There’s a new Carnival of Feminists up, with all the usual great feminist blogging. I was particularly intrigued by this post at The F Word about women’s complicity in the lad mag culture. It’s a response to this article by Decca Aitkenhead, and I have to admit, the F Word blogger Samara was a lot more measured in her response that I might have been. Aitkenhead’s premise is a flimsy one, which is that women should be held accountable for male sexism, because we don’t do enough to stand up to it.
The reason - and the problem - is that the feminist critique has consistently failed to account for women’s own complicity in the genre.
The Nuts website, for example, features a page called Assess My Breasts, inviting men to study photos of naked breasts and rank them - which doesn’t seem particularly respectful. But the thousands of images have been uploaded by ordinary women - “entirely voluntarily”, for free, as the spokeswoman took pleasure pointing out. Without these willing armies of female volunteers, there would be no breasts for any readers of Nuts to assess - or any of the “Real Girls!” beloved of porn shoots, and no “High Street Honeys” for FHM porn scouts to find.
“A lot of young women feel very angry” about lad mag culture, Walter still insisted - but the evidence is, regrettably, against her.
How? How does the existence of some young women who are eager (or desperate, I’d say) enough to flash their tits for free evidence of what lots of other women feel about lad mags? It’s quite possible that there are entirely two sets of young women—those eager to strip down and have the approval of slobbering assholes and those who find the entire thing nauseating. Hell, I’d argue there are even more than those two sets. There are young women who don’t care. There are those who strip down and are so humiliated by the process they convert to the angry set. There are those who are fine with lad magazine sexism because they think it’s an outlet for male nastiness so they can rise above it. (Call them the IWF set, preaching modesty for women on one hand while excusing men who leer and sexually assault on the other.) And there’s women like Aitkenhead who are angry about the lad mag culture but blame women for it.
It is no wonder a lot of men now genuinely believe that women want to be treated as sex objects. Who could blame them when so many of us have internalised an exhibitionistic ideal of our own objectification? You could argue, I suppose, that women who put headless photos of their naked torsos on to the internet are still suffering the legacy of millennia of male sexual oppression. But there must come a point where it is simply implausible to keep blaming men.
I don’t really see why. Is it because there’s a certain cut-off to the amount of man-blaming available in the world, whereas woman-blaming comes in an infinite supply? Seems like the case to me. I don’t blame the generalized group “men” for anything—like women, they come in many flavors. But pardon me if I don’t want to dig around for some woman to blame for a man who pays hard money for misogynist magazines. And I’m not thinking, “Well, some woman made that asshole believe all women enjoy being treated like a sex object,” if I’m getting catcalled by a man clearly enjoying my discomfort. I’m going to keep training my blame on the people who actually behave badly and try to hurt others. Women who are casting around desperately for male approval aren’t objects of ire, but kind of pitiful. The woman debased in the lad mag and made an object of mockery in some “compare your boobs” contest is not the villain here, but the victim of those blameless men who get a rise out of making women grovel in front of them.
Yes, I want women to take responsibility and quit sending these dehumanizing boobie shots to lad mags. But the way to convince anyone is not to make it sound like you’re the enemy who blames them for sexism, making them run into the arms of the men coaxing nudie shots out of them while snickering behind their backs. The difference between the young woman sending in boobie shots and the young woman angry at the sexism of lad mag culture isn’t some sort of hard-to-define reponsiblity-takingness—the difference is in concrete things. The latter group has probably got better information; we know that these guys mean harm and we know, from reading up on feminism, that the entire boobie contest is a way to pit women against each other and put us in no-win situations (show your boobies, you’re a ho, don’t and you’re a prude).
But the strategy of pitting women against each other extends past the strict boobie comparison. The contest is a way to pit said angry women against the desperate women—keep us divided and pointing fingers about who’s most complicit and we don’t stand together to address the real problem. Attacking women who act out of a pathetic but understandable (who hasn’t been there in one form or another?) desire to be liked and appreciated doesn’t do us any good. Reaching out to them and rationally explaining that the boobie shots don’t get you liked or appreciated (since even if you “win”, the magazine readers are laughing at you for being a dumb chick who has to plead for their attention) is the only thing that has a chance of really working.
37 Responses to “The show-your-tits tap dance”
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I’m still trying to think of a point in history when men (as a group/culture, not specific individuals) didn’t believe that women wanted to be treated as sex objects. I don’t think you can argue that, say, Casanova treated women as valued individuals and not sex objects, and he died in 1798.
