Artist Statement 1

Hey, so this is definitely quite disturbing, so apologies. When I first considered what I wanted to do for this project, I had initially settled on something grunge and openly critical. Between thinking of this idea and actually executing it, I stumbled upon this interview with this woman. In this interview, she attempted to teach other women how to “serve their man.” It was alarming to watch someone of the same sex place themselves on a lower rung in the world than their male counterpart. It all felt very vintage in ideology. This inspired my zine “How to Serve Man,” a tale of vintage feminism. I used vintage ads, often quite sexist in nature to divert expectations. An ad that originally stated “A Woman’s Place is Always in the Kitchen” is transformed into a scene where she bakes a man’s hand into a pie. The story itself is quite simplistic: a woman is harassed at a bar, the man won’t take no for no, he follows her out of the bar, she leads him down an alley, she stabs him, she then brings him home to serve him for dinner. I aim to lead readers into thinking she will be the victim initially, as most stories, unfortunately go, before surprising them with the “black widow” twist. Throughout the zine, I also put in explicit modern feminist imagery like the pussy hats, the female power symbol, and the woman’s rights convention document. I also interspersed moments of seriousness: a reference to the psychological phenomenon known as the “Madonna Whore Complex,” and the symbolic fight between the cat sex and the dog sex.