- 16 Nov 2016 06:00
#14738181
Sounds like the same bollocks some Christians try and pull where they emphasize that women should cover up.
The issue I think though is that the behaviour of covering up or not doesn't really overturn the morally problematic perspectives and following behaviours based in such perspectives that feminists oppose.
I initially thought things like free the nipple were silly, but I think they pose a good endeavor overall by disconnecting the association of nudity = sex/ual/ity.
By covering up the human body we have mystified it.
- Elizabeth Hurlock
- Paul Ableman
- Ben Lowe
By normalizing nudity in contexts that aren't sexual such as pornography, sex scenes, strip clubs and so on, the mystification can be diminished in the same way we no longer look to topless men with a sense of their immodesty in many contexts, whilst historically it was subject to having to be covered in public also.
The focus is too much on the external behaviour without any examination of the subject and gender ideology which interprets it. The sort of man who emphasizes a woman's modesty objectifies a woman just as much as the one who stares down a woman in a nice dress like a nice piece of meat he wants to stick his dick in.
It positions the woman's value in her physical appearance still and thus does nothing to empower her and emancipate women from a sense of them as primarily sexual objects rather than sexual beings.
But it is certainly true that the modern trend of assuming sexual = empowerment/emancipation is equally naive. It is true that we're at a stage in which media avoids the passive object form of sexuality but instead portrays women as if they were active agents of sexual acts, but are in fact created fantasies which can distort peoples sense of women (ie all women love anal).
Empowerment/Sexism: Figuring Female Sexual Agency in Contemporary Advertising
Going out and fucking a lot of guys doesn't materialize a world post patriarchy. Women are still being judged on their sexual behaviour, they may in such behaviour in fact put themselves at risk, they may still be subject to being used as sexual object in which they are given little respect for them as a person.
This was known since the 'sexual revolution' with the contraception which became a means for men to presume that all women were on it and thus sexually available. Such medical advancement didn't wash away sexism and misogyny.
And because the variance in the human object/subject doesn't by itself undermine the ideological assumptions which interprets women as primarily as sexual objects or at least having their primary worth/value based in sexuality, one has to do more than clothing. In this regard I suspect the free the nipple is useful in undermining the ideological background of interpreting nudity as inherently sexual by showing nudity in desexualized contexts. The association is so strong that people presume it universal in spite of a reality in which tribal women walk bare chested, where different cultures have fetishized different aspects of the body and often covered it. Doing this doesn't mean one can't still be sexually attracted to someone, because sexual attraction doesn't require that we fetishize a single aspect of someones body as inherently sexual, sexuality is more than visual parts but interacts heavily with the subjects mind.
When we leave the human form in this mystified manner or where its associated with sex because all appearances of nudity are within sexual contexts and thus they become inseparable by built up associations, we develop people who interpret a certain sexual power in nudity. The sort that comes to rationalize the sense that women's appearances provoke men, with little discussion in the mediation of subject to object.
I was recently at a hot spring in Colorado, where clothing was optional and so lot of people were naked. There was clear rules emphasizing that sexual acts where to be done in private, delineating that nudity wasn't sexual. Coming from a social context in which nudity is covered by clothing and general nudity is unfamiliar to public contexts, there remains a degree of curiosity but also a sort of indifference that arises from being visually saturated in the human form. It becomes familiar, it becomes the new normative, one that normalizes human nakedness without implying sexuality.
This subject I think in a more in depth discussion would have to explore aesthetics. But overall, the view that modesty equals empowerment is misguided and doesn't strike at the ideology that positions women's primary value in their physical appearance at all but is in fact the other side of the same coin.
The issue I think though is that the behaviour of covering up or not doesn't really overturn the morally problematic perspectives and following behaviours based in such perspectives that feminists oppose.
I initially thought things like free the nipple were silly, but I think they pose a good endeavor overall by disconnecting the association of nudity = sex/ual/ity.
By covering up the human body we have mystified it.
