The porn look

It’s been some time since I did an explicitly feminist post. Here goes again.

Not long ago, in a throwaway remark, I denounced the apparent return of false eyelashes in popular fashion. No doubt, my age and generation have some part to play in this critique, but I don’t think it can be reduced to that as a way of dismissing it. I won’t describe my own erotic past or triggers, because it would be just another instance of an all too common and disagreeable internet exhibitionism, except to summarize my outlook as kind of “mother nature’s son,” that is, plain and simple. The more “natural,” the better. Those ingrained personal biases aside, my intent today is more “theoretical.” I’m posting a few observations and reactions to what I can only call the new hegemony (at least in the centers of “cultural production”) of a pornographic fashion aesthetic.

Out of the gate, I’ll just remind perhaps younger readers of a time in the receding past when feminism—when it still took actual women as its subject—exerted a good deal of effort on critiques of the beauty-trap, from its double-standards, to its inhering objectification, to its tendency toward female immobilization, to beauty fashion’s role in capital accumulation. Somewhere in the even more distant past, the only women who were inclined or cajoled or forced to engage hyper-feminine, self-objectifying, immobilizing fashion were a thin ruling class stratum. The rest were doing farm work and the like, and marriages were arranged through families or matchmakers (meaning no competition in some sexual “marketplace”). So, while there were specifically female forms of dress, manner, speech, and labor, women were not preoccupied with exploiting themselves through sexual self-objectification.

When I was entering my post-pubescent years, feminist trends were gaining traction, and one of the ways in which women generally profited, for example, was in the greater acceptance of women wearing what were formerly “men’s clothes,” that is to say—among my cohort—jeans and practical shirts and shoes. Girls and women could walk comfortably and anatomically, run, get dirty, and engage in more forms of work and play. Some dispensed with their bras, all dispensed with girdles, a few threw out their makeup and razors. For my own part, I thought, and continue to believe, that these were Good Things. By 1987, when I was a Military Science instructor at West Point, I made the acquaintance of Lissa Young, at that time the first female Deputy Cadet Commander. Things were changing, but we couldn’t then anticipate how sly would be the reaction to some second-wave demands, most of which comported with nothing more or less than common decency and mutual respect.

That reaction came in several forms, some entirely predictable, one that aforementioned insidious reaction, and one that was ultra-marginally prescient. This is not some wholesale endorsement of second-wave feminism, which was embedded in a wider reform movement within both liberalism and Marxism as the step-siblings of the twentieth century. Given the historical and cultural context—apart from those critiques—much of it was good. The sly reaction emerged from liberal feminism, which capital transformed into a product called, among other things, post-feminism or “power feminism.” It had fuck-all to do with either power or feminism.

Michelle Lazar described it perfectly:

Popular postfeminism . . . is a media-friendly, consumer-oriented discourse, which . . . recuperate[s] socially progressive notions of women’s empowerment, agency, and self-determination, and in so doing deflect[s] long-standing . . . feminist criticisms of the advertising industry for its oppression of women in setting up narrow and impossible standards of beauty and social acceptability, and for its perpetuation of exploitative, stereotypical images of women. Postfeminist [cultural production] suggests that patriarchal ideologies of gender in terms of women’s powerlessness and oppression are outdated. Instead, this is fast becoming a women’s world, in which relations of power are shifting in favour of women. Such representations, however, far from supporting the feminist cause, are quite detrimental to it. Feminists’ concern for women’s empowerment is appropriated and recontextualized by [media], evacuating it of its political content and instead infusing meanings quite antithetical to feminism . . . Structurally, the gender order remains dualistic and hierarchical, but the players have been switched. There appears to be at work a perverse sense of equality — if women traditionally have been the subordinated group, and in the media sexually objectified, it is a sign of social progress to turn the tables on men along similar lines. This is hardly the kind of gender order restructuring envisaged by feminists of any persuasion. (Lazar, “Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis,” 154)

The “power” is not economic power or political agency, but the power to (a) act like men or (b) turn men’s heads with your sexual mojo, and espeically to (c) buy things. What some of those (ooo ick) second-wavers had pointed out was that within the exploitative earlier sexual binary, some of those traits which described “masculinity”—sexual objectification of others, readiness for violence, a general dominator vibe—were not desirable in anyone. Something similar to what first-wave feminists had said in the context of a “care feminism,” which understood quite clearly that many of those virtues associated with “womanhood,” like empathetic nurturing, gentleness, generosity, readiness to understand, and so forth, might improve men. (This was Nietzsche’s manly objection to Christianity, btw.)

