"American suburban fantasies of manliness are used by real killers"

I have no time really to write a blog post, but I thought some of you might want to read this article: "Jesus, meth, and masculinity." Andrew Brown of the Guardian explains how John Eldredge's Wild at Heart, an American evangelical handbook to normative Christian masculinity, has become the official handbook of La Familia Michoacana, an especially brutal Mexican drug gang known for decapitation. It makes sense; the logical end of normative masculinity is unfathomable violence. But of course Eldredge is horrified by this turn of events. I don't have time right now to talk a lot of about how masculinity and Christianity make terrible bedfellows, but I don't have to: I've done it before ("Feminine Christianity"), and a bunch of people have done it better than I have ("Mark Driscoll makes pacifists fighting mad"). And of course it's nothing new that the somewhat silly daydreams of privileged people are horrific when acted out: I love pirates, for instance, except when they're real and contemporary.

Wild at Heart does happen to be on my bookshelf, though I haven't read past perhaps the fifth page or so. It is the only book I've actually flung across the room, and I made a point of leaving it where it landed for a few days before putting it away. I do not want to own it anymore. I want to be rid of the thing. But I do not know how to get rid of it. Donating it to a used bookstore seems like a bad idea because then someone might read it, and this seems like a worst-case scenario to me. Destroying the book seems like the best alternative, but the idea of book-burning gives me serious willies. Perhaps I should try to make some sort of craft out of it, but I'm not really sure what I'd make. (I'd like to make something like this, but I haven't the skillz.)

"Her Naked Glory": Objectification and Female Nudity in Television and Film

I've been reading* a bit of commentary about "Blurred Lines" and Game of Thrones, particularly regarding female nudity and objectification. In the comment sections more than the articles themselves I've noticed a few people (mainly women, incidentally) asking if female nudity couldn't be empowering (or be read as empowering) in certain cases. While the individual comments I saw were not really well worked out with regard to "Blurred Lines," which we probably cannot read as empowering if we're being honest about the video, I still think that this is a question worth asking. I don't really have an answer, but I do want to break this broader question into a few more specific ones.

1. Are representations of female nudity always erotic?
I ask this because male nudity isn't always erotic. In the first season of Game of Thrones (the only season I've seen), there is a lot of female nudity but there is also some male nudity. In the first instance of male nudity that I recall, there is really no sense that that nudity is erotic. It's humiliating and objectifying, yes, but not erotic. (A man is forced to march naked and tied to a horse as a punishment for attempting to murder another character.) So my suspicion is that, if male nudity is not always erotic, then female nudity wouldn't be, either.

2. Are representations of female nudity always objectifying?
I have little to say about this, except that if the answer to this question is no and the answer to the previous question is no, we have to ask the next question.

3. Are representations of female nudity, when erotic, always objectifying?
Again, for reasons like those above, I am assuming that it isn't. The example that's usually cited here is lesbian pornography (as in real lesbian pornography, made by women about women for women, not pornography made about lesbian women by straight men for straight men), but the example that comes to mind for me might be Irene Adler in the BBC's Sherlock. She appears naked as a way of exercising power, and I think her agency is deliberately emphasized in that scene, but I'm not always sure that this sort of agency is maintained as the representation crosses the fourth wall. In other words, can a female character still be objectified for the sake of male viewers while maintaining agency within the fiction?

(Note that you can set this up as a chart, with two columns and two rows; the columns would be erotic/non-erotic and the rows would be objectifying/non-objectifying. I've covered three of the four cells now, but the fourth, non-erotic objectification, is pretty obvious, I think, in that if non-erotic nudity is possible, then non-erotic objectifying nudity must be, since objectification does not rely on eroticization to function. That statement is a pretty important piece of evidence, though.)

4. If the answer is no to questions 1 through 3, then under what conditions do representations of female nudity a) become erotic and b) become objectifying?
This is the question that really interests me, and that I am most ignorant about so far. I suspect that I know the answers to #1-#3 as far as I am asking those questions abstractly: so, representations of female nudity almost certainly aren't always inherently erotic. But maybe, in the cultural and representational settings I inhabit, the conditions making nudity both erotic and objectifying are always present; maybe, under patriarchy, where the assumed viewpoint of any text is both male and heterosexual, and where male heterosexuality assumes subject status at the expense of female subjectivity, representations of female nudity always become erotic and objectifying, regardless of the text's own features. I'm not saying that any of this is true, just that I could believe that it is true without much convincing. But I would need some convincing.