When primitive peoples are unaccustomed to wearing clothing, putting it on for the first time does not decrease their immorality, as the ladies of missionary societies think it will. It has just the opposite effect. It draws attention to the body, especially to those parts of it which are covered for the first time. Arthur Grimble, Research Commissioner of Gilbert and Ellice Islands in the South Pacific Ocean, has expressed his views in regard to this matter as follows: “Clothes may have originated in the Garden of Eden but they have spoiled a Pacific paradise. Clothes covering bodies which once went naked, have contributed to the natives’ moral decadence by stimulating a nasty curiosity which never before existed.”
- Elizabeth Hurlock
From the sixteenth century onwards, clothed Europeans regularly encountered naked primitives all over the world. The Spanish in South America came upon naked Indians in Brazil and elsewhere. Captain Cook found naked, or unconcealed, islanders in Polynesia and New Zealand. Later British, French, Germans and Portuguese, among others, came into contact with naked Africans. The results of these meetings were usually lamentable for the simpler cultures. The Europeans exploited them economically and sexually. Sometimes, indeed, they exterminated them. But it was not until the eighteenth and, especially, the nineteenth centuries that they made much attempt to change them. Then came the missionaries, and the first aspect of primitive life to experience their reforming zeal was inevitably the nakedness of the potential new recruits to Christianity. Doubtless most of the missionaries meant well, but they provided a greater force for ruin than the simpler and more brutal traders and explorers.
The missionaries were usually disconcerted to find that the biblically recommended act of ‘clothing the naked’, far from producing an improvement in native morals, almost always resulted in a deterioration. What the missionaries were inadvertently doing was recreating the Garden of Eden situation. Naked, the primitive cultures had shown no prurient concern with the body […]. The missionaries, with their cotton shorts and dresses, disrupted this. Naked people actually feel shame when they are first dressed. They develop an exaggerated awareness of the body. It is as if Adam and Eve’s ‘aprons’ generated the ‘knowledge of good and evil’ rather than being its consequence.
- Paul Ableman
From the time of Columbus’s first voyage to the New World, when the admiral noticed the Amerindian women’s “very pretty bodies,” the most commented upon attribute of the new people was their nakedness (Morison 1963, 128). As the body is the agent of beauty, whether one wears clothes or not was the clearest manifestation of either acceptable or unacceptable body images in the Western world at the time overseas explorations were undertaken. We have already seen the degradation associated with female nakedness, a condition that resulted from women’s uncontrollable lust and attachment to the body. Contemporary European views on nudity connected clothes with civilization; the absence of clothing was a sign of anarchy. A naked man in public was seen as a destroyer of order, while a naked woman was always associated with “nascent or confirmed desire.” Once again, it was the male prerogative to contain the depraved nature of the female, and so “female nudity was explicitly linked to the affirmation of manly power.” If clothing was a metaphor for civilization, men, being more rational by nature, could violently strip women to expose their beastliness, and if, in so doing, the men give in to their desires, they are not really at fault, for the women are undeserving of any better treatment (Régnier-Bohler 1988, 367-72).
Stories proliferated in Renaissance Europe of men and emperors who did just that, ordering women to be unclothed before them so the women would suffer humiliation for their lechery. European artists used female nudity to teach Christians the evils of carnality. In many Gothic church sculptures, lust is signified by a naked woman who suffers for her sin by having snakes devour her genitals and breasts. According to the Malleus Maleficarum, the late medieval guidebook on witches, as Eve used her naked body to tempt man to sin, women’s bodies were “beautiful to look upon, contaminating to touch, and deadly to keep.” But nudity can also display imperfections of the body more readily, and representations of old hags with poison dripping from their breasts and sixteenth-century tombstones depicting the body victimized by worms were quite common (Warner 1985, 295-99).