This was a really good post. This is a good analogy for so much that’s going on in the world, especially the blame-the-victim mentality. Secondly, I find it ironic that your post speaks on young ladies exposing themselves for profit when the ad on the side is doing just that. It’s not a reflection of you as I know how ad proxies work. It just feels weird that John Q TV would post their ads like this on a rather feminist blog.
I think it’s food for thought, though. Really I do.
Ooh, I think Aitkenhead is having an itty-bitty problem with the existence of that bizarre, obscure system called “patriarchy.”
Even as she feeds it — for what does patriarchy teach better than “I’m a man and I’m entitled to the top tier of everything, and it’s women’s fault for making me be this way and it’s women’s fault for not givng me what I want.”
And remember, patriarchy is an “it,” not a “he.”
Sorry the redesign of the site and the ad structure is taking so long. We’re kind of strapped by immediate duties.
Complicity is always part of the mix where oppression is anything other than violently forced upon the oppressed. Some go along to avoid trouble, some go along to get favor, and some go along because they must. Unfortunately in these instances, some also go along for the fun of it.
Where sex and prettiness and fun mix under a patriarchal umbrella, there will always be some question of consent, choice, and oppression. There’s too much of a grey area for me to say all complicity in lad mag culture is the fault of the patriarchy. But there’s way too much common sense in me to say that it’s all about individuals’ choices. The idealist in me wants to lay it all on individuals, but I think there are too many sheeplike people out there for my idealism to be much more than an elitist fantasy on my part. And that’s where I start to hate the world.
The phrase “lad mag” - does that imply men’s magazines/publications which feature scantily clad famous females, or is it used to describe men’s magazines/publications which feature scantily clad Jane Q Citizen females?
I’m wondering, do people see a difference between capitulation to and promotion of sexist images when it’s rich, famous women taking the naughty shots, as opposed to when it’s an “any-woman”? I find I can’t sympathize with self-objectification when women who belong to powerful economic classes engage in it.
deep6, you’re right on the money. Girls like Paris and Britney have not only willingly objectified themselves, they have created a fortune and a following doing it. One of the scariest pop culture moments that I ever witnessed was seeing a five year old girl on tv mouthing the lyrics to “Hit me, Baby, one more time” during a performance by BS. Both Britney and Paris have made a conscious choice to act the way that they do. I do not believe they where coerced into their choices, and for Paris, she could have easily lived her life objectified-free as an heiress.
There needs to be a serious re-assessment by both men and women about our gender assumptions, because the old black and white logic of the battle of the sexes is getting grayer and grayer.
Heh, It’s always gonna be blame the victim.
As the bully says to his victim, while holding the victims hand “Stop Hitting Yourself!” SLAP “No, really, Stop Hitting Yourself, You’ll Get Hurt!” SLAP SLAP “Oh, There’s Just No Convincing You That You’re The Problem”…
This game? Way too much fun and empowering…
Incidentially? Allow me to spam this book/trilogy by John C. Wright…
http://www.amazon.com/Orphans-Chaos-John-C-Wright/dp/0765349957/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-3975774-2746007?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190268231&sr=1-1
The Author does a real number on *exactly* this sort of thing talked about in the blog post, in a really cool framework. You would be well advised to be familiar with Greek Mythology, some matters of theology, and hyperspatial geometry/mathematics. It’s still repulsive when the circumstances warp the two girls into *being* the image of sexual availability and lusted powerlessness. Spanking is prominent ?:~) Some of the reviews had missed the point, thinking that it was make-believe for perverts instead of a commentary of what goes on in the real world. When you think about it, that’s kinda sad…
Right. When I go to my local to have a beer and not get hit on, it’s my fault for being harassed because I could have just stayed home. This shit makes me crazy. When I’m not willing to be reduced to my body parts, I’m being a mean bitch. I’m so sick of this.
Amanda, you’re my pine cone.
I hate lads mags and the whole culture which surrounds them. When I go into a shop and see them all there, it always ruins my day a little bit, but, whilst I agree that Aitkenhead was entirely wrong to act as if men are blameless little lambs in the lad mag culture, I also feel that you’ve still come down a bit hard on the women who send these photos in. I think that there is nothing wrong with women expressing themselves sexually, and if we criticise these women for sending topless photos of themselves into this magazine, then we are joining the chorus of people only too keen to tell women exactly what to do every moment of their lives.
