don't the trees look like crucified bees
Jan. 19th, 2010 09:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbLet's begin with an anecdote.
There's a set of billboards in Pearse St. station. Most of them are boring fare: film adverts; a quote (out of context) from the New Testament advertising an evangelical bible study course that's been there for at least a year; coffee; Guinness; Lucozade.
Monday there was a new one. Kellogg's Special K cereal. A woman, head not in the frame, in a red shirt and blue jeans. Her arse was the most prominent part of the frame, as it is in the image at the bottom of the page here. Caption: "Love Your Jeans." Very male-gaze, somewhat creepily sexualised.
See, you'd think I'd be in their advertising demographic. I'm female, I eat cereal, and if it had been a frame of a woman doing something active, with the caption "Love Your Body," I might have even found the ad appealing.
But no. Jeans are not something you wear because they're comfy and they keep you from being naked in inappropriate places. They're - obviously - something female-identified persons only wear so they can appeal to persons who might find them sexually attractive.
And that ad's pretty mild as fucked-up objectification goes.
Another anecdote. There're banks of televisions in the gym. Mostly they play sports, which is inoffensive in a gym, or music vids. The music vids almost uniformly contain scantily-clad skinny young women gyrating in clichéd, sexualised ways. In many cases, it may as well be pornography, and it's clearly not intended for a female audience.
The fetishisation of female sexual availability in those videos is disturbing, mainly because it's clearly not the female performer enjoying her own body for the hell of it. "Performer" is the operative word: it's a performance, one which reduces the women involved to objects in a fantasy.
It's tiresome, and tiring, and of a piece with larger cultural dynamics concerning femaleness.
I haven't mentioned - or maybe I have - that my self-image is rather seriously screwed up in somewhat complex ways. Leaving aside for the moment body-image issues, let me mention the performance of femaleness.
I can't do it.
Let me be as clear as I can. I'm female, and quite happy to have come that way. I have a body I'm usually quite happy with, since I can convince it to climb walls and run a brisk mile or two. While I might be five to eight kilos over a good fighting weight (ninety-five kilos at the last weigh-in, and I'm pretty sure my healthy fighting weight is somewhere between eighty-five and ninety, what with being five foot eight and a bit and having all this shoulder from climbing) I'm not really all that worried about it. I'll fix that when the days get longer and I have a little less stress on my hands. Okay, so I loathe my breasts, but they get in the way of doing shit. I even like boys, although that's not a component part of femaleness except in the narrow minds of bigots.
But I cannot perform femaleness. Any of the performances of femininity - wearing make-up, skirts, long hair, jewellery beyond, perhaps, a necklace on a very rare occasion: the shaving of legs, the wearing of clothes which emphasis the femaleness of one's body - I can't, physically, bring myself to do them.
In my head, the personal performance of femininity has become too closely confused with the acceptance of the "object" position. (This does not apply to other people. I am aware that this is my weird quirk.)
When I have the - rare - opportunity to choose clothing for other than purely utilitarian purposes, I have noticed that I choose clothing which is as close to gender-neutral as I can find. Or "mannish," to use my grandmother's word. (Leaving aside the fact that about the only shirts that fit across the shoulder are men's large: women can have breasts, but not shoulders, apparently.) This has on occasion led to amusing exchanges with persons of middle age in public toilets, where I am informed that this is the "ladies' room."
I've grown rather weary of needing to defend my femaleness in the absence of the socially-mandated performance thereof. Said performance makes me feel ill to even contemplate. And yet it has been made clear to me in countless niggling ways that if one is (physically insofar as the physical markers go) female and does not present as unambiguously so, one will run into countless smaller and larger difficulties. Which I have so far been largely insulated from because I've been living in the bubble-world of university undergraduate life, and here everyone is weird to some degree.
And I'm not, either personally or in any analysis of wider cultural cues, able to disentangle the performance of "femininity" from the "object" position. I'm not an object, but if I start presenting myself in ways which are objectified - and, in fact, dehumanised - in media and culture, then I must accept than some people will use this as an excuse to see me as an object, and be thus complicit in my own objectification.
(Okay, so some people are never going to see other people as anything other than objects. We call them sociopaths. And CEOs. Screw them.)
It's, you know, one of those insoluble dilemma thingies. Here in my head? I think things will always be a little screwed up.
