scorching than any spotlight, more irritating than any post-summer sunburn, was the co-opting of my experience of my own naked body. Once I was seen, the entire scene shifted.

Now I thought about my slanted tits, wondered if it would turn someone on if I rolled onto my side and they pushed together. If my naked body was doing the job assigned to it, the position subconsciously accepted. Or did I apply for it? The ‘unnerving’ contradiction of Ono’s “Cut Piece,” according to Nelson, is that she invites the violation herself. Did my public display of nudity invite the same?

Motivations can be murky; sometimes I need to retrace my steps. As I left the beach that day, I put on my tennis shoes. The small mountains of sand I risked taking home with me (I’m still finding grains between my toes, sheets, and cleavage) was nothing compared to the momentary burning on the soles of my bare feet when I first arrived. Live, learn, and next time maybe bring flip-flops. Remember to wear sunscreen literally everywhere.

I’ve gone back to that nude beach, and will continue to next summer. Negotiating the limits and experiences of my body, particularly my naked body, has become central to my accumulation of ‘self-knowledge’ over my late twenties. My body still existed; it still belonged to me. Many women aren’t accorded that right. Yoko wasn’t naive in her performance. By allowing our bodies to be seen, and the image interpreted with or against our intent, we reveal something much more elusive than a pink nipple or full bush on the beach.

Tits up, naked in the sun, you risk exposure. The female body can be effectively taken, or not taken at all, and both can leave you feeling pretty shitty. But acknowledgment isn’t complaisance. A cut to a cardigan on a Carnegie stage and a sunkissed pussy on a Toronto beach: our bodies can be interactive exhibits. Tans fade into little balls of dead skin as you scratch your shoulder. Eventually, the spotlight goes out and Yoko walks offstage.

The physical evidence of ultraviolet light can be ephemeral. The effects are residual. The moment where my body was seen, the few seconds in which a snide college student snips a bra strap; those don’t last forever. Our exposure to it lives inside us after summer dies, deep in our tissue, grains of sand we’ll feel in every summer to come.

Casie Brown is a writer, stylist and vintage clothing picker from Toronto. Her favorite things that start with the letter P are Pizza, Paul McCartney and Pussy Power. You can find all three on her Twitter and Instagram accounts, @casieleeanne.