This is not to let the whole second-wave off the hook, since it is an umbrella category under which there were multiple and often antagonistic tendencies. As I said, liberal feminism pasted women’s standpoints onto liberal philosophy with its market individualism, and other more radical tendencies promoted notions of separatism and even the acceptance of violence. What was lost in the transition to the next “waves,” were, first, the recognition that sexual objectification is altogether a bad thing and a bad deal for women, and finally the erasure (by gender ideology) of women themselves as objectively identifiable socio-political subjects.

I’ve gone on elsewhere, at tedious length I’m sure, about the metaphysical confusion of these “waves,” and how one led to another and another (the Now always seems inevitable in the rear view mirror of history). The subject of this interlocution, though, is the porn aesthetic.

When I did a search on this term, it turns out that there’s a book about it which I’ve not read, so I know not whether my brief engagement here will correspond with anything in said book, or whether the insights in that book might be so sharp that they make my own remarks come off like a monkey who found a computer. The book is The Space of Sex: The Porn Aesthetic in Film and Television, by Shelton Waldrep, and it is—like my own book—called Tough Gynes—Violent Women in Film as Honorary Men—about film representations. I suspect we may be covering some of the same ground.

[Be warned, if you put in the search term “porn aesthetic,” you get a near-infinite menu of porn sites with the tag “aesthetic porn,” whatever that is. Waldrep’s book shows up about ten page scrolls down.]

The he and the she of it, so to speak, is that we’ve arrived at a point now where internet pornography (see note above on internet searches) has exploded alongside something called sex positivism (or sex-positive feminism, implying that anyone who critiques it is [ooo ick] “sex-negative”). Like “power feminism,” out of which much of this bullshit emerged, this whole (largely manufactured) cultural gestalt has flipped the script. Being sexually objectified is great now, and what’s even greater is participating in this objectification through intense self-exploitation. This has been and continues to be a shit deal for women overall, even if a few privileged women have embraced it as a form of recreation and entertainment over which they paint layers of pretentious, self-justifying, pseudo-sociological rationalization.

See my review here of Christine Emba’s book, Rethinking Sex, in which she documents her interviews with many young women who in trying to meet the expectations of the disenchanted, transactional sex milieu have found it about as “empowering” as a prison cell. In one anecdote, a young professional woman wonders if it’s okay to not want her partner to choke her during sex! Where a lot of this shit comes from, of course, is internet porn—now available to any five-year-old with access to a computer. We are in a period now when—at least in the industrial metropoles—most young people are getting their “sex education” from pornography. The lion’s share of this pornography is misogynistic as hell, with much of it also trading in creepy racial tropes, and plenty of it bordering on outright violence. Young men are being trained from childhood to view pornographic sex as . . . well, sex. So are many young women, who also have to contend with the expectations of men during sexual encounters, expectations that these men have imbibed from the porn industry.

Long story short, the aesthetic of porn crept into fashion now as hip and edgy, and it’s now—with everyone selling themslves to the attention economy—making the transition to normal and expected.

I have to backtrack a bit now to discuss something that had a prominent place in my aforementioned book, Tough Gynes: the male gaze (which is mentioned in the blurb on Waldron’s book). In my book—which is likely far less academically erudite—I made note of the fact that bad-ass women in film, who can “fight and fuck like men,” are never represented, like many men, as little concerned with beauty enhancement. That is, you can have guys who are not “hot” as rough and ready protagonists or supporting characters, but the women have to appear such that an obnoxious sixteen-year-old boy would tell his nitwit buddies, “I’d do her.” She has to be . . . hot. That’s how you end up with highly coiffed women detectives in film, wearing high heels and chasing down bad guys twice their weight then whuppin’ ass. Of course, films have all sorts of ridiculous tropes; but the point is, women in “traditional” men’s roles are in those roles in all ways except appearance. The appearance has to be (even if self-consciously casually) sexually objectifiable.

