[00:04:59] Host: Now, and like you said, there is kind of this, there's not a way to kind of create a specific time, but there was a decision at some point in your life where this was what you're going to pursue.

[00:05:12] Hebron: No, there was not a decision. There was never a decision.

[00:05:16] Host: It just happened.

[00:05:19] Hebron: Yeah, I mean, I don't, the idea of defining oneself as an artist or making a particular choice to pursue a course of study, for example, wasn't something that ever occurred to me, perhaps precisely because artistic thinking and creative actions were so integrated as part of my life. I didn't see it as something that had to be defined and separated from everything else. And that, I would say that remains true. My life, my art, my teaching, my living, all of that, none of it is different for me. I don't see a distinction. I don't work in a studio the way a lot of traditional artists do. Like, I don't set aside separate time to go and make art, and then I'm going to go and stop making art. I kind of feel like I'm always making and living art. I also wanted to say that when I was in fourth grade, our teacher gave us essentially a Jackson Pollock assignment to kind of drip and drizzle art onto, or to drizzle paint onto a canvas and let us do it outside and kind of make a big mess. And she did not explain the kind of defiant actions of a soon-to-be postmodern drunk that Pollock was, but she did talk about kind of the freedom of expression and how the actions in making the art were as important as the object that was made. And that was a real moment for me. That was a real cornerstone of thinking about what defined art and how art could also be an action, not just an object.

[00:06:59] Host: As your creative expression, or it's just as your life, you using yourself as a subject, has that always been a part of that expression?

[00:07:12] Hebron: Yes. I think I have always seen my art as a way to work through philosophical contemplations of existence. And so I will say, yes, I did go on to study art. I had to make that choice at some point, but even then in college, but even then I couldn't decide between art and theater and music. I was doing all of those things in high school. And as many of the listeners, if they are college age will know, it's really hard to know when you are 17 or 18 or 19, what you want to do for the rest of your life. And hopefully it isn't just one thing. Hopefully it changes a lot, right? Hopefully you get to do a lot of things, but my body has always been a part of it in large part because I've been sick for much of my life. So a lot of my art has to do with both physical illness and my chronic illness. I have Crohn's disease, which I have had since I was very young. It's an autoimmune disease that affects the gastrointestinal tract, but I was very sick, very young and nobody knew it. So I spent many years in a lot of pain, unable to express it as a child because children don't know what's normal or not normal or whatever. And so when I started to live with this disease and acknowledge its impact on me, finding ways to express my experience with it through art was one of the main ways I could talk about it because words really failed me. I didn't have the words. I wasn't given the words. But likewise with sexuality, I think that I've always been, I guess a lot of people would say queer, but I sit more on the ace and demi spectrum and that's almost never talked about. So I was growing up in a body that was actually really adversely affected by the medicines that I was given for this disease. My experience with puberty was erratic and different. My physical development was different. And I actually ended up with very large breasts as a teenager that were completely disproportionate to the rest of my body, making me look a bit like a cartoon. And here I was surviving through kind of the thick of my disease, the onset of my disease, causing all kinds of physical and emotional struggles. And then I had this body that society saw as being incredibly sexualized. So I had a lot of attention coming at me because of these huge breasts. And it was attention that I absolutely didn't want, but I couldn't do anything about it. I couldn't disappear from my body. And I didn't really know at the time, but like I wasn't interested in sex the way that my peers were. I didn't have crushes as a little kid. I didn't have celebrity crushes. I didn't have fantasies. It was not a part of my game. But no one ever talked about being ace or being demi. There was conversations about being bi, about being pan, about being queer, about being gay, about being lesbian, about being straight. But nobody talked about being ace. So my art really was trying to explore that conundrum. What was a conundrum for me? And again, looking for a way to express something that I didn't have words for otherwise.

[00:10:54] Host: It's such a young age to have to deal with that. I mean, that's something that even adults would struggle to kind of understand. But like right at the onset of puberty, I mean, that's just...

