“Mum”, a drag mistress sporting a severe blonde bob, dresses me in a black tuxedo jacket and tie, chest and belly exposed – then puts me to work ironing knickers. Later, I’m handed a feather duster with which to polish an array of white porcelain dicks – alternately girthy, proud, veiny and shrivelled – protruding from the rich green velvet drapes (Peter Lundberg’s 91 Penises).
This is the price of entry to the Museum of Old and New Art’s Ladies Lounge – if you’re a man.
The nipaluna/Hobart museum reopened the lounge last week for a one-month victory lap, after a sex discrimination complaint first won by New South Wales man Jason Lau was overturned in lutruwita/Tasmania’s supreme court. Operating since 2020 as a space for women to luxuriate in their own company, the lounge is now allowing men to enter on select days – provided they remove their shirts and serve the matriarchy inside. This Saturday, I did both.
“The Ladies Lounge was this fertile female body. The men came in and sprinkled their seed on it [in the form of a court case] and together we grew something really beautiful,” the lounge’s creator, Kirsha Kaechele, told me earlier in the day. “It’s not a virgin birth, we needed the men, we needed Jason Lau. I want him to come back. He’s so cute and so nice and he was genuine in his inquiry.”
Hepburn, an unforgiving male head butler, makes me hand-feed our female guests plump green grapes and kneel while pouring them champagne. He charges me with filling Kaechele’s cut-crystal flute with Pol Roger. Lady KK, as she’s known inside, approves of my left-arm-behind-back technique but notes the white service linen missing from my right. Hepburn chastises me for half-filling her glass and I’m sent back to complete my task.
“For a lot of women, myself included, the experience of going through the world, there’s been a price to pay. I think about myself as a young lady trying to make my way and all of the dynamics I had to negotiate with men who held the power,” says Kaechele. She recalls a powerful man agreeing to fully fund her New Orleans-based Life Is Art Foundation providing she returned to his hotel room. “No play, no pay,” he said.
I’m not the only volunteer butler. Courtney, a 47-year-old man holidaying from Chicago, found himself respectfully lifting Lady KK’s dress above the knee to administer a foot and calf massage.
“[She] told me I did a very good job. I was sweating quite profusely under that jacket,” he says. “At first it was a bit goofy and funny, but then it became quite serious. I couldn’t help but reflect on how this is the status quo for most non-binary and female people. [As] cis white men, how do we rationalise the position of privilege you’re born into and what can you do about it? I realised: duh, be of service more often.”
A striptease by muscular, forensic-wigged barristers breaks out to Patrick Cowley’s pulsing Hi-NRG disco classic, Menergy. It choreographically crescendos in a barrister’s splayed-leg headstand and a gavel sharply thwacked in uneasy proximity to his glittering jockstrap.
“During the supreme court case the barrister made a joke with the judge, trying to buddy up about the men’s club that they were in … but the judge didn’t bite,” says Kaechele. “These male villains have just played the perfect part. They’re straight out of central casting.”
After my shift, I run into a family of women I’d served in the lounge, in front of Mona’s famous porcelain vulva artwork (Greg Taylor and friends’ Cunts … and other conversations).
“It was absolutely fabulous, but I did think it would be more like a traditional bar, like down at Wrest Point Casino,” says Angela Nixon, 66, from lutruwita/Tasmania, who had declined my first grape dangle but ate from the second. “It was lovely to be in there with my female family. Glass of champagne on the way in. A little show that wasn’t too risque.”
Angela’s niece Eleanor, 13, who was allowed entry post-striptease, didn’t like the 91 Penises artwork but enjoyed the lounge. “It felt better than just being out normally, that the men in there were offering stuff. It was a better vibe,” she says.
Eleanor’s cousin Michelle, 41, found the supplicant males confronting, but warmed to the experience.
“You serving [me] wine while you’re down on your knees, that didn’t feel quite right. You wanna see equality, you know,” she says. “There’s always been a males lounge in Hobart, that’s all cool. We open one up here [for women] and all of a sudden all hell breaks loose. I don’t see what the hoo-ha is about.”
In early December the Tasmanian Club, a “private gentlemen’s club” founded in 1861, changed its rules, allowing women to accompany their male club-member partners into its bar. The Ladies Lounge may have relaxed its own entry rules but some males remain excluded. The lounge’s concierge politely rebuffs a spectacled preteen boy, who retreats, gazes up earnestly at his fully clothed father and says: “Man, I wish I was a woman.”
Mona’s Ladies Lounge is open until Monday 13 January 2025. Women can enter freely (with paid admission to the museum) and men can apply by ballot through the Mona app, for entry between 1–6 January.
