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.
BWAAAHAAHAHAHAHA!
(Predictable.)
Didn't you know that it is cruel and unusual punishment to show other people that picture?
I wouldn't know about timidity. All the women in my life are very aggressive. If I wasn't 100 pounds bigger than they are, I'm sure I'd be in trouble.
OUCH! :)
Eh. To-may-to, to-mah-to. ;^)
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