[00:11:09] Hebron: It was exasperating. And frankly, I was suicidal. I had suicidal ideations. I actually did attempt suicide. It was too much for me. When I was 15. But because of my looks, I was approached... I was solicited for sex by older men regularly, even though I would be literally in like sweat pants and a sweatshirt and whatever. I'd be minding my own business. So that was really difficult. It was a really exasperating, difficult thing. I was the butt of jokes at school. People would like make bets to see who could like ask me out and then get close and then make jokes about my breasts. And so it became... It was very demoralizing. It was exasperating, but it also caused physical problems. So it caused me to have scoliosis. It caused me to have headaches all the time. I couldn't buy clothes that fit me. I had to... I made a lot of my own clothes or I would buy men's clothes. Eventually, I just started buying men's clothes and wearing giant t-shirts and blazers and stuff to cover up my body so I would be as unnoticeable as possible. And then when I was 18, I ended up getting a breast reduction with the assistance of my mother who was looking into it for me that I didn't even know it was a thing. I didn't know that that was a... I mean, you don't know. I grew up as a hippie kid in Northern California. We weren't talking about cosmetic surgery and Botox and body modifications or nose jobs or like that just wasn't a thing. And we were poor. So that also, that wasn't part of the conversation. I mean, the fact that I would have to buy two of things if I had to buy like a bathing suit or a dress or something, you know, I was like a size 16 on the top and a size 4 or 2 on the bottom. And that was also, it was cost prohibitive. It was like, you know, my body ended up being also like really expensive in a circumstance where we didn't have the means to deal with and support that body. So I got, as soon as it was legal to do so, which was 18, I ended up getting a breast reduction. And it's, and it's also wild to me now to think about that, like that I know, I know students, I used to teach junior high and high school. And I know students who at 13, 14, 15, 16 get breast implants or nose jobs. But in my day, it was illegal for me to get a reduction. When I did, it was actually paid for by insurance because it was considered a medical disability. I was so disproportionate. They considered it a medical disability, which was additional language that made me feel really strange about my body. I'm like, well, who's to say that, like, because of the size and shape of my body, it's a disability. That's a world, you know, that that says a lot about what the world perceives the appropriate bodies to be or able bodies to be.

[00:14:07] Host: I want to talk about this concept of objectification of the female form or the commodification of the female form. And as an art professor, and after your education, I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what role art has played historically in this commodification or objectification.

[00:14:32] Hebron: A lot of my work in the arts has been about the gender imbalance in the art world. So I think to answer that question, first, we must acknowledge that for millennia, the art world has been dominated by male authors and male artists and male producers. So that already is laying a kind of biased foundation for what we see, what we see represented in art, who we see venerated as brilliant minds, whose names we're told to remember, whose experiences we're told to remember, whose experiences we're told to value. So I think that alone has done a lot to shape the objectification of women and women artists and female bodies, and not just women, non-binary bodies and trans bodies and queer bodies and bodies of color and disabled bodies. You know, I think that the trajectory of art and art history echoes that of patriarchy. So we can trace, in fact, at the advent of writing in Uruk, like 7,000 years ago, we see a concurrent shift in religions away from matriarchal kind of female goddess-led religions to patriarchal sky god religions that begin to literally lay out a series of guidelines or descriptions or rules that say the female body is sinful and that the female body shouldn't have agency or a say within culture.

[00:16:27] Host:  And, you know, I think my thought, and I'm not an art historian, and I'm not, you know, but I know I've seen the frescoes and, you know, the Renaissance images of the female, you know, the pouring of water or like the female form was always this voluptuous body that was presented, and I'm not sure if that was like, you know, part of that objectification and commodification of the female form. And if that led to where we are now where commercials are using the female body, you know, this idiom of sex cells, if there was this connection, if there's a connective thread from art to where we are now in commercialism.

[00:17:25] Hebron: Yeah, that's a great observation. Erving Goffman, who's a sociologist, looks a lot at what he calls gender, well, he has a book called Gender Advertisements that looks at the way that bodies are held in advertisements and the differences between male bodies and female bodies and some of the rhetoric is probably pretty familiar to us now, but with regard to, you know, power poses or servile poses, whether the hands are open or closed, whether they're, you know, leaning or moving forward. And I think it's become so integrated into our subconscious in terms of these visual signals that we don't even name them anymore when we see them, but they are pervasive. And I think that is true coming out of art history as well. The presentation of the female body as a body that is limited to certain spaces. Griselda Pollock has a really great essay about that, like modernity in the spaces of femininity, the way that male artists depict female subjects in interior spaces, in washing clothes in a laundry area, you know, in the garden, in the kitchen, literally, like, and we actually see that echoed in AI now, right? So, when you say, show me, you know, a female, whatever, fill in the blank profession, the default tends to be to put female subjects in these kind of domestic spaces or in feminine spaces and to put male subjects in office spaces and factories and different, you know, there is a masculinization of the space, even just the environment that we see figures in. There is a famous painting called The Source by Jacques-Louis David-Ancre, which features a young woman, nude, holding a terracotta pot on her shoulder and it's pouring liquid forward. And I saw this painting at the Louvre when I was about 19. And it was the first time I'd ever been able to travel to Europe. And I was so excited. I never thought I would make it to Europe at all. And so, I wanted to look at everything I possibly could. And I'm going through the Louvre and I saw this painting and the didactic panel next to it said something that this young woman was being depicted as this metaphoric, you know, perpetual spring, this like perpetual fertility body, right? And she's holding a vessel on her shoulder that is always pouring forward. And I thought, man, that's exactly, that's right. That's exactly what society sees women as like these fertility machines. I mean, and we're seeing this very horrific, Handmaid's Tale-esque presentation of society in the United States right now that is really just hyper-focused on the role of uterus-having bodies to be child-bearing machines, right? And to have that, even, and then to have every aspect of that process controlled by the now state, where like, who's allowed to have children, how many they should have, who's not allowed to have children, who shouldn't be having children, you know, that to me is so objectifying, right? The idea of the female body as this vessel, either to receive a male body in an act of sexual assault, because it often is, or to push out a child in the service of repopulating the state.