It is understandable, then, why the first European men to notice the naked Amerindian women considered them beastly and in need of domestication, while at the same time they feared them for their supposedly uncontrollable urges and egalitarian customs. The most famous and thorough of the early reports of Amerindian women (gaining much greater circulation than Columbus’s descriptions of his discoveries) came from Amerigo Vespucci Mundus Novus, published first around 1504-05. Vespucci’s account fixates on the nudity of the natives, especially the women. The writer clearly ties together European notions of cultural superiority and the prevalent perceptions about the disorderliness of naked beauty, so that while Amerindian customs appear harmless on the outside, they lead inevitably to a multitude of heinous sins. A lengthy quotation from this work is thus warranted:
All of both sexes go about naked, covering no part of their bodies; and just as they spring from their mothers' wombs so they go until death. . . . They are comely, too, of countenance which nevertheless themselves destroy; for they bore their cheeks, lips, noses and ears. Nor think those holes small or that they have one only. . . . For women do not bore their faces, but their ears only. They have another custom, very shameful and beyond all human belief. For their women, being very lustful, cause the private parts of their husbands to swell up to such a huge size that they appear deformed and disgusting. . . .
. . . They live together without king, without government, and each is his own master. They marry as many wives as they please and son cohabits with mother, brother with sister, male cousin with female, and any man with the first woman he meets. . . . They live according to nature. (Berkhofer 1978, 7-8)
Here the explorer draws a clear link between the nudity of the natives and a society that knows no bounds of sexual depravity, all of which causes them to live in a lawless, anarchic way, bestial in their inability to overcome animalistic behavior as civilized Europeans did long ago. But such a view, while castigating this immediately obvious trait of Amerindian culture, is laid alongside the natural beauty of the women, which the writer declares was deformed through pagan practices, all to enhance their bodies for carnal pleasures, since they are without doubt “very lustful” and sodomites (Crosby 1972, 10). Vespucci goes on to recount the ineffective attempts “to dissuade them to desist from these depraved customs,” yet “when they had the opportunity of copulating with Christians, urged by excessive lust, they defiled and prostituted themselves” (Berkhofer 1978, 9).
Throughout his description, the explorer develops what would become a justification for all sorts of ill treatments of Amerindian women by European men. Their beauty is obviously of the carnal type and finds its fullest expression in nakedness, since only women of unusual lust would live their lives unclothed. Their world was so disorderly and without restraint that they were not under the consistent supervision of Amerindian men, who were themselves unequipped to contain property their own lust (Scammell 1989, 187-88). When sin entered the world, God forced Eve to cover her nakedness and shame, but these pagans were instead flaunting their depravity, proving that they were by nature nothing more than prostitutes. As in Europe, such women became fair game, as if rape or other abuse was their just reward.
For the early explorers, who had been separated from women for quite some time, the ability to indulge their sexual urges with native women proved almost too much to handle. For example, one of Columbus’s shipmates, Michele de Cuneo, gave this astounding account, in the earliest existing evidence of sexual relations between the two cultures:
While I was in the boat I captured a very beautiful Carib woman whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me, and with whom, having taken her into my cabin, she being naked according to their custom, I conceived desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it and treated me with her finger nails in such a manner that I wished I had never begun. But seeing that (to tell you the end of it all), I took a rope and thrashed her well, for which she raised such unheard of screams that you would not have believed your ears. Finally we came to an agreement in such manner that I can tell you that she seemed to have been brought up in a school of harlots. (Morison 1963, 212; see also Sale 1990, 140)
Amerindian women could be subjugated in the most violent and cruel manner, since they had not been socialized to conform to European ideals about beauty images and the submissive behaviorial norms that such represent.
