Miley and the gaze

Hello! It's been years since I've posted here! What a pavlova!

Ok so what made me want to write a blog entry? Well I wanted to explore an issue with a modicum of depth and slightly less flippancy than an ironic pancake toss, so Twitter was out, and I always regret writing anything on facebook ever, and I never did make that website I keep threatening... so here we are. Probably appropriate since I used to drivel on about social issues and such on here back in the day anyhoo.

GET TO THE POINT

Ok so Miley Cyrus did a gig last night in which she was almost naked once again. I don't really know any details, I just saw it on ye olde sidebar of shame. Being a Mail article, it's purpose can only have been to titilate, harangue or - click-bait heaven - both. I think this was both? I barely looked. I could go back and research now but that would cloud my testimony. Anyway I realised how numb I have become to the female form as presented by the Mail. It was not THAT long ago that I was just a boy, and a slip of sideboob would be ingrained in my memory for months in not years. Now I don't even need to go to porn to find such minor nudity - almost any magazine cover (aimed at men or women) shows me such, and it's the Mail's bread and butter. I realised that the more saturated I become by female nudity, the less exciting it seems. I thus reasoned that over-supply kills demand, and suggested on Twitter that we send Miley to the tabloids to end the desire for page 3. It wasn't a great joke. Anyway, my friend then responded to me asking if that was because I didn't respond to Miley's own "overt form of sexuality". Now I guess I don't. I've never found strippers sexy, and it seems to me Miley is doing something akin to a stripper act most of the time. It is, as my friend suggested, too overt for me. It removes any intrigue. I remember one of my friend's saying that Robyn Adele Anderson (of Post Modern Jukebox) had more sexuality in a slight turn of the head than Miley has managed in all her pornographic style posing. I have to agree. For me, sexuality is more about a relationship, or perhaps some tension, or generally involves some intrigue. A nearly naked adult in an infantilised setting, or riding an overblown metaphor, is all a bit too obvious. It bores me before I could begin to be aroused. Am I just too jaded? Almost certainly. Am I secretly gay? Experience suggests not. In any case the net result is that the pure naked female body no longer excites me ex nihilo. There remain an infinite number of contexts in which that is not the case... but on its own, its not enough any more. Maybe I'm just getting old? When I was 13, pretty much anything gave me a hard on. Maybe when I'm really old I'll become like a former lecturer of mine and only find stimulation in maths... maybe that's what happens when you can use your eyebrows as curtains... who knows? Sex and sexuality are everywhere but who talks honestly about sex? Almost no-one. It's all airbrushed teenagers posing in a way gay men think old men like, or something. Sorry I'm not very good at not being flippant.

But what's the consequence of this desensitisation? Well it means I'm more interested in what a girl says and thinks and does than looks like. That's not to say I don't appreciate bodies, but a fine body alone won't keep my interest, and a body as poorly looked after as my own can become perfection in the right hands. I have gotten with girls that looked stunning but we wanted different things and so the whole experience was a bit like going to Curry's for a PC you spent ages deciding on only to find out they're out of stock and there's one you can have that's kind of similar but it's not really what you wanted but then you've come all this way.... and likewise I've been with girls I barely registered at first but after a few hours conversation they were possibly the hottest person I'd ever met. When I was a boy, real live girls were intimidating (I went to an all boys school, didn't help), so the detachment of a subject-object relationship was more surmountable. Now I'm older, that kind of relationship bores me and I look for someone to enjoy my time with, naked or otherwise. Did over-exposure to naked ladies put me in this position? I don't know, I don't have a control life where I'm a mormon.

So let's refocus, and by that I mean let's actually move in a totally different direction for a moment so it's pleasantly reassuring when it's all tied back up at the end. After my wildly unclear explanation of wtf I was meant to be getting at with the first Cyrus tweet (I'm still not 100% sure. One of the joys of flippancy is not needing to know what you mean, or to mean anything. Like politics, flippancy is for scumbags XD), my friend then wrote that they "just resent the idea that the primary function of the naked female body is male titillation." Now that was the phrase that made me want to write this, cos there's so much there to dissect. But first, let's put it in more context, as after I sought clarification as to whom this titilation was the female body's primary purpose, my friend replied "Society. The male gaze. All that. Goes so far that even breast feeding is sexualised to the point of taboo." O god I have so much to say. Can I keep it vaguely organised and coherent? Well I'm relatively sober... let's try!

