For the past two months, New York artist Diana Oh has been taking her clothes off in public. She’s stripped to a black basque in Times Square, strummed a guitar in her pants outside the Brooklyn Museum and even encouraged others to get naked and join her. But she’s no nudist — the 28-year-old is trying to make a very serious point about female sexuality.
Diana calls it My Lingerie Play. The premise is simple: she gets up on a soapbox in nothing but her underwear, holding up signs with statements like: ‘I’m standing here in my lingerie because I’m a woman who enjoys wearing lingerie but does not enjoy being catcalled, being trafficked, being sold, being owned…’ Then she stands there for up to two hours, allowing people to interact with her.
Some stare. Some snap pictures on their phone. Others pause to read her signs and start an argument with her. Someone muttered: ‘That’s a slut.’ Another told her: ‘If you dress like that, you’ve got to expect people to talk to you like that.’ One man simply walked past her and said: ‘That’s how you get raped.’
For Diana, this is all part of the plan to drag slutshaming into the open. ‘That was the main point of taking it to the street,’ she says. Her initial idea was to stage a play, but soon nixed that. ‘I could write a show and have all these liberal-minded people who already know what I’m saying come see it… Or I could do my version and literally stand in a street and tell people.’
Or as she puts it in her project’s manifesto: ‘We are not asking to be harassed, abused, talked down to, or violated no matter what we are wearing. Being a sexualized woman does not strip us of our humanity. The problem isn't sexualization. The problem is the DEGRADATION that comes along with women expressing it.’
I have to admit: I didn’t really get My Lingerie Play at first. By now, most people have swallowed enough Upworthy videos to know that slutshaming women is a Bad Thing. Women who wear short skirts and heels in public aren’t asking for wolf whistles, but going out in just your knickers is bound to raise more than a few eyebrows. So why invite that attention?
'Lingerie is this risqué thing that women can’t bring out in the public space,' Diana tells me. 'But then you have David Beckham in tiny little underwear on a huge billboard and nobody questions it. He doesn’t get rape threats, he doesn’t get shit-talked… But women do.'
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Diana has tirelessly documented each of her public installations in photos and video. In one video from Times Square, she stands on her soapbox as a gigantic video billboard displays footage of frolicking lingerie models. Nobody stops to look at the advert; everybody stops to look at Diana. One passerby even tries to knock the sign out of her hand. I begin to see her point: we’re surrounded by images of sexy, perfectly toned women, but the public sight of a regular-shaped girl in her underwear is enough to drive us to violent distraction.
‘The first time I did it, I really freaked out,’ Diana laughs. ‘But it was like jumping into a pool. I took my clothes off and then I was like, “OK, I’m in and it feels good!" It’s made me so much stronger. This has made me grow so much more of a thicker skin than i’ve ever had.'
While she’s dealt with her fair share of haters in real life and online, she says it's worth it to actually see people's opinions changing right in front of her. 'Even with me standing up there in sunglasses, I’m watching people react,' she says.
So what’s next for My Lingerie Play? Diana only intended for there to be ten performances, but now she’s planning to tour the show all across America. 'I get emails every day saying: “Please come to my city, my city needs this,'" she says. “I’ll be in my minivan and whatever I can afford, I’m going to do.”
Even better, she wants to eventually publish and license the performance, “so people can perform it for themselves and begin their own Lingerie Play.” Sounds like the start of something beautiful to us.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.