While nudity was the essence and source of much comment about the physical appearance of native women, the descriptions betray an overall feeling that the bodies of pagans are so corrupt that the body itself is completely desacrilized, for these men and women have no basis for believing that the body is God’s holy temple. Inevitably, nakedness must, therefore, lead to other forms of deviance and bodily profanity, most notably cannibalism. This is the natural consequence of their sexual license according a Dutch pamphlet from 1511-12, which was also published in English:
But all thinges is comune/this people goeth all naked. But the men and women have on theyr heed/;necke/Armes/knees/and fete all with feders bounden for there bewtynes [beautiness]. . . . These folke lyven lyke bestes without any resonablenes and the wymen be also as comon. And the men hath conversacyon with the wymen/who that they ben or who they fyrst mete/is she his syster/his mother/his daughter/;or another kyndred. And the wymen be very hoote and dysposed to lecherdnes. And they ete also on[e] another[.] The men eteth his wyfe[,] his chylderne/as we also have seen and they hange also the bodyes or persons fleeshe in the smoke/as men do with swynes fleshe. (Berkhofer 1978, 9-10)
With this sort of propaganda being spread and enhanced more with each telling, it is no wonder the European explorers believed that any treatment of native women would be preferable to that which they were already receiving. A number of woodcuts, accompanying Vespucci's works and those of others like him, offered in horrifying detail the nonchalant cannibalism of these depraved beings. Between 1503 and 1515, the illustrated Mundus Novus was published in France, Germany, England, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal. The powerful naked women who were ready to strike Europeans with heavy clubs were in sharp contrast to the domesticated, modest women of the Old World (Honour 1975, 10-11).
- Ben Lowe
By normalizing nudity in contexts that aren't sexual such as pornography, sex scenes, strip clubs and so on, the mystification can be diminished in the same way we no longer look to topless men with a sense of their immodesty in many contexts, whilst historically it was subject to having to be covered in public also.
The focus is too much on the external behaviour without any examination of the subject and gender ideology which interprets it. The sort of man who emphasizes a woman's modesty objectifies a woman just as much as the one who stares down a woman in a nice dress like a nice piece of meat he wants to stick his dick in.
It positions the woman's value in her physical appearance still and thus does nothing to empower her and emancipate women from a sense of them as primarily sexual objects rather than sexual beings.
But it is certainly true that the modern trend of assuming sexual = empowerment/emancipation is equally naive. It is true that we're at a stage in which media avoids the passive object form of sexuality but instead portrays women as if they were active agents of sexual acts, but are in fact created fantasies which can distort peoples sense of women (ie all women love anal).
Empowerment/Sexism: Figuring Female Sexual Agency in Contemporary Advertising
Going out and fucking a lot of guys doesn't materialize a world post patriarchy. Women are still being judged on their sexual behaviour, they may in such behaviour in fact put themselves at risk, they may still be subject to being used as sexual object in which they are given little respect for them as a person.
This was known since the 'sexual revolution' with the contraception which became a means for men to presume that all women were on it and thus sexually available. Such medical advancement didn't wash away sexism and misogyny.
And because the variance in the human object/subject doesn't by itself undermine the ideological assumptions which interprets women as primarily as sexual objects or at least having their primary worth/value based in sexuality, one has to do more than clothing. In this regard I suspect the free the nipple is useful in undermining the ideological background of interpreting nudity as inherently sexual by showing nudity in desexualized contexts. The association is so strong that people presume it universal in spite of a reality in which tribal women walk bare chested, where different cultures have fetishized different aspects of the body and often covered it. Doing this doesn't mean one can't still be sexually attracted to someone, because sexual attraction doesn't require that we fetishize a single aspect of someones body as inherently sexual, sexuality is more than visual parts but interacts heavily with the subjects mind.
When we leave the human form in this mystified manner or where its associated with sex because all appearances of nudity are within sexual contexts and thus they become inseparable by built up associations, we develop people who interpret a certain sexual power in nudity. The sort that comes to rationalize the sense that women's appearances provoke men, with little discussion in the mediation of subject to object.
I was recently at a hot spring in Colorado, where clothing was optional and so lot of people were naked. There was clear rules emphasizing that sexual acts where to be done in private, delineating that nudity wasn't sexual. Coming from a social context in which nudity is covered by clothing and general nudity is unfamiliar to public contexts, there remains a degree of curiosity but also a sort of indifference that arises from being visually saturated in the human form. It becomes familiar, it becomes the new normative, one that normalizes human nakedness without implying sexuality.
This subject I think in a more in depth discussion would have to explore aesthetics. But overall, the view that modesty equals empowerment is misguided and doesn't strike at the ideology that positions women's primary value in their physical appearance at all but is in fact the other side of the same coin.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
-For Ethical Politics