[00:21:15] Host:  I want to kind of tie this into, there's a strange dichotomy that exists with this push of this objectification of the female form or this idiom of sex cells in commercialization that we want to weave, that the system uses the female form only to a certain extent. We hint at everything that's under the clothes, but once anything is revealed, that Puritan side of our country's nature comes out and bans it, that those two things could exist at the same time. A woman on a motorcycle eating a hamburger wearing a low-cut dress, but as soon as Janet Jackson's nipple is exposed, her career is over.

[00:22:13] Hebron: Yeah. Oh, the double standards of patriarchy. Shocking. Yeah. First of all, I think that the objectification and commodification of the female body is highly profitable to those with power within the patriarchy. So that's kind of a simple answer to me. I'd like to ask my students and others, the viewers of my work maybe, to always ask the question, who profits? Who is benefiting from this situation or this construct or this paradigm or this expectation? It's a little bit ironic because if women had employment equity worldwide, if we had social and civic equity within society, we would raise the gross global product by like 26% or more. So, it would actually be more profitable to include women equitably in society, but in terms of power distribution, it does mean that there would be a redistribution of power within patriarchy, and those in power don't like that. I mean, there's a saying, and I'm sorry to say I don't remember who said it, but this idea that when you are in a position of privilege, equity feels like oppression. You know, being asked to engage in equity feels like oppression because you have to like, it's not that you're giving up power, it's that you're just, things are being leveled out a little bit, and when you're used to having disproportionate amounts of power that are higher, having being brought to a level equal with everyone else feels oppressive.

[00:23:57] Host: Which is exactly what's happening right now.

[00:24:01] Hebron: That's right. So, I think there is this wild double standard, and you had brought up this idea of sex sells and, you know, maybe alluded to something like OnlyFans, and that's a very large conversation too about the shaming, about shaming female bodies or female identifying people for using their bodies to make money, and I think the implication is often like that we, the male, you know, CEOs, patriarchs, whatever, should be able to make money off your body, but you shouldn't be able to make money off your body. That's an autonomy issue for me, and I think there are so many ways in which our society doesn't afford autonomy to certain bodies, and we forget about it. We sometimes don't even see it. We don't see the ways we're being undermined, but even OnlyFans is, on the one hand, why I think it's amazing, it's an amazing opportunity for the consumer to become a producer, as with all of social media, for people to make money off foot fetishists, for example. Like, yeah, great. I mean, I know people who make more money doing that than they do in their, quote, gallery art, and why not? However, the CEOs at OnlyFans, just like with Facebook and Instagram, Meta, TikTok, Alphabet, are all male and predominantly cis-hetero men who have the power to say, you know, with a literal click of a button, we're going to change the algorithm, we're going to censor certain words, we're going to censor certain actions, certain things, and there goes your livelihood. So, it's a bit of an imprisonment, also, like they're not affording autonomy and freedom to the producers on that platform. And in fact, with the list of watchwords that Meta now has, I worry about that. I worry about when the roundups begin. I worry about the fact that, you know, I have been engaged for decades now about social justice activism pertaining to gender identity and equity and sexuality, feminism, and all they have to do is plug in whatever keywords they want to search for, collect all those accounts, and, you know, deleting your account is one thing, but then handing that list over to Doge, for example, is quite another.

[00:26:51] Host:  You had created your nipple pasty artwork, and it was kind of in reaction to these algorithms that you're talking about.