I'd enjoy these little dilemmas a lot more if they only existed in the abstract.
There's a set of billboards in Pearse St. station. Most of them are boring fare: film adverts; a quote (out of context) from the New Testament advertising an evangelical bible study course that's been there for at least a year; coffee; Guinness; Lucozade.
Monday there was a new one. Kellogg's Special K cereal. A woman, head not in the frame, in a red shirt and blue jeans. Her arse was the most prominent part of the frame, as it is in the image at the bottom of the page here. Caption: "Love Your Jeans." Very male-gaze, somewhat creepily sexualised.
See, you'd think I'd be in their advertising demographic. I'm female, I eat cereal, and if it had been a frame of a woman doing something active, with the caption "Love Your Body," I might have even found the ad appealing.
But no. Jeans are not something you wear because they're comfy and they keep you from being naked in inappropriate places. They're - obviously - something female-identified persons only wear so they can appeal to persons who might find them sexually attractive.
And that ad's pretty mild as fucked-up objectification goes.
Another anecdote. There're banks of televisions in the gym. Mostly they play sports, which is inoffensive in a gym, or music vids. The music vids almost uniformly contain scantily-clad skinny young women gyrating in clichéd, sexualised ways. In many cases, it may as well be pornography, and it's clearly not intended for a female audience.
The fetishisation of female sexual availability in those videos is disturbing, mainly because it's clearly not the female performer enjoying her own body for the hell of it. "Performer" is the operative word: it's a performance, one which reduces the women involved to objects in a fantasy.
It's tiresome, and tiring, and of a piece with larger cultural dynamics concerning femaleness.
I haven't mentioned - or maybe I have - that my self-image is rather seriously screwed up in somewhat complex ways. Leaving aside for the moment body-image issues, let me mention the performance of femaleness.
I can't do it.
Let me be as clear as I can. I'm female, and quite happy to have come that way. I have a body I'm usually quite happy with, since I can convince it to climb walls and run a brisk mile or two. While I might be five to eight kilos over a good fighting weight (ninety-five kilos at the last weigh-in, and I'm pretty sure my healthy fighting weight is somewhere between eighty-five and ninety, what with being five foot eight and a bit and having all this shoulder from climbing) I'm not really all that worried about it. I'll fix that when the days get longer and I have a little less stress on my hands. Okay, so I loathe my breasts, but they get in the way of doing shit. I even like boys, although that's not a component part of femaleness except in the narrow minds of bigots.
But I cannot perform femaleness. Any of the performances of femininity - wearing make-up, skirts, long hair, jewellery beyond, perhaps, a necklace on a very rare occasion: the shaving of legs, the wearing of clothes which emphasis the femaleness of one's body - I can't, physically, bring myself to do them.
In my head, the personal performance of femininity has become too closely confused with the acceptance of the "object" position. (This does not apply to other people. I am aware that this is my weird quirk.)
When I have the - rare - opportunity to choose clothing for other than purely utilitarian purposes, I have noticed that I choose clothing which is as close to gender-neutral as I can find. Or "mannish," to use my grandmother's word. (Leaving aside the fact that about the only shirts that fit across the shoulder are men's large: women can have breasts, but not shoulders, apparently.) This has on occasion led to amusing exchanges with persons of middle age in public toilets, where I am informed that this is the "ladies' room."
I've grown rather weary of needing to defend my femaleness in the absence of the socially-mandated performance thereof. Said performance makes me feel ill to even contemplate. And yet it has been made clear to me in countless niggling ways that if one is (physically insofar as the physical markers go) female and does not present as unambiguously so, one will run into countless smaller and larger difficulties. Which I have so far been largely insulated from because I've been living in the bubble-world of university undergraduate life, and here everyone is weird to some degree.
And I'm not, either personally or in any analysis of wider cultural cues, able to disentangle the performance of "femininity" from the "object" position. I'm not an object, but if I start presenting myself in ways which are objectified - and, in fact, dehumanised - in media and culture, then I must accept than some people will use this as an excuse to see me as an object, and be thus complicit in my own objectification.
(Okay, so some people are never going to see other people as anything other than objects. We call them sociopaths. And CEOs. Screw them.)
It's, you know, one of those insoluble dilemma thingies. Here in my head? I think things will always be a little screwed up.
I'd enjoy these little dilemmas a lot more if they only existed in the abstract.
