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"The main objections I get are from men. It makes people uncomfortable to see something that is presented to them in such a way that shows they're not the only ones thinking about that." Fathers get nervous when their prepubescent girls start thinking about sex, she says.
"It's one thing to see someone being brutally abused, but it's another thing to see your daughter putting on makeup in the bathroom, and she looks a lot like your wife when you first met her," Honig says. "All of a sudden, someone who has been a child in your life takes on characteristics of someone who is already sexual."
People project their own issues onto her work, Honig says. The Olivia character begged someone to stop -- that could refer to a rape. Or the character could be responding to innocent tickling or teasing. "All it is is two hands saying 'no,'" Honig says of the drawing.
Three years ago, the Charlotte Street Fund, a Greater Kansas City Community Foundation program that awards grants to six local artists every year, gave Honig $4,500. She could do whatever she wanted with the money.
Honig ventured to the Shady Lady Lounge, a strip club a couple of miles east of downtown Kansas City. There, she drank cocktails, paid for table dances and bought drinks for the strippers so they would talk with her about their lives.
Around the same time, Honig mingled with sorority girls in the Delta Zeta sorority at William Jewell College in Liberty. She found that sorority girls and strippers aren't so different from one another.
"In every arena is a hierarchy," Honig says. "Women talk about each other in every social structure." A college girl whispers disparaging remarks about her sorority sisters' clothes; a stripper berates a fellow dancer who forgot to remove the price sticker from her stiletto-heeled boot. And they were all little girls once.
Next, Honig painted a series of watercolors based on hardcore pornographic photographs from skin magazines she bought at highway gas stations. Honig portrayed the spent-looking women in provocative poses, regressing to what she imagined they might have looked like as young girls.
But some high-society types involved with the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation might be surprised to see where Honig's work has ended up.
A friend of Honig's searching for her art online once found it on a Web site called Butterfly Kisses, which displayed a photograph of a little girl sitting on a woman's lap. The woman and child gazed into each other's eyes.
"At first I thought it kind of looked like a Christian help site," Honig recalls. "Then I saw it was dedicated to older women who are attracted to young girls and women attracted to their daughters." Honig says her work isn't based on that kind of attraction. But, she says, "If that is what you're seeking out, [my art] can illustrate being attracted to early puberty, even in yourself."
"Princess Charming," Honig's drawing of a person with an exposed set of male and female genitals lounging on a sofa with a gentleman suitor, ended up on xxx.competitions.com, a porn site dedicated to hermaphrodites and teen-age girls. Her work shows up just beneath an ad for the Strap-on Teens Web site, in which a long-haired, big-breasted blonde licks the tip of a gargantuan dildo.
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