Which brings me to appearance and fashion, about which I admit I am cantankerous. I have actively hated “fashion” as long as I can remember, so this will in no way be an unbiased take. I hated it when bouffants were all the rage, I hated it when gel spikes were “in,” and I hate it now with hairstyles that look like they were invented by landscapers on peyote. It always feels like I’m in the presence of one of those sharpers I met as a naive Army recruit, who’d coax you into a gambling scam and walk off with your money. Not to say, I hate people who follow said fashions. I can’t say I actually hate anyone nowadays. (I myself—as a 72-year-old man—cleave to the “blend-in quietly” aesthetic, which I admit is pretty easy as an old man, because no one expects much from you.)

Fashion, nonetheless, is a thing, real and potent. So, having to accept that in view of my own prejudices is no big deal. My preceding one-paragraph vent above is sufficiently therapeutic. But the porn aesthetic, it seems to me, has real and urgent political import.

To clarify, the porn aesthetic is the tendency in women’s fashion to look like porn stars. Heavy, stylized makeup and coif, accompanied by hyper-femme, revealing, and fetishistic dress taken from the tropes of a media-trained male-gaze. In this ad, we have a ten-year-old model displayed with the porn aesthetic. There is something terminally fucked-up about this, and that’s why I say this is political.

Here is the same aesthetic with what could be a sixteen-year-old.

Here is an actual “porn star” sporting the pedophile’s dream look.

So what is the male gaze?

The “male gaze” was a concept first articulated by British film theorist Laura Mulvey in 1975. Mulvey noted at the time (and it is still largely true) that writers, producers, and directors of film are overwhelmingly male. They are possessed of the sensibilities of males constructed by male-dominant cultures, including culturally hegemonic notions about women, and they vacillate between sexually objectifying women, making atypical women monstrous and terrifying, or portaying women who are invisible/disposable. Men enjoy “looking” at women, voyeuristically, as a form of possession and power. The Freudian term for this is scopophilia. Mulvey showed how often male filmmakers transferred their own particularly possessive and “male” gaze into the point of view of the camera. What makes this problematic, as some female writers, producers, and directors come on board, is that women—internalizing the point of view of power—are often “gazing” at themselves and others through the psychological point of view of men, a kind of “double consciousness” as described by Fanon.

Delving more deeply into the topic of the gaze, I cannot too strongly recommend Ivan Illich’s 1998 long form essay, “The Scopic Past and the Ethics of the Gaze.” He calls the gaze “opsis” to differentiate it from optics, or the “scientific” study of seeing, “those optical disciplines that monopolize the explanation of vision since the seventeenth century” (Illich). Opsis is phenomenological with an ethical dimension. There can be a moral or an immoral gaze. In the premodern past, seeing was not a passive operation of light entering the eye to be neurologically cast onto a brain-screen. Seeing was active, like the hand reaching out and grasping a thing. Some things we are entitled to grasp, and some we are not. Most of us have experienced this when we accidentally walk into a room and someone is naked: we reflexively avert our eyes and apologize.

The peeping Tom is appropriating something that is not his.

Pornography has normalized sexual voyeurism (in some respects, modernity has normalized voyeurism). It’s in light of the ethical dimension of the gaze that there is an evil—the premeditation of harm—in the “genre” of “revenge porn, wherein men record sexual encounters with their female partners, then seek revenge later by publishing these encounters for anyone to see. (People who do this should be strung up by their balls imho.)

The evil of the normalization, nay, celebration of the porn aesthetic as fashionable and ethically trivial is that its recruits women (and girls) as agents of their own objectification. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, grrrrl power. Women are not “empowered” by this, and anyone who says so is an fool or a scoundrel.

This isn’t even the post-Hegelian breakdown of sexual masochism described in Jessica Benjamin’s Bonds of Love, when she unpacked The Story of O (a very acute analysis in my view). That was a discussion of pathological receptivity, not a new cultural norm which includes—apparently—the sexualization of children. What we are facing now is the pornografication of culture, even “youth” culture, in which women and girls are going to (surprise) get the shitty end of the stick. It is not in women’s interest, ever, to be sexually objectified . . . and that assessment includes women who, for whatever reasons, are not routinely objectified. The foundational episteme here is hatred and debasement of women generally. Some women will be sex objects, the rest will become other kinds of objects or just the objects of contempt. We are training our young women to humiliate themselves and to believe that this is female self-actualization.

I can already anticipate the (by now supremely tedious) responses to my remarks. I no longer have the energy or the inclination to respond. Been there, done that, got the fucking t-shirt.

This . . .

. . .is not okay.