Eye Magazine #14 "Cobalt Myth Mechanics": Karen Finley

Karen Finley

I'm an Ass Man 

Folio 25 from

[Various Artists]
Eye Magazine #14 "Cobalt Myth Mechanics"
New York City, USA: Eye Publications, 1986
[unpaginated], 27.9 × 22.9 × 1.9 cm., spiral bound
Edition of 200

I’m an Ass Man is an early monologue by Karen Finley, often performed while smearing herself with kidney beans. It opens with the bold statement "No, Herr Schmidt, I will not shit in your mouth, even if I do get to know you. I just want to smell the gas pass from your ass" and gets increasingly provocative from there. 

The work is told primarily from the perspective of a man fascinated with women's bodies but ultimately repulsed by them. It describes a rape in the subway:

"I just wanted to get my cock inside some of the rump roast action...I wanted to get her against that cold slimy rat-turd wall and fuck the hell out of her."

However, when the rapist discovers his victim is menstruating, he flees in terror: 

"I mean bitch, you on the snatch rag. How can you be on the snatch rag during the best rape in your life?"

He runs to clean his hands and learns that he can't wash it from his cuticles, his fingernails, his lifeline. The last line of the piece (which is handwritten by Finley in coloured pencil on the photocopied page in "Cobalt Myth Mechanics") is

"It would be a long time before I used that hand to shake my dick after I pissed". 

The page is available from Printed Matter, here, for $500 US. An audio version of the work can be heard on the LP The Uproar Tapes, Volume 1 (released the same year) or at Ubuweb, here. 

"Some of her work from this period--the monologue “I’m an Ass Man,” for example--shows Finley being tough-minded and funny, at once goofing on and inhabiting a vicious kind of aggression, viscerally invoking how much people want to get inside each other’s pants, revealing the lie in every kind of decorum."

- Laurie Stone, 2000, Los Angeles Times