Ok so let's start with the first phrase of intrigue, "primary purpose" - this was the one that begged me to ask "for whom", since I think this is relevant. For example, if Miley were coming to me saying "here is my art, what do you think?" and I said "shut up, bitch, you's lungs only be good fo' pushing you's breasts out" (no idea what accent that's meant to be but it's probably a bit classist in any case - remember, posh people with proper writing are just as likely to sexually objectify you as anyone. It's just instead of just ogling norks, as star-gazers do, they tend to prefer blonde teenagers opening exam results and Liz Hurley (yes my Telegraph references are out of date. What of it?)) then instead of seeing the primary purpose of her body to be a vessel to express the depths of her soul (as she wanted), I'd be reducing her to an animated corpse or a real life fucktoy. That would definitely be very rude and disrespectful and is unlikely to lead either of us any closer to eudaimonia. Instead I could have listened to her music and then decided I found her repulsive (incidentally, I quite like some of her songs and am fundamentally indifferent to her as a person, but this is not relevant - I certainly remember meeting someone I initially found stunning but who quickly became one of the most unattractive people I'd met).

But let's imagine another scenario: one where Miley and her support team are extremely cynical capitalists whose primary purpose is to earn Miley as much as possible before Society forever writes her off at 30 (as an aside, does "society" (read chauvinistic media outlets) reject all women as they age or just the ones they only hired to be a young pair of tits in the first place? Lord knows, but I sure as hell miss the days when singers were singers and nobody cared about Sarah Vaughan's bikini body (well, probably a handful of people cared, but it wasn't a matter of public interest)). So let's imagine I'm her image consultant, and my job is make sure she appeals to the seediest elements of male sexual fantasy (let's put aside lesbians, anyone bi and everyone else for a moment (I'm not sure whether lesbians are supposed to have these sort of fantasies too, whether they have different kinds of fantasies altogether, or whether they are pure like virgin snow... O god what if they're all different? it's so confusing). Let's also assume Miley hired me to do this for her. So her will is that, for me, the primary function of her naked body was indeed male titilation (and subsequent richery). Would this be ok?  If it's what she wants, could it be wrong? Is she "letting down the sisterhood"? Alternatively, is she "empowering women to be sexually liberated"? Or, in a Marxist twist, is she "taking back the tools of oppression (objectification) and utilising them for her own ends (wealth)"? Does it even matter if she is doing these things? What's the point of all this anyway?

Feminism aims to:

make women equally powerful to men

make women more powerful than men

redress the inherent imbalances of gender in society to create a "different but equal" status between the sexes

remove the culturally constructed stigmas of femininity and masculinity
free women from subjugated roles
set women free to live as they please
free women to own themselves

I could go on

All of these objectives are real parts of feminism according to whom you ask, since feminism has a complicated history and is a subject broached daily by hundreds of thousands of different voices. I remember saying once that feminism needs a rebrand; that feminists need to get together and decide what feminism is, what it wants and blah blah bollocks. Yeah, all the women need to get themselves together! And black people, when are you finally going to agree on everything? Hey you, random group of people, why don't you all have the same motivations?

Has anyone seen a point? I'm sure I had one a minute ago. Boy this kind of aside must made for a frustrating read. Get on with it. Sooooo what is the primary purpose of the female body then, if not to titilate? Well, as we've said it could be a vessel for song, or perhaps to type op-eds, or to hold up a light, or to taste a new recipe, or to score a try in a rugby match, or to model a dress... hmm well it's function will be different at different times, and for different people... even in our recipe tasting example, it could be that the girl tasting is using her body to impress the head chef with her sensitive, educated taste-buds, while for the head chef, the taster's body may be ensuring her meticulously prepared dish is ready for her diners. A woman's body may serve several functions at once, even just to her: she may be simultaneously using it to walk, talk, think (the brain is part of the body, yo), model an outfit, hold books and yes even potentially attract a male (ideally a fat greasy middle aged cab driver with podgy fingers and a practiced leer - mind you lets not objectify him). I don't much like teleology (loosely, that everything is "for" something), despite being generally warm to Aristotle's ethics (man does not need to have a common function to have common needs and causes of happiness and sorrow). Why don't I like it? Well firstly because it's just dumb. What are my cufflinks for? Holding my cuffs together. But I use them like a stress toy! Can't they be for that? No. Why? Because I said so. Etc. It's pointless. And you know why I like it even less? Fascism. Eh? Yes, fascism. When you start thinking everything is for something, you think people are for something, and given that people do an infinite number of things when left to their own devices, you might find the only similarity to be procreation (for that is what sustains this crazy project), and thus you might conclude that gay people are not fulfilling their function and so are a bad example of humans, where humans are a thing for making more humans. Any teleological worldview will heavily subscribe to strict gender roles (usually backed up by wildly inaccurate references to the animal kingdom (that thing humans aren't really a part of cos we're so damn special (you know I have one friend who thinks humans are a cross breed of monkeys and aliens? I shit you not)) hint - every kind of sexuality is represented in the animal kingdom (except maybe kinds that require thumbs, like gameboy fetishes), and way more than you'd ever imagine too!) and anyone who doesn't fit snugly into their prescribed ideal, which is everyone, is seen as a mistake, as a failure, like a poorly made biscuit. Thus you end up with people saying things like disabled foetuses should always be aborted. So yeah, teleology is a pretty ugly way to look at things and best avoided, I reckon. Especially if God isn't actually gonna show up and check we ascribed everything the correct function! What a slacker.