Racy T,
I know that since I don’t have the warm hole most men desire, this may not mean much coming from me, but if you go anywhere in public, you just might get hit on. Whether you go to the bar to get hit on or not, it just might happen. Your intention, unless clearly communicated, is irrelevant. But if you are harassed, that’s a different matter. Harassers are assholes who will hit on a woman with a wedding ring, an obvious partner (even present,) and who has said “I’m not interested, so bug off.” In that case you aren’t a mean bitch, you’re just trying to have a beer. Don’t worry about being called a mean bitch if the namecaller is an asshole. Really, don’t.
The ownership of a vagina must be like having a pickup truck: near strangers are always asking you to move something. There wouldn’t be those “No, I won’t help you move” bumper stickers if the owners weren’t sick of answering those questions, but I bet those people still get asked anyway. After all, they don’t mean me, do they? No way.
Feeding the troll?
Jon, just because you desire the world to be a heterosexually romanticized marketplace, where you may evaluate the sexuality of any woman you choose, and attempt to force your way into that “warm hole most men desire” (I can’t believe this dude actually wrote that here), doesn’t mean that women just have to deal with it. “That’s just the way the world is” is an argument we’ve long foregone here.
You define a harasser as a man who will hit on a woman who is already the property of another man. If you would actually read this feminist blog, you would know that women aren’t open to the romantic and sexual advances of “any man, any time”, EVEN IF THEY ARE SINGLE AND LOVE HETEROSEXUAL SEX. That means that while, in your ethical universe, you consider it cool to hit on women whom you perceive to be single, in the feminist ethical universe, we consider most acts of “hitting on” to be unwanted harassment from the oppressor class.
But hey, Racy T., jon here wants you to “Don’t worry about being called a mean bitch if the namecaller is an asshole. Really, don’t”. (pat, pat on head). Guess what Jon! How about a world where a woman isn’t #1) first lusted over and flattered, and then #2) called a “mean bitch” when she isn’t interested. Oh right, a world where men aren’t constantly trolling for sex and resenting women who don’t offer their bodies up to be thrust into simply doesn’t exist. Let’s label those men “harassers” and label men like you… what exactly? Oh! I know! I bet Jon here is a “nice guy.”
Puke.
On the money jon, my vagina is exactly like a pickup truck.
Exactly like terrorism or crime. Some fraction of a percent of folks of some label are thus, so all of them are thus.
I’m still trying to think of a point in history when men (as a group/culture, not specific individuals) didn’t believe that women wanted to be treated as sex objects.
Mnemosyne, the old patriarchy treated women as property but not as sex objects. In the old patriarchy, “lad magazines” are forbidden.
You’ll say - “what is the difference between property and sex objectification”? The answer is plenty. E.g., in the old patriarchy daughters (at least until their marriage) are their fathers’ property, and not sex objects.
I found the side advertising to be particularly ironic, too, just because it proves the point of how pervasive this attitude is. The damn thing could have been purposely placed there as an illustration device (though I’m glad that it wasn’t).
@Cara
Yeah, I love the lingerie-clad women staring out over the discussion of how they’re (victims/enablers/supporters) of male oppression.
http://i124.photobucket.com/albums/p12/Midwest_Product/pandagongrab.jpg
Remember the movie Mean Girls? The best part of that movie, to me, was the ongoing flashes of the little girl watching tv and imitating the “girls gone wild” and other sexual stuff on it — lifting up her shirt, dancing suggestively. it’s brainwashing from an early age and then people wonder why these young women give into it?
I think you can probably always blame somebody for anything and totally get away with it. Men are just as convenient to blame as a woman’s desire to get attention when it comes to lad mags.
What Aitkenhead does is place the blame on ’submitters’ and assume that all of the ‘women’ who submit photos or are in videos are completely in control of the situations they are portrayed in, which is probably not the case at all. There are two important factors she doesn’t take into account: anonymity and duress.
I can pretend to be a 14 year old girl and submit media to magazines and/or online publications . . . even though I’m not a 14 year old girl. Its not difficult these days (though I wish things were different) to use high tech spy equipment in order to take pictures of unassuming women in various states of undress. Usually, someone else is on the other side of that camera.
