Posted on 10/04/2005 11:12:47 AM PDT by Lorianne
I came within a patent leather inch of being naked on the Internet.
Call it art or artifice, power or pornography. But a rose by any other name would still shed its petals.
Forget the oiled tangles of silicon and vapid stares, the airbrushed affectations of lust and the dimpled green flesh of night-vision cameras.
In a fringe industry increasingly open to barely-B-cups and tattoo-riddled skin, the Playboy bunny is a dying breed — and the feminists are burning more than their bras.
At the root of it all is SuicideGirls.com, a site that, as musician Dave Grohl put it, “completely tears down that Pamela Anderson image.”
Photographed professionally in various stages of undress, the women are students, artists and even executives, stripping down to flaunted imperfection. It’s what Mae West would have done if she’d had pink hair and pierced nipples.
More interesting than the panorama of body art, however, is that most of the Suicide Girls offer themselves up with little concern for money or men. The $300 payment per photo set is a paltry sum, and the site caters unapologetically to a female aesthetic. Add a booming online community and a strict requirement for artistic merit, and you have a revolution in a garter belt.
The decades-old feminist ideal, however, would cringe at such an appraisal. Our generation of young women grew up in Gloria Steinem’s well-covered bosom, believing, as she said, “Pornography is the instruction. Rape is the practice.”
But for all my dog-eared stacks of Ms. magazine, I reserve the right to be taken seriously in a vinyl corset.
This is not about validation, vindication or voracity. It’s not about satisfying a need to be desired, and it’s not about fitting into an over-commercialized avant-garde mold.
It’s about breaking boundaries. The female form has for centuries encapsulated sin, temptation and immorality. Unapologetic nudity has too long denoted impurity, and impurity in turn has marked bare flesh as damaged goods. So the final feminist frontier could be the reclamation of our own territory.
The commercial pornography industry, legal squabbles aside, has been ineffective and inaccurate in its portrayal of women. Its horrific amalgamations of breast implants and Botox stands in stark contrast to reality even though technology has turned the plasticine lies into standard components of the adolescent male hard drive.
Thus emerges a generation that might never see the allure of a soft stomach or the aphrodisiac of laugh lines.
So vehement is the feminist denouncement of pornography that we’ve forgotten that sexism, not sex, degrades women. Condemning tasteless porn makes a fantastically self-righteous noise but does nothing to actually combat the problem. Instead, our best defense might be our collective skin, in all its scarred, rumpled, cellulite-addled glory.
Pornography itself did not spring from Hugh Hefner’s loins but from the feverish minds of 17th-century Europeans at the cusp of the Enlightenment.
The period’s greater emphasis on the value of science led to a fascination with the human libido, and early works of erotica focused on female narrators who were the intellectual and sexual equals of men.
Degradation and misogyny are far more modern issues, at least in their current prevalence.
Unfortunately, the anti-porn backlash has infused perception of the female form with more sin than sensuality. The stigma of bare breasts remains a foreign concept to me; I was raised by a woman who wore T-shirts silk-screened with nude art prints to drop me off at the mall.
And when I see pornographic paranoia escalating to such a level that even nursing women are herded behind closed doors, I can’t help but think that exhibitionism is preferable to embarrassment.
As for me, my Suicide Girls membership has been languishing for quite some time, waiting for the right balance between the creative and the carnal. This is an equation that needs to be solved on a far greater scale than my own corner of cyberspace, however, and until women can stop balking at their own reflections, the women’s rights movement cannot realize its true strength.
There is a beauty and an innocence in the expression of unadorned femininity, with skin baring battle scars rather than plastic surgery scars and eyes reflecting far more tenacity than timidity. Beneath the debate and the confusion there is an emerging grace, a brocade of proud flesh, multihued, tattooed, unencumbered and unashamed.
And this, Ms. Steinem, is what a feminist looks like.
ummmm .. pictures?
(somebody was GONNA say it soon enough...)
Regardless of the authors desire to legitimize whatever it is that she's done, the mechanics of reality will not change for her.
Yeah. That 'Tim Scarfe' is a pretty hot suicide girl. Yeech. I'm glad that I'm not a day younger than I am. Yech
(somebody was GONNA say it soon enough...)
That's why I'm here too................
HEY I HEARD THIS WAS A MICHELLE MALKIN THREAD.............
This young lady really thinks porn began during the onset of the Enlightenment? Time to do more research, Toots!
BTW, feel free to remain clothed.
Now is that an enumerated right, or is that another right eminating from some penumbra or other?
"ummmm .. pictures? "
Pictures of nude feminists? NO! Please, NO!
Egad.
I was raised by a woman who wore T-shirts silk-screened with nude art prints to drop me off at the mall.
Well throw the cow over the fence some hay.....I know bad grammer when I see it. What a worthless article.
So it's dyke porn?
So that's what's been missing from the 'net, Naked Pics of Ugly Girls! What'll they think of next? Political sites for people who don't like politics? Sanity blogs written by the mentally ill? Penmanship for the illiterate? I could go on but y'all have suffered enough.
Yes we are overun with people thinking that boundaries are just made to be broken...put up to be torn down...
Earth to nympho....we have examples of porn from the ancient Greece and Rome. There is also asian porn at least that old. Thus, you are only about 2,000 years off.
"The period’s greater emphasis on the value of science led "
A giant myth.. The so called dark ages have been so misconstrued it's not funny.
The Church, through it's priests who were scientists, indeed emphasized science. Science was promoted, and Rome hosted many of the scientists to hear them propose their theories during this timeframe.
What the Church was strict about was treating theretical ideas as absolute truths. That was the issue with Galelio and a few others. Never was the hypothesis condemened -- the way it was portrayed as fact was.
A current example would be the situation of the theory of evolution -- it's treated as much more than a hypothesis. It's put forth as if it's the authoritative truth. Time may prove or disprove evolution, but until then, it should be treated as something which can be questioned.
The only thing dark is the lack of education concerning this era...
As requested :>)
No, those have been there for a while.
Or so I am told.
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