Alrighty then, let's move on to the next part of the seemingly unstructured but I promise there's a vague structure in my head as long as I don't try to to look directly at it ramble, and discuss whom the "primary function" may have been for: "society" and "the male gaze". Hmmmmmmmm abstractions. Awkward. Maggie Thatcher told me there's no such thing as society, but she was just a pair of tits so what did she know? But no, Maggie was not wrong because she was a woman, but because she was a twat. And I don't mean her genitals, I mean she was that mixture of selfish, spiteful, stupid and generally obnoxious that one might call a twat. I wouldn't call female genitalia a twat myself, it just doesn't seem to suit (incidentally I have never heard a good word for the female genitalia - and don't say "vagina", it means sheath :P vagine is better, but only if you want to make it sound like part of a network of porcelain pipework). Lost again? Me too. Ok so society exists. My proof? I'm talking to you, and millions of other people are doing the same. Unless Maggie was referring to the Japanese hotel where everyone plays the matrix in their own little cubicles, I'm pretty sure people interact all the time. So what does society say? Well basically everything, but there are more common themes. It's a bit like twitter. So what does society say about women's bodies? Well, this, and anything anyone else has said (approximately 98% of the internet, depending on whether female kittens count as women). But when we use the phrase in such a way, surely we imply that society can speak with one voice? Well, sort of. As I said, there are themes, and there are sources of power. Aha, so whoever is in power decides the themes? More or less yes, baring in mind there are many kinds of power (economic, sexual, epistemic, physical, psychological and many more) that become relevant in different situations. Ok but can we stop beating around the bush here - we clearly mean advertising and media here. Yes, and as I already said, women's bodies are heavily featured, though how much of that is male titilation and how much is female titivation I am not sure... I'd be willing to wager that a lot more women than men look at the "sidebar of shame", for a start (given that the Mail has always been aimed specifically at women). So women's bodies are beset on two fronts! First, their ownership is claimed by men (sorry lesbians, I continue to ignore you (all you other sexualities need to sort it out so I don't have to face the possibility that the world is nuanced and hard to understand)) who wish to enjoy the physical form; secondly, their bodies are claimed by other women who want to use it as a model, a goal, an alternative, a rival, a disincentive, and incentive... I really don't understand. It seems to me that there are more women with more opinions about other women's bodies than I could ever begin to generalise over... it certainly seems like a thing to a lot of women. Like I'd say a lot more women buy some kind of paper (Mail) or magazine that details women's bodies than any men do... My experience suggests teenage boys buy FHM etc and grown men watch porn, have sex, use their imaginations, all of the above or something else... That might be a quirk of my experience though. I've never known anyone to genuinely enjoy or defend page 3... so what do I know? I have never particularly hung out with the kind of guys who care about whether they're perceived as masculine (more than anyone does... come on, everyone has some sort of relation to their gender identity, whether it's sticking to it (makes life easier, that's for sure) or rebelling), maybe that's where I'm going wrong? Maybe macho macho guys all hang around looking at naked pictures of women together going "cor!" and I just missed out... Presumably it happens somewhere? Presumably somebody wants to keep page 3? A lot of people want rid of it! Someone out there must be thinking "god these children dying is so sad, and that we armed the soldiers really makes me uneasy about my silent assent to a national defence program I don't fully understand, but what would really bring home the full emotion of this complex situation is some bare human mammary glands."