The point where I resist this story that I've posited is where, under patriarchy, male heterosexuality's assumption of subject status always entails objectifying women. I think it's easy to do, and that we (as in "heterosexual men" and not "you and I") are encouraged (by whom?) to assert subjectity at the expense of female subjectivity, but I don't think it's inevitable. That's one place where I'd need convincing. And I'd also need convincing that the assumed reader/viewer is always male and heterosexual. (In other words, just because patriarchy is big and strong doesn't mean it's omnipotent and omnipresent.)

In other words, we are confronted with the problem--the same problem, really, that all textual or cultural interpretation confronts in some way or another--of where meaning resides: intention? reception? context? form? Does a film objectify women, or does the director objectify them, or do the veiwers? Do well-intentioned viewers, watching a well-intentioned and well-executed film, nonetheless objectify nude women when watching in a patriarchal context? Can the act of watching, in anyway and by anyone, recover agency for women represented erotically when nude? Or is it some formal (or intertextual) feature of the film itself that objectifies or does not objectify nude women, and that feature trumps anything you or I might bring to the text? The answers to these questions certainly aren't obvious in the general case of textual interpretation or the specific case of representations of female nudity.

We can ask a version of question #4 of women even when clothed, obviously: Under what conditions do representations of women a) become erotic and b) become objectifying? However, because we criticize films for gratuitous nudity and not for a gratuitous presence of women (the problem is the exact opposite), I think there is something special about nudity that lends it to objectification. (Notice, too, that when people criticize a film for gratuitous nudity, they almost always mean female nudity, not nudity in general.) And gratuitous female nudity does seem for most people to mean "erotic objectification of women" in and of itself, which makes me think that these questions are particularly apt, since if female nudity is not always objectifying, then we ("you and I" this time, not "heterosexual men") should probably be criticizing films a bit more pointedly and accurately than just saying "gratuitous nudity" without explaining how it is objectifying in this case.

(I'm assuming feminist reasons and not prudish ones for criticizing a film for gratuitous nudity. While rather prudish myself, I don't consider prudishness grounds for criticizing a film; it might mean you don't like the film, but it has no bearing on the film's quality.)

5. Are representations of female nudity ever empowering for women, and under what conditions?
Which is the question I started out with. It isn't a question I feel I can answer, though, this time not because of ignorance (as in #4), but because I'm a dude. I feel that this particular question is probably one that men can't answer.
______________
(The title quote comes from Paradise Lost and refers to a pre-lapsarian Eve. There's some obvious baggage with that quotation--for example, Milton's spectacular sexism--which is why I chose it. Because, you know, so-called empowering nudity might come with misogynist baggage.)
*OK, skimming.

"That was never a comedy for me."

I have very little introduction for this video. Dustin Hoffman talks about his role in Tootsie and how it changed his way of seeing women.

"Dustin Hoffman Breaks Down Crying Explaining Something That Every Woman Sadly Already Experienced"

They Don't Hate Men; They Hate You

From Lindy West's Jezebel article "If I Admit That ‘Hating Men’ Is a Thing, Will You Stop Turning It Into a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?":

In fact, the most powerful proponent of misandry in modern internet discourse is you — specifically, your dogged insistence that misandry is a genuine, systemic, oppressive force on par with misogyny. This is specious, it hurts women, and it is hurting you. Most feminists don't hate men, as a group (we hate the system that disproportionately favors men at the expense of women), but — congratulations! — we are starting to hate you. You, the person. Your obsession with misandry has turned misandry into a self-fulfilling prophecy. (I mean, sort of. Hating individual men is not the same as hating all men. But more on that in a minute.) Are you happy now?

West goes on to outline a number of reasons why men should stop crying misandry in the comments section. Read them here.

When the Model Doesn't Exist

or, Why Should We Find the Invisible Book of Invisibility?

Eve Tushnet just wrote a wonderful post comparing natural law theology and equality feminism (contra choice feminism), indicating that both rely on an ideal which will never directly encounter.

