Prototype from “Toward a New Genital Paradigm”: Artifact from the archives of The New Institute for Sexual Technologies

Latex mold, acrylic paint, used injection needles, leather belt. Approx. 14 x 14 in. 2021.

From an unfinished, unpublished manuscript:

From approximately 1989 to 1991, Christopher X Davis, co-founder of the New Institute for Sexual Technologies, amassed a huge amount of preliminary documents and recorded material for a project called Toward a New Genital Paradigm. While the project’s scale and focus would morph over the years, much of X Davis’s attention was on the creation of a documentary short proposing a futurist view of the human body’s potential for the development of new genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics. X Davis was excited by the possibility of surgical implants and paraphernalia allowing humans to customize their bodies; increasingly fantastical proposals for such bodily interventions would make up the bulk of his output in the last few years of the New Institute’s existence. During my many hours of research, I became fixated on the notion that these designs would be fascinating sculptural objects. I made it my goal to recreate one.

In a way I was led astray by my own hubris, overconfident in my extensive research. Quixotically I became fixated on replicating the new genital supposedly shown on-screen in the never-completed Toward a New Genital Paradigm film. While various drafts of the screenplay and pre-production materials have been available since the late 1990s, no footage had ever been recovered. If I could create a prop version of the now-lost new genital, then I could also reshoot the documentary using these original pre-production documents. I must sheepishly admit that I even planned to pass off my recreation as the original in an elaborate hoax.

The New Institute’s available archives contain many schematics and detailed descriptions of the new genitals, and logically I concluded that the latest designs must have been the final versions which were both constructed and used in on-screen demonstrations as described in both the available screenplay and storyboard materials. This final design, more a secondary sexual organ than a genital, was similar in shape to a breast implant but included an inflation mechanism based on similar technology used in phalloplasty. This implant would be surgically inserted into the armpit. Lab-grown armpit skin would be used for the skin graft, genetically modified to stretch “like a frog’s neck”* when the implant was inflated.

It was hard not to be skeptical. While the New Institute was undoubtedly a futurist organization prone to flights of sci-fi fancy, it seemed like a stretch to believe that they had actually made one of their eccentric ideas a reality. In the first article written about the New Institute, X Davis had proclaimed, “We’re not scientists. We’re activists.”** Despite my reservations, I wanted my hoax to recreate as closely as possible a version of the documentary that would have actually existed. So I set about trying to create a latex special effect that could approximate the implant.

I should have done more research. While working on my version of the implant, I discovered among the large amount of New Institute audio-visual material gifted to me by an anonymous source a great deal of raw video footage from the shooting of the Toward a New Genital Paradigm documentary. From the interviews with Dr. Esther Davis it became clear that the implant design was only a proposal and most likely was never actually constructed. There was another design however, built, tested, and shown on-screen. This was an exciting discovery.

X Davis once described the strap-on dildo as “the most important invention in the history of human sexuality.”*** It is no surprise then that the only completed prototype of his new genital design would so closely follow this example. A bulbous latex mound, cast from a large butt plug, is inserted into a leather belt which is worn around an armpit and the opposite shoulder. The bulb is firm but hollow, allowing for a great deal of flexibility. In its final design, it would have been constructed from lab-grown skin stretched across silicone. On the inward facing side there are three needles. Two of these are plugged into the axillary nerve, while the third acts as a ground.

*This description can be found in several undated screenplay drafts for Toward a New Genital Paradigm. It is also found in a letter by Dr. Esther Davis from August 1990.

**As quoted in: Rachel Wood, “Institute studies new discoveries in gender,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, September 6, 1988.

***Christopher X Davis, “New Bodies, New Sexes: New Technologies and Their Impact on Human Sexual Activity,” The Journal of Sex Research 27, issue 4 (1990): 630.