Exhibition: Amor veneris: a journey into female sexual pleasure
Exhibition in Lisbon at the Museu Pedagógico de Sexo
My partner and I spent Christmas 2022 in Lisbon, Portugal, with some friends from Colombia. When I was researching cultural things to do while we were in town, imagine my delight when I found that mu s-e-x, the city’s new Museu Pedagógico de Sexo, had an exhibition dedicated to female sexual pleasure. I booked tickets for us all, thinking that it would at least be a fun distraction, and could potentially prove to be excellent research for me, as I’m beginning to shape the public engagement elements of my PhD.
The entrance to the exhibition asks attendees to choose to ‘Entrar com consentimento’ (to enter with consent), or ‘sem consentimento’ (without consent). Of course we chose ‘com’ and entered a lusciously designed exhibition space, walls draped with soft pink material, curtained rooms and several invitations to participate. One space included a selection of brilliant videos, in several languages, about the science behind sexual pleasure, and the history of knowledge about the clitoris. There was a titilating queer peep-show, and a room where you could write a note about your desires, scrunch it up and throw it into a pile with hundreds of other notes.
One room had a selection of vials of perfumes, which were supposedly the scents of famous women in history: the olfactory swirls with which they engulfed their lovers. I loved the invitations to touch, smell, hear, see - it was an immersive, sensory exhibition which certainly delivered on its promise to be “educational, playful, evocative and irreverent”. Happily, we and our friends embraced all of it with glee.
As we moved through the spaces, we moved through the different organs related to pleasure: the brain, the skin and the clitoris. Art and science co-mingled effortlessly and every turn around a corner or wander up some stairs brought new delights. Once we’d passed under a giant clitoris and spent time in a corridor which was supposedly re-creating the blood flow of an orgasm, we were led to a dark room dedicated to ‘cliteracy’, with blocks of metallic text on the walls debunking myths about female sexuality and staking bold claims. This room was considerably less subtle and nuanced than the rest of the exhibition, and was entirely in English, but I suppose for some visitors, the exhibition’s messages required spelling out a little more bluntly.
After all this glee, the final section, which you are invited to ‘entrar sim consentimento’ is a sobering space, focussing on sexual violence against women. Throughout the exhibition, consent is foregrounded as essential to genuine intimacy and pleasure, and this shift in tone is brutal. Much of this final room inevitably focuses also on the sexual violence commited by Portugal and other European powers through colonialism.
Most of the texts were in Portugese and translated into English for international visitors, and from the museum’s instagram I can see that there are regular tours with Marta Crawford, psychologist, sexologist and the museum’s founder, as well as workshops with all sorts of fabulous sounding people (their instagram also shows the exhibition’s artworks week by week, which is great for those who can’t make it to Lisbon to see it in person).
There was so much to love about this exhibition, and I was definitely inspired when thinking about how I might ‘centre pleasure’ with my PhD project. I found the lack of acknowledgement of trans women’s pleasure disappointing, however, and the exhibition problematically reinforced a gender binary with no hint at engaging with this critically. The tonal shift to the final room could also be incredibly distressing to those with first hand experience of sexual and racial violence. It was encouraging to see such an eclectic range of visitors, mostly engaging enthusiastically with the content. I wonder how such an exhibition would fare in the UK, and how audiences would respond. I do know that it would be incredibly challenging to promote, as images and text would be censored everywhere you go. In Lisbon, meanwhile, there were ads on the trams for mu s-e-x. Definitely very happy to have visited, and I will ponder the experience for a long time.