Photo by Jurvetson

A couple of years ago when I first moved to San Francisco, I happened to walk past the Masonic Center on my way home from a job interview and I noticed that they had some sort of medical exhibit going on.  One thing you should know about me is that I am obsessed with medical knowledge – obsessed and totally freaked out by it.  My family are mostly doctors and nurses, so it was pretty common to talk about diseased gall bladders at the dinner table growing up, yet I am still super squeamish when it comes to looking at all that inside stuff.  Yuck!  Ok, back to my story.  Being the freak that I am, I thought I’d be a glutton for punishment and check the medical exhibit out.  Little did I know what I was in for.

Bodies.  Real bodies.  In all states of dissection and whatnot.  All doing totally normal alive person activities, like kicking soccer balls and playing chess.  All without their skin.  It was the Universe Within exhibition, a collection of real bodies preserved with a technique called Plastination that allows for the tissues and organs to be totally preserved from the inside out with no decay.  Pretty neat/nauseating, huh?  I was completely entralled and had to leave almost immediately for fear of damaging any of the specimens with vomit. 

What does this have to do with sex, you ask?  Well, one of the latest installations of this kind (though I have no idea if it’s the same creators of the one I saw), the touring Body Work exhibition, recently opened in Berlin with with something even more shocking than people without skin – people without skin having sex!  This latest exhibit at the Postbahnhof features two specimens frozen in the throes of coitus.  The exhibit, which has been seen all over the world) is comprised of 200 plastinated bodies from all life stages, displayed in all postions, but this instillation is the first with bodies in a sexual position.  The best part – it’s reverse cowgirl!  

It turns out that all of the bodies used in the exhibit are self donated by people that want to help further our understanding of the human body.  While that’s great, I wonder if they have any inkling that their plastinated corpses may be getting busy on display for thousands of people once they kick the bucket.  Something tells me that isn’t mentioned in the fine print…

(via Em and Lo)

xoxo
-J.D. “feeling queasy” Bauchery

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