On a Saturday afternoon in mid-July, the Pink Nun is working the sidewalk in front of a tattoo parlor on Belmont between Clark and Sheffield. She’s dressed in a hot pink habit with a wimple, belted with a chrome leash that suggests bondage gear. At the curb sits her bright yellow pickup truck, adorned with hand-painted self-portraits, the URL of her Web site, the slogan “Don’t judge a nun by her color,” and muscle-car-style flames around the front wheel wells. Despite the spectacle, few people slow down to gawk.
The roving interviews, which the Pink Nun conducts every month or so, are part of a larger enterprise that’s half art project, half moral crusade, the thrust of which is to promote sexual abstinence outside of marriage. It’s the same message she plugs through the sale of her Pink Nun Products, a line of merchandise that includes T-shirts, postcards, buttons, and fridge magnets, all bearing mottoes like “I am not your slot” and “Keep tight, Sister! Keep it tucked, Brother!”
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Bulten and the Pink Nun, who have never been photographed together, bear an uncanny resemblance to one another, right down to their identical nose rings and tongue studs. But Bulten insists that she and the Pink Nun are two different people and usually manages to keep a straight face while doing so. “Our goal is for people to think about sexual choices in general,” she says. “I just think that so many people don’t think into their sexual choices that much.”
Bulten was raised in a conservative Presbyterian family in Florida but now disavows affiliation with any particular denomination. “I don’t even like the idea of formal religion,” she says. “With Jesus and his followers, it wasn’t a formal church.”
Another key influence was Bulten’s thesis adviser, photographer and multimedia artist Barbara DeGenevieve. In many respects the collaboration between student and teacher was a union of opposites: DeGenevieve’s work is heavily sexual, and in the past she has courted controversy by teaching a course known colloquially at SAIC as “Porn 101.” She also operates a Web site called ssspread.com, which bills itself as “the prime porn site for hot femmes, studly butches, lots of gender fuck.” To put the icing on the cake, DeGenevieve has written that Christianity is “perhaps the single most destructive element (despite any positive influences) in the organization of Western culture.”
At Ladyfest Bulten was expecting to sell a lot of her Kruger-inspired postcards, one of which features a collage of a lab-coated food inspector examining a chicken with a human vagina beneath the caption, “You don’t need HIS approval”; instead it was her T-shirts and Purity Panties that moved the best.
The second issue of Pink Nun Zine, published this summer, includes e-mails to the Nun from the public, some laudatory and some critical. A man who signs himself as “bub” writes in to say, “I don’t think that wearing a shirt that says ‘lock your cock’ or ‘no pets’ on a pair of panties is gonna make a guy or women think about anything but sex. It’s like having a campaign against stealing, showing how practical and easy stealing is.”
