MATH#4

Letter from the Editor

As a reader of Math Magazine, you are nurturing our reality, a romantic risk we’re willing to take in order to create a world that we haven’t seen before.

Whether in the full color of real life or the focus of a black and white photograph, words or images, digital or in-person encounters; we’ll find full expression in new mythologies, new visualizations, and new realities around sex and art to find personal liberation and collectively, sexual revolution.

All too often I find myself skating along the glossy surface of media, not using its full power to my benefit. Just temporal moments of this strange masochism, a narrow-minded indulgence. I don’t want to think so small anymore. Cast aside instantaneous pleasure addiction and whatever binge consumption of the day. Let’s spend less time playing in these small feedback loops and consider ourselves within the story of humankind.

Zooming out to see the larger picture, transcending time through technology, using epic collaboration to protect our essential humanity, and applying our cumulative power to project into the future; I want to re-frame sex and sexuality today by contextualizing within histories and ideologies otherwise untouched by the genre of porn. We can be bigger than ourselves, we can write a larger story. Expressions of desire, re-envisioned. Visions of lust, reimagined.

We’re animals and we’re hungry. There is so much out there. So much noise, anger, requests, messages, emails, memes, and clips. The hunger grows as you feed yourself more. Instead, create an oasis in these pages, in your bedroom, in the space between you and your lover where everyone finally gets what they want. Desires are clear and satisfaction eminent. Simplicity in knowing what you want, the confidence in asking for it, and the courage to explore.

Sexuality is intrinsically divine, and the sexual impulses in us, animals, is the sensible presence of creative divinity. Think about it, Homo sapians have been around for about 200,000 years. Centuries of sex. One of the first examples of creativity, and one of the finest examples of doing something simply for the pleasure of it. Shoulders were very sexy in the 19th century, the neck is a focus of sexual attraction in Japanese culture, and butts have been a contemporary American obsession.

Obsessed with our modernity and domesticity, we look back to our ancestral past, followers of impulse and worshipers of sex with judgment and distance. For not only our own conception, sex plays a central role in the majority of our lives. It permeates our days yet is shameful to talk about openly, is censored constantly, and is regulated by the government. We have a legacy of artists creating pornographic work from ancient to modern times. Let’s not forbid ourselves visions of what pleases us most. Must the animals have more freedom than we do? Sex has preserved our species. We should have parades in the streets and feasts in its honor; not hide it away in sock drawers and deleted browser histories.

Art is another uniquely transcendent experience we possess. The creation of art is a kind of shamanistic intoxication where, as in bed, we communicate things we cannot say, or even admit. Better still, unlike an orgasm, what an artist makes persists as a tangible communication with others. You are holding a merging of the two.

Sex, art, and pornography are ancient. It’s easy to forget, as we glide through video clips and Tumblr feeds for GIFs to help get us off, that the enjoyment and proliferation of all this is so old. With an openness to others, history, ideas, culture, and an openness to our own consciousness, I want to carry the story forward. Math Magazine is a manifestation of what it means to be lovers, alive now.

I'm not the gatekeeper to some fantasy designed to be unobtainable. I'm here to say that you have everything you need. Save yourself, accept your de- sires, and be honest about fulfilling them. Focus on that and all of the mirages and tricks fall away. Sex is not sinful but beautiful, we are eternally complementary and equal. Systems that deny these truths deny life. Pleasures of the flesh are one of the only transcendent experiences we have left.

Hold tight, love and do it!

Sincerely,
MacKenzie Peck
Founder & Editor-in-Chief Math Magazine