That someone could be a boyfriend, a father, a girlfriend . . . That someone could be stalking, spying, blackmailing, hurting, threatening and/or begging to get a woman in a “sexy pose.” I don’t believe that all women are noble, just as I don’t believe that all men are noble, and so I will admit that there must be some truth to what Aitkenhead asserts.
Even so, I hesitate to support Aitkenhead when she reported numbers of submitted photos released by FHM, a source that recently published a topless photo of a 14 year old without her consent, to back up her claims. I have a hard time believing anything FHM would state.
shah8: I’ve read the first two books in that trilogy, and am waiting for the third to arrive at the library. The first one really, *really* squicked me, because this book I’d been enjoying up until then, with the tone of a PG-13 boarding school fantasy novel, had morphed into this “women really want to be dominated” Gor-lite crap. It’s not until much later that you find out that this is not the work of human nature but a personality quirk specifically inculcated in the character by her patriarchal “handlers.”
The ownership of a vagina must be like having a pickup truck: near strangers are always asking you to move something. There wouldn’t be those “No, I won’t help you move” bumper stickers if the owners weren’t sick of answering those questions, but I bet those people still get asked anyway. After all, they don’t mean me, do they? No way.
He’s not saying that “a vagina is like a pick up truck”: he’s saying that “the experience of how people treat you when you own a pick up truck is analogous to how a lot of men treat women in regards to sex”. And I think is my be a really good analogy to try to explain to “why won’t women sleep with me” guys what it’s like to be in the woman’s position.
I’ve tried to use the “tables were turned” example (”What happens if a really ugly woman who repulses you hits on you, you turn her down, and she hounds you for the rest of the night?”) before, but it’s so specific that a lot of guys can’t really wrap their brains around it.
With the pickup truck analogy, you have a pretty good example of a guy “owning” something that many people want to borrow, and many of those people will feel entitled to it just because they’ve been nice to him or bought him a beer, and they will badger, bully, or bad-mouth him if he don’t comply with their demands, all the while pointing out how he should accomodate them because they are “nice”.
And when it comes right down to it, everyone has to admit that the the pickup owner and no one else gets to decide who borrows the truck and who doesn’t, and no, he doesn’t have to explain his reasons, and if someone takes the truck without his explicit consent, it’s a crime, even if he drank a lot and passed out and left his keys hanging out of his pocket. (”If you didn’t want me to take your truck, you should have hidden your keys better…”)
Better yet, it’s a common enough experience that most guys have had it happen to themselves or a close friend and can actually internalize it instead of imagine it.
I can’t see the harm in anonymously sending in (links to) pictures of your breasts to a website. You’re not being objectified; your breasts are. No one can connect your breasts to you. And if you’re proud of your breasts, why not? It’s not like you can ask people on the street what they think (or your friends, your co-workers, acquaintances, et al.).
Dorothy —
Didn’t you know that the world is full of people who call people with pickup trucks nasty names for not agreeing to haul stuff, and that some folks actually go around beating up folks with pickup trucks who won’t haul things for them? And there are whole shelves in bookstores devoted to works telling pickup truck owners that if they don’t want to get beaten up for behaving in such a miserly fashion they shouldn’t keep their trucks so sparkly clean or get fancy paint jobs for them or add accessories like winches or tow bars or extra running lights. But they also shouldn’t let their pickup trucks get dirty, because that’s a tipoff that the truck really is getting used to haul stuff on a regular basis…
Oh, wait. Pardon the ring.
I still remember when, in my formative years, my father sat with me on the back porch and began his talk with, “You know, son, a vagina is a lot like a pickup truck…”
Ah, halcyon days.
I’d forgotten my book one day, so I picked up a lad mag (I think it was FHM) at the gym for when I was on the treadmill. (Everything else didn’t interest me, or was several months out of date.)
Everything about the lad mag disgusted me so much, I had to roll it up and place it in the cup holder of the adjoining treadmill. I couldn’t even deal with the airbrushed fembot on the cover, or the nauseatingly misogynistic cologne ad on the back.
I was stunned to see such a poorly constructed magazine.
At least Maxim often has its tongue firmly in its cheek.
Pfeh.
