For us, accustomed to having an infinite number of women slipping before our eyes stripped of masculine looks, it is ambiguous and sometimes scandalous to see naked men in poses that passionates of categories would define as feminine. Matalon and his subjects play a repeated exchange of roles, creating a short circuit in which neither gender is recognizable according to the rules we know. What happens in these images is extraordinary: if we didn’t know who took them, would we be able to tell if it was a man or a woman?
I say no. What is female? What’s masculine? Faced with Molly Matalon’s irony, we no longer know. Perhaps it’s no longer interesting.
All that remains is the political and, I would say, feminist charge of a man who takes his clothes off in front of a woman, letting himself be portrayed with the freedom not to contract his body in an all-masculine tension, but discovering the most defenseless part of himself, without being afraid of not being strong enough.