Now I'm probably coming across as gay again... well let's leave my relationship with penises to Dr Freud for now and just focus on the boobs. I love boobs! Who doesn't love boobs? They're like flesh pillows! They're amazing! The texture is incomparable (bags of sand? Shut yo mouth). Do I need them with my news? Meh. Do I want to see all random women's boobs all day long? Meh, not so much. To be honest most of the time I'm trying to do something and it would just be a bit distracting. Having a sex drive can be super annoying sometimes. Do I care if they're in page three? Not at all. My view of all such interactions (where a girl gets paid to arouse a guy, or indeed vice versa) is that as long as everybody involved is happy and doing what they want etc then I could not give less of a ****. Do I think that women appearing in page 3 undermines other women? Not at all, but I can see why you might. Personally I think women shouldn't have to be either sexy or respectable, but should be perfectly capable of being both together. Just because a woman is naked, or acting submissively, or whatever, doesn't mean I should respect her any less. And likewise a woman doesn't have to get naked and act submissively to be sexy. Yet at the moment, that seems to be the accepted way within the weltanschauung (yeah like feminism's basically finished, right? there's like nothing more to do?). The opposite is true for a man. If we're making an advert for some aspirational tat and we want our man to look powerful and our girl sexy, we'll put him in a suit and her naked. If we want to make her look powerful and him sexy, we'll probably put them both in suits... images of men naked are becoming more common, but the trope remains that for a man to look sexy or powerful he has one look, where women have two polar opposites. So how could this be redressed? 1. No naked women 2. lots more naked men 3. naked women being shown in positions of power 4. naked or partially naked women not being instantly dismissed as not serious, not capable etc (I have heard ardent feminists call Beyonce a whore for wearing scanty clothing.... really sticking up for your sisters there, huh?) Personally I'd go with 2 through 4. I reckon all our Victorian hang ups about sex are not good for a healthy society, and coping better with nudity would be good for us. I also think nudity won't go away, so there's no point trying to be Mary Whitehouse cos you can't fight the tide.

Incidentally, if a woman chooses herself that she only wants as much male attention as possible, she enjoys getting naked for men, she likes to feel objectified etc, is she free to pursue this? Is it a respectable goal? If not, why not? Is it different for a man? Why? Do we need to decide morality for entire genders this way? Can we have a society where some people pursue attention, physical pleasure etc etc, other people pursue intellectual and mental ends, and the vast majority of people land somewhere in the middle? Our politics, as a rule, says no: we must live how this group of people want to live, or how this group of people want to live. There will be no compromise and any outliers are marginalised to the point of repression. Why? Can we throw the fixed human nature baby out with the teleological bathtub please?

You know, I reckon the nudity isn't even a problem, it's just a symptom. What does the abundance of female nudity say? What about most sex workers being women? It either says: men are base, animal creatures who don't respect women, or men have way more economic power to satisfy their baser urges. As women come into more and more economic power, there is an increasing market for selling sex to women, from sex toys to male strippers to 'porn for women'. Is there anything wrong with this? No. As long as all everyone involved is happy and consenting etc then who cares? I'm personally fairly modest and would not go around taking my shirt off all the time. Some guys do, I don't really care.

So, the "male gaze", is that a thing? It obviously bothers some, but again I would ask why? Is there anything wrong with enjoying someone's body? If your sexual partner enjoys it, you're probably pleased. If your dad enjoys it, you're probably creeped out. Again though, I'm forced to ask: who owns your body? There's a sense of violation whenever a stranger stares... whatever their motives are...and it's creepy to think paparazzi might be trying to sneak a look up your skirt (or maybe just that guy over there (sorry again lesbians)), but whatever they want out of you, ultimately you have to accept that while you're out and about in the world your body is as much public domain as your twitter posts... That doesn't mean there are not actions that are rude, unseemly, gross, violating, perverse and so on, but that they're inevitable (I'm obviously talking about looking, not touching). Just wait for google glass... eww. What about the female gaze? Is that a thing? Well yes and no, it's just not threatening... aha! so here we come again to issues of power.... it's not the gaze that's the problem (though it can be, depends) but the surrounding context - that men rape women waaaay more often than women rape men (and that men generally being more physically powerful enables that, but let's put that aside for now). If women went around raping men all the time, I'd probably get a lot more uneasy when a girl I wasn't attracted to started staring me down in an aggressive manner (yes, women do do this sometimes). The fundamental problem, seems to me, at the root of all of this is that there is no accepted way of initiating sex. I reckon if every young teenager was taught some basic ways to ask someone out, initiate sex and so on, we would have less of these problems. I'm not saying there won't still be a myriad other reasons why people will do terrible things, but this situation is ridiculous. So atm we have the old model where the man is aggressive and the woman is submissive and/or plays hard to get. This is the default model and is pretty dangerous when you think about it... What else is there? The honest grown-up conversation? Who manages that? Nice fantasy but get nervous kids to do it, or anxious adults... Like I say, perhaps if we can make it seem the norm in schools, and give everyone templates to work from, it could get better, but now? It's a right mess. As a man, I have tried a range of ways of hitting on women in my life. When I was younger I used to really enjoy staring at a girl to see if she smiled back or not and all that nonsense. It works quite well til you really some girls find it threatening and then that kind of dulls the appeal... My straight up honest approach was never successful either, nor was my jokey approach. Trying too hard to be nice is, as we all know, the worst possibly route - it creates a sense of entitlement and bitterness that's extremely awkward (and girls do it to guys too. I've had girls do everything from bake me cakes to clean up someone else's vomit to try and create some implicit contract in which I owe them sex... no.). Ultimately I've had the best success from making no effort whatsoever to ever have sex, treating everybody like I don't care if they're attractive (as close as I can manage) and then letting them come to me. When I say the most success, this has worked three, maybe four times. If I wanted to bed a lot of people (people want this, I don't get it, but people like coldplay so... I don't get most people), this would be a poor strategy. This strategy mostly sucks cos few women will make the first move. The old structures, the old heirarchies and the old ways of doing things remain totally in tact.