[00:27:04] Hebron:  Yeah, so, as I had mentioned before, I had this kind of long history with breasts, and a really long history, I guess, not long after I had my breast reduction, my mother passed away from breast cancer. In 2014, I was invited to be in an exhibition by an artist at LA based artist named Bettina Hubby, who was also a breast cancer survivor. And she had been through, yeah, a mastectomy and was recovering, thankfully, but was really interested, wanted to do work, wanted to do an exhibition about glorifying, well, not glorifying, but just like removing the taboo about doing art, making art talking about breasts and cancer in particular and breast cancer. So, she had a show called Thanks for the Mammaries, and invited 100 artists to participate with art about breasts. And I, being a performance artist, among other types of art, I offered to do a performance, which was kind of like a PR stunt I had invited. I said that I would attend the opening topless if 100 people agreed to RSVP and attend, and I invited anybody to join me topless at the opening in the process. So, I did, and I had a few friends and students, even two male students and a few friends of mine from the art world. We were all topless, milling about this very full opening, you know, opening of the exhibition. Everyone was having a great time. It was celebratory. It was supportive. It was creative. It was not sexualized. Like, I was not going topless so that people could jerk off to me at a breast cancer exhibition. Do you know what I mean? Like, it was pretty clear that the context was not a sexualized context. And before the next, not even 24 hours later, I received notices that images from that performance had been taken off Facebook. This was before Facebook and Instagram had merged. And I got a notice that literally just said, we've removed your image because female nipples are not allowed. And that was the first time I'd heard it. So, this was 2014, and that was the first time I'd ever heard any language like that. It literally just said, female nipples are prohibited. I'm like, what? I was like, it just didn't register to me. Like, that's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. And so many questions. I had so many questions. Why just the nipple? Is it the nipple or the whole breast? Is it, how do you define female? You know, what? And because I was in these pictures with some males who were also topless, that was further confusing. I'm like, oh, so if it had just been them, would that have stayed up? And I tend to have a bit of, like, humor and sarcasm in my work. I like using humor. I like using wordplay. And I like taking things literally when maybe they're not meant to be taken literally because it sometimes points out the absurdity of certain rules or social constructs. And so, my first thought was, okay, well, if you don't allow female nipples, I just, I need to present myself with a male nipple. And so, I Google searched for a Creative Commons or license-free image of a male nipple, which I found on Wikimedia, and made a pasty and put it back out on my, put it over my nipples and the nipples of another female with me in the image, but not the men who were with me in the image. And I reposted it, and those images stayed up, no problem. And so, that was even weirder.

[00:31:10] Host: Yeah. I was thinking about, almost as a thought experiment, I mean, with this, another dichotomy, if you were to take, because this is female identifying or female presenting bodies. So, if a trans woman were to post a before and after picture of their breast augmentation, the after picture would be censored. Correct. Even though nothing changed other than the size.

[00:31:44] Hebron: Correct.

[00:31:45] Host: Or the reverse, if it was a trans male, the before would be censored, and then the after is fine, which is baffling.

[00:31:55] Hebron: Yeah, that's correct. And there have been several people who have done Instagram accounts or TikTok accounts that follow that process, that follow the transition process, and have talked about it and written about it. I mean, now, that has been in the last couple of years. At the time, that wasn't, it was inconceivable that someone could do that on an account. So, in some ways, there's progress. In other ways, there've been a lot of cases, one artist, Reign Dove, actually sued Instagram for censoring her nipples during transition, I think. But there's a lot of hypocrisy, yeah, like you say, and double standards. And that was certainly one of the first questions that I had back in 2014, which was, how do you know my nipples are female? How do the algorithms know? How do the, quote, censors know that my nipples are female? And isn't that up to me to say? But not just that, it was also the presumption that female nipples are sexual no matter what. And there is, of course, a long history now of artists and activists pushing back against that, including breastfeeding mothers and chestfeeding parents. A group of people who called themselves lactivists showed up at the headquarters at Facebook in San Jose, actually, earlier, I think even as early as 2009 or 2011, to protest the fact that breastfeeding images were being censored because of areola exposure. And then that led to a long discussion about, well, what constitutes a nipple? Is it just a nipple? Is it the areola? Which is like, I'm like, wow, so much attention is being given to this formal quality of a body, but not at all to the autonomy and subjectivity of that body.

[00:34:01] Host: What do you think is so fascinating about the female breast? And I ask, my daughter is an artist and her favorite thing to draw are large-breasted women. And she's been doing this, this is her art, her cartoon work. I think it's a body part that people from all sexual orientations are attracted to, to some level, or admire.

