The Biggest Threat?

Something I’ve been thinking about:

In the feminist community, encouraging purity is bad, but so are photos of naked women. 

I think one of the main divisions between the schools of feminism is which one seems like the worse threat. I am sex-positive third-wave because the chastity-pushers piss me off far more than any perfume ad with naked women. With the abstinence crowd, the judgment on those who fail conform to the ideal is very, very overt. If you don’t save yourself for marriage, you’ll get herpes and AIDS and abortions and you’ll never find a husband. Most of the time, sexy pictures are just sexy pictures.

To me, there is no problem unless the image or ad or whatever it is comes with judgment towards those who don’t fit. 

The market is saturated with pictures of the same kind of woman — skinny, with big tits and lots of make-up — and that’s a problem. But in cases where the trend is the problem you can’t point to one particular example and claim that it’s excluding you. That’s saying that this particular woman isn’t sexy, and she isn’t real. Supermodels are real people, and calling a woman unsexy because she’s too thin or because she’s had plastic surgery is douchebaggy and hypocritical.

Complain about the airbrushing. Most of us have seen what they did to poor Jessica Alba in the latest Campari ad. Companies should caught on by now, really. There’s a reason American Apparel ads are so much sexier than other ads that show just as much skin, and it’s because the un-photoshopped photos seem much more realistic. The models look like people, not fembots.

Scroll down to the second letter in this Dan Savage column. A guy demands to know why a hot girl would save herself for marriage and deny men the right to have sex with her. Dan bitches him out for his attitude. Sadly, I’ve run into this before.

I don’t think it’s quite fair that women are the ones who get objectified. I think we’d gain a lot of equality if men were objectified in equal measure. The imbalance shows a cultural misunderstanding of female sexuality which contributes to a lot of incredibly annoying attitudes. Appealing to vaginas works — The Mentalist has done incredibly well for a show in its first year, and the ad campaign was almost entirely based on the fact that Simon Baker is sexy.

Complain about airbrushing and complain about the designers and magazines that consistently use the skinniest models on the market. Complain about people who feel entitled to a woman’s body. These are worth complaining about, and I think that those feminists who think porn is demeaning to women and who staunchly oppose any sexualized images of women are responding to these very real problems. I just think their anger is a little misplaced.

Because none of this means that a dirty picture is insulting to women. Just the opposite, in fact. No woman should be ashamed of her body. Every woman should have the right to decide how much of it she will show or not show, and that decision should belong to her and her alone. The moralizing comes from both the conservative Christians and the radical feminists, and it’s annoying. It seems much sadder coming from feminism, which seems to have gone from “you can do it!” to “you can, but you shouldn’t.” We’re better than that.

I went to Catholic school. My junior year we talked about sexy ads in my religion class. Some of it made a lot of sense to me, but a lot of it just showed me how much discomfort with sexy pictures is tied into body shame. One of the arguments against the ads that came up was, “But if people see her half-naked, they won’t respect her!” Why wouldn’t they? Why am I supposed to give up my intelligence when I put on a miniskirt? I enjoy my sexual power and I enjoy feeling sexy. I don’t base my self-worth on it, but I enjoy it. If you don’t think a naked woman is still a person, that’s your problem and I’m not going to be made to feel like I’m somehow unworthy because I’m naked. I’m just going to think you’re an idiot.

And no, I don’t think using female nudity in an ad is problematic in and of itself. It’s a good marketing strategy and as long as the women doing it aren’t being pressured into it, I don’t care.

If you didn’t hate your body, a half-naked supermodel wouldn’t make you feel bad about yourself, and you wouldn’t feel the need to judge the woman for daring to take off her clothes.

I’ve linked to this essay before, but I feel I need to do it again.

“Slut” is for when you wear it short, tight, without a bra, cut up high and down low and around the side, because, see, “slut” is also for when you have the nerve to enjoy your body in front of women who hate their own bodies. Don’t strut. Don’t dance with soul, or lick your lips. Don’t look too good; don’t think you look too good. Digging your own self is slutty. Making your own good time is slutty. Who do you think you are, anyway? Knees together, slut.

I feel like feminist critique of female sexuality gets uncomfortably close to this sometimes. Replace “slutty” with “self-loathing” or “brainwashed by the patriarchy” or “low-self esteem” or whatever term is in vogue right now to explain why women don’t really want to do what they’re doing.

Anytime sexuality comes up there’s always the issue that women might be doing it to please a man. Obviously, a woman who does everything to please a man has some problems. A heterosexual woman who on occasion wants to arouse a man is perfectly normal. A woman trying to arouse a man isn’t anti-feminist or stupid or self-loathing. A woman who isn’t trying to arouse a man isn’t anti-feminist or stupid or self-loathing.

The actions aren’t the problem. The need to make other people do the same thing certainly is. We’re all different, and doing one thing on one day doesn’t mean that you think everyone should do it all the time.

I will stand up for any woman’s right to go unshaven and make-up free and run around in baggy pants and t-shirts. I will also stand up for any woman’s right to get a Brazilian and wear a shirt that shows off her cleavage. The woman with the hairy legs isn’t a better feminist than the woman in the push-up bra, but if she thinks she is I don’t want anything to do with her.

I think it’s okay to suggest that chastity might be a good choice, as long as you aren’t handing out false information or saying that those who practice abstinence are morally superior to those who sleep around. I also think it’s okay to use a sexualized female body to sell a product, as long as the body isn’t photoshopped into something that resembles a Barbie doll. I think it’s fine to dress up and go to a club and enjoy the male attention, as long as you don’t think women who aren’t just like you are sexless blobs. I think it’s fine to hang around your house with a year’s subscription to Bitch magazine as long as you don’t think women who don’t have your exact priorities are idiots obsessed with men. It’s fine to want a relationship and it’s fine to be happily single and it’s fine to stay at home and take care of the kids and it’s fine to be a career woman and it’s fine to like your sex candlelit and romantic and it’s fine to like it with whips and chains. The important thing is that you don’t convince yourself that your choices are somehow superior to everyone else’s.