Paul,
Didn’t you know that the world is full of people who call people with pickup trucks nasty names for not agreeing to haul stuff, and that some folks actually go around beating up folks with pickup trucks who won’t haul things for them? And there are whole shelves in bookstores devoted to works telling pickup truck owners that if they don’t want to get beaten up for behaving in such a miserly fashion they shouldn’t keep their trucks so sparkly clean or get fancy paint jobs for them…
I didn’t say it was perfect analogy, just an experience that men who can’t “get it” can relate to. It’s a “starting point” comparison, and once you have them hooked with the analogy, then you go on to explain the extremes women have to face: “OK, now suppose the guy you refused to haul stuff for beat you up because of that” or “Suppose you report your truck stolen and the cops spend all their time quizzing you about where exactly you left your keys and asking if you might have smiled at the guy who took it: how pissed would you be?”
In a sense, the sheer ridiculousness of that extreme (”Your ‘friend’ beat you up because you wouldn’t move his weight set? He’s fucking crazy!”) drive home the bizarre double-standard held against women (”Your boyfriend beat you up because you wouldn’t have sex with him? Well, you should have just fucked him, them…”)
Again, it’s just a rhetorical technique targeted at those men who are blind to the issues–basically those guys who treat women they know personally like, you know, people, but don’t see “the problem” overall (most of the guys I have know like this were in their early 20s). It’s just one way to get men to step out the “entitled” point of view and into the “victim of entitlement” point of view. If the guy you’re talking to can already appreciate the problem, then there’s no reason to go there, right?
Dorothy — sorry. The sheer extent of the double standard had me bamboozled.
Whether it was a good analogy or a bad analogy, it’s an analogy not a metaphor, folks. Just because someone somewhere has produced actual exhaust pipe porn doesn’t make the two in any manner equivalent. At least I sure hope not.
And I’m not saying “just deal with it” so much as “sorry too many assholes make you deal with it.” I’m just one man, you are all one man or woman, and we all have to work to make the world a better place. It’s tiring, thankless work a lot of the time. But is it worth it? I sure hope so, since I try.
And when I said “partner” I meant “partner”, and not necessarily “husband”. I still think hitting on married or dating people is vile behavior, whether or not the patriarchy is involved.
“actual exhaust pipe porn”
Linky?
Babs, Jon clearly included women who say “I’m not interested, so bug off,” not just those who apparently have partners. Maybe we all just need to agree on a definition of “hit on.” I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable that when I’m in a public place where socializing normally occurs, people who find me attractive might approach me and attempt to start a conversation. Is that being hit on? Only when I’ve said no and it persists does it become harassment.
And I thought Jon’s analogy to having a pickup truck was funny: he wasn’t comparing the two things, he was comparing other people’s sense of entitlement to them. Guess it was too deep.
Ugly in pink,
Just remember, you did ask:
http://www.mightyjustice.net/jubei/stuff/dragonsfuckingcars/?N=D
And no, I don’t really understand it either.
#Dorothy — sorry. The sheer extent of the double standard had me bamboozled.
Paul, pointing out the double standard actually helped: violent reaction to not having your sense of entitlement to a neighbors truck is blatantly and undeniably wrong. “Call the men in white coats” wrong, even. I can’t see anyone making the argument in favor of that.
If you agree with any part of the analogy, it’s impossible to persist in thinking sexually-motivated violence against women is justified. In a sense, it points out exactly how wrong that is.
It’s odd, there’s another, different column in the Guardian today, saying almost exactly the same thing.
I get extremely frustrated with fashmags and lads mags and celebrity mags and all the mags which do nothing but obsess over women and how they should look. Whenever friends buy these magazine, I say: “You know by buying that you’re really just chipping another flake off of the pillars of civilization.” and they chide me for being a cheerless party-pooper.
A woman’s reproductive system is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.
A woman’s reproductive system is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.
So a urogenital tract is like a pipe organ? To play it well, I need my hands, feet, and a whole lot of air?
As long as I get to dress like the organist from Monty Python, it’s all good.
I’m a guy, and admittedly, I enjoy these “lad mags.” But I think pinning the blame on anybody’s hard, if not downright impossible, since there are so many factors to consider. Sex and sexuality isn’t just a base primal instinct for men, for instance: some people actually resort to pornography out of loneliness, or lack of intimacy with a loved one. But then, these guys are also to blame for their lack of fortitude in the matter. You could also blame the business execs that recognize the profitability of the smut market. I mean, to say that you have to find somebody to blame is a really really big job that might not have any solid possible end.