[00:34:35] Hebron: Well, yeah. I mean, I think as far as-

[00:34:38] Host: There's no other part of the body that gets that.

[00:34:42] Hebron: Yeah, I find that to be really weird, right? Because I think in one case, I had this theory about nubs and buttons. I think that because nipples are kind of like these little nubs, and people think nubs are either funny or weird, belly buttons, bows, even moles, things that protrude, right? So it does beg the questions, why not then also the penis or the clitoris? Why are they not getting as much attention? And I think that I'm sure there are Freudian theorists out there who would have a lot to say about that and the relation to a mother figure and being fed and nourished.

[00:35:24] Host: Right. And that's what I was thinking. Yeah.

[00:35:26] Hebron: But why do we need to sexualize that? I mean, give me a break. We don't need to have, we don't, we just don't need that. And also the Greeks, thanks, Oedipus. I think that, but again, these are male authors authoring these narratives. So if women writers and women historians and women artists had had more of a say and more weight in how they kind of reflected a society, we would have different narratives. I really believe that.

[00:35:59] Host: So how do we neutralize? How do you neutralize this fascination or the arousal to the naked form? How do you protect against objectification of the breast or the vulva from an audience that may be reacting biologically or hormonally, or just because it's ingrained in society to have this reaction? Is it over exposure? I mean-

[00:36:29] Hebron: Yeah. I mean, there are some people that take that approach too, right? Like just look at it more and more and more and more and more until you're like, so sick of it. It's not a thing anymore. I think I was going to say, there's a really amazing book by an author named Florence Williams called Breasts, A Natural and Unnatural History. And it's both sociological, anthropological and scientific, really thorough, very interesting about the role that breasts have played, that breastfeeding has played, the power that they've had and not had, but also the implication of actually like environmental concerns and the ways that plastics and chemicals in the environment affect breast milk. And that in turn affects the hormones of babies and bodies of all genders. And it's like, I really, I recommend this book to people of any sex or gender. I think that it's really informative and impactful. I am very interested in how we return autonomy to all bodies. I don't know that waging a war against nipples specifically is going to do it. I think the conversation has to actually be larger than that. I think we have to recognize the ways that we revoke autonomy and civil liberties from bodies and want to stop doing that. Like people have to want to stop that. And I think that's a harder thing. I think we need to believe people when they speak about their experiences, when they talk about being harmed by social constructs that exist. I think we need to have real conversations about who is afforded autonomy and when, in our society in particular, but globally really. I mean, when do we give children autonomy? When do we give, at what age? Like it's arbitrary to say, oh, you're quote an adult at 18, but you're living in a body long before you're 18. And if we don't give people autonomy until a certain age, then who is making decisions about what happens to those bodies and by whom? So I think learning to listen to each other, learning to really respect each other, learning to recognize that every single body has its own lived experience and civil liberties, or should have, I hope, and that it's not up to anyone else to make decisions for those bodies. It's just not. And that asking consent isn't a pain in the ass. Like it's actually a really sexy thing. It's a really empowering thing. Asking for consent, supporting someone else's autonomy, giving people platforms to speak their truths about their experience is really important as well. You know, you can't, as they say, you can't be what you can't see. I get conflicted about that saying a little bit because on the other hand, I think it is the role of artists in many cases to envision what isn't already visualized, right? To give voice and image to things that we don't see yet or that we haven't seen or that have been suppressed. But I think until we are willing to consider all bodies as worthy of the same autonomy, we're going to have these double standards. We're going to have these hierarchies. We're going to have oppression. We're going to have violence against bodies. And I do think it's a violence, even if it is not a physical violence towards the body. I think the omission from history, the lack of equitable protections under the law, the lack of pay equity, all of those things amount to systemic social violence, which in turn does get physicalized. It results in increased autoimmune conditions and illness, particularly for women, increasing maternal mortality rates are off the charts. And especially for black women and indigenous women, for example, in the States, a pregnant woman is three times more likely to die young just because she is pregnant and more likely to be killed by her partner or the father of the baby. So those statistics really hurt me to think about. And they should hurt everybody. It should be alarming that to be pregnant, to be trans, to be black, to be indigenous means to have a reduced lifespan. I don't have words for that. It's unacceptable.

[00:41:47] Host: We'd like to thank Micol Hebron. If you would like to continue the conversation, visit Chapman.edu/Wilkinson to learn more. To access recommended books from our guests for further learning and for more socially conscious content, visit us at pastforward.org or follow us at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.