Empress of the senses - Betony Vernon
Known chiefly as a creator of transgressive jewelry, the flame-haired
femme-fatale Betony Vernon is also a ‘sexual anthropologist.’
Known chiefly as a creator of transgressive jewellery, the flame-haired femme-fatale Betony Vernon is also a ‘sexual anthropologist.’ Described by Alejandro Jodorowsky as an ‘urban shaman’, and deferred to by some of the most renowned doctors in an evolving eld of sexual wellbeing, her therapeutical work explores what most would consider to be an obvious precept of sado- masochistic practice. While she is not interested in such categorisation, she is convinced that all kinds of sexual pleasure, no matter how one attains it, demand a certain level of dominance and submission. In this excerpt from her extended interview in Author Magazine, the author of The Boudoir Bible:
The Uninhibited Sex Guide for Today speaks to us about the future of human relationships in an increasingly fractured sexual landscape.
“I am public about my conviction that the power of love and spiritual wellbeing are far more potent than anything else, and it is for this reason that love, like pleasure and self-knowledge, are not encouraged by our class structure. In fact, they are traits that are constantly undermined by the establishment. This is because a happy, well-loved and spiritually grounded society makes for a really bad economy.”
“I do not believe in creative or sexual hierarchy because everyone and everything is interdependent. Collaboration is extremely important to everything I am and do. It makes my creative process possible. Sex affects every facet of our lives, physically, politically, socially and spiritually, and sexual behaviour motivates all of my works. Monogamy is just an ideal and its foundations have been shaking since the beginning of the second sexual revolution in the 1960s. Polygamy has been around for a very long time. What interests me the most is polyandry, which is the bond between three or more consensualintimate partners that is headed by a woman, not a man.”
Interview by JOHN-PAUL PRYOR
Picture by RAUL HIGUERA