She describes natural law theology as an ethics based on an ideal body:

One cheap but useful definition of natural law is that it’s the belief that there is a universal human nature which is knowable by reason (and here we fight about what we mean by “reason,” but ignore that for now), and so our desires can be rightly ordered based on what would express and support this nature, even though we have never seen this nature instantiated anywhere in our lives or history, ever. You can see why this is both a tempting place to ground your ethics, and a tough sell to people who don’t agree!

After some discussion of the disagreement between choice and equality feminisms, she describes the latter as being based on an ideal (but nonexistent) society:

This is a vision of how the world should be–how men and women would be “if we had equality”–which we have never, ever actually seen. There are AFAIK literally no societies in which men and women make interchangeable choices around questions of sex, work, and family; there are societies with more than two genders but not less. It’s not a statement about how great the Peopleihaventheardof are, and how we should emulate them. It’s a statement about how men and women inherently are, according to their universal, precultural nature.

Tushnet goes on to argue that something like natural law is often used to explain that universal nature.

I generally get excited about this kind of theoretical work, making connections between seemingly unrelated lines of inquiry. This is particular caught my interest, though, because I find natural law theology incomprehensible and irresponsible, but the kind of vision given by equality feminism is one that I find very attractive. As much as I dismiss many telos-sightings as too blurry to be plausible, I am very guilty of positing ideal societies and offering them as a collective goal, despite the absence of any historical precedent. (Maybe this is why appealing to a lost Golden Age is popular; you can at least pretend to have a historical model.)

Human nature in its natural habitat!

In the end I'm not sure the comparison between natural law theology and equality feminism holds, however. I react negatively to natural law theology because it seems to make a mockery of the actual diversity of people's bodies and minds, and could very well require that people with notably atypical bodies or atypical psychologies act in ways that are not safe, possible, or sometimes even comprehensible given their bodily or mental situation. The problem here is that acting towards a counter-factual will never produce that counter-factual. No matter how much I act as if I were not near-sighted, or possessed of bad knees, or whatnot, I will never actually achieve such a state (and here I'm taking as given that there is a "right" eye strength, or a "right" way to have knees, or a "right" way to have a mind, for that matter, which I don't actually think is true). Of course there are particular things (mental illness, broken bones) which, in order to achieve a desired state, require you to act differently than you would if you were in that desired state. (So, in order for your leg to heal, you need to wear a cast and let it rest, etc.) But there are other cases in which the goal is merely surviving your current state, not achieving a desired one, because it is entirely unclear that the desired one will ever be possible (for instance, there is no way to make an autistic person non-autistic).

The reason the comparison doesn't hold is that equality feminism is talking about behaviour, not embodiment; as far as we can tell, all of its concerns are like broken legs and not like missing legs. They can all be brought toward the ideal, whether by acting as though the counter-factual were true or acting according to the current state of things. Either way, the primary focus is that the unseen-ideal will eventually be achieved, will eventually be see-able, which can not be said of natural law theology. Finding the Invisible Book of Invisibility is difficult to do, why bother if it is too invisible to read anyway?

Of course, I might be off topic slightly; Tushnet was describing the source of our ideal, not so much the desirability of either philosophy. Is equality feminism's ideal society actually based on a universal, precultural nature? I am not sure. I don't think that's the only option available. You could claim that there is a biological equality of some kind between men and women that is, therefore, empirically measurable; or you repudiate all claims that men and women are unequal (through, for instance, deconstruction) and come to the conclusion that we must act as though men and women are equal, even in absence of positive evidence of that fact. But this question is interesting to me not least because I find Platonism to be so absurd that I always find it shocking to see its face, or the illusion of its face, in my own thought.

Still, I want to draw a line between Platonism and Christian ideas of becoming Christ-like and ushering in the Kingdom of God. While the Christian ideas can be understood in Platonic terms, they needn't be; Platonism implies that the telos of a thing inheres in the thing itself, while trying to become like Christ, or trying to bring in the Kingdom, only requires that we can observe a difference between is and ought, and the movement from one to the other is possible. It does not need the mechanic of a thing's nature to operate. And I am not abashed to say that one reason I find equality feminism so attractive is that it follows the narrative of Kingdom-building.

(As a final caveat: I find choice feminism attractive as well. If I were a real activist, I would probably try to switch strategically between them in ultimate service of something like equality-feminism. But then, if I were a real activist I would be better educated in these questions, too.)