But is that entirely bad? Many seem happy with the old model, why can't we keep that? Well cos it's fascism, as I described above. Having a model like that is a way of forcing nature through a mold that doesn't fit! It's pointless and it's nasty and while it might fuel the kind of dark feelings we need in a nation committed to the expansion of its empire and the murder of its enemies, it's not where I'd wanna live. I'd wanna live in a society where people were generally pretty happy and free and able to negotiate appropriately to create something everyone was sufficiently happy with, but I'm a hippy and that just ain't gonna happen, chuck. Now having said that, if many wish to stick by the old model then that's absolutely fine! There probably are some good reasons it endured so much for so long... but why force it? People be getting way too up in each other's businesses.

O my god this is like ten million times longer than I intended and the end does not feel in sight at alllllllll you cunt (again just using as a swear rather than a reference but incidentally I think cunt is probably the best name for female genitals. It sounds strong and firm and powerful to me, like something a woman might own. Vagina sounds very detached and medical... and foo foo etc? That makes me feel queasy... I used to know a girl who called her niece and her genitals by the same pet name.... uh....). 

So breastfeeding. This one I just don't get. Why does anyone care, seriously? Is it a tiny bit awkward talking to a woman while she's breastfeeding, because you're conscious of not wanting to look like your ogling her breasts? Meh, sometimes, but that's probably just cos it's rare and because as a man I'm assumed to be constantly looking for an accidental flash of a woman's boob.... But as I said earlier, Miley is totally desensitising me to that. Could we reach a point where there is so much nudity, of all genders and ages and body types, that nudity alone doesn't titilate at all? Certainly what is considered titilating has changed over the years... we all know ladies ankles were considered indecent until rather recently, so much so that exposed table legs were considered lewd! Hence long tablecloths... but did you realise that from the 16th century until the Victorian era, many women's fashions, including amongst the regals, displayed the bosoms? As Wiki says:

"In aristocratic and upper-class circles the display of breasts was at times regarded as a status symbol, as a sign of beauty, wealth or social position"

So o my god, I think we've found our conclusion! MORE NUDITY! More naked women until they're no longer titilating (until the naked female form is once more associated with power), more naked men until women are sufficiently titilated too (more recognition of homosexual, bisexual and all other sexual needs in blogs), more breast feeding and no-one to be an ass about it (and no-one to put up with people being assholes - honestly how many of our social problems are facilitated by those intermediaries who unwittingly bow to traditional sources of power? If someone complains to you that someone else is breastfeeding in your place of work, maybe ask them to not look, or apologise for the clientele in general, noting that lots of nosy cunts are being incredibly rude by sticking their beak in other people's business)...

But no it's not that simple. Whether we want it or not, the female body is an object in the lives of other people: leery old men who want to see it; leery old men who want to hide it; smart women that don't want to be judged by it; exhibitive women who want to make money (or just attention) from it; jealous old women who envy other women's confidence in it; designers who want to shape and decorate it; dashing young men who write long, arduous and boring blogs about it...

Bedecked in so much politics, it's a wonder it ever gets naked at all.