Wednesday, 19 March 2014

FEMINISM AND PORNOGRAPHY -- JD KRUGER -- GLP4
Roos Van Montford -- Miss January, Playboy

Although, various types of pornography are violent and oppress women, perpetuating patriarchal ideologies, in both blatant and subtle manners, they shouldn’t be censored because they empower women politically over the hegemony of a phallocentric, and patriarchal tradition, of stereotypical gender relations.  This uncensored discursive genre, and its economic practise, develop sexual roles which ultimately challenge the representation of femininity, through the sexual depiction of the woman as object of desire, not only for men, but also for women, and has provided a forum for the emancipation of women to control and manipulate men, and other women, through sexuality.  No longer passive in the construction of her role, because of working with male directors and producers, the female artist is now active, and free to challenge traditional female iconography, and formulate new images of female dominance, sexual, aesthetic, and political, particularly, as more women take on the actively-engaged role of camera and director, beyond simply model and actress, and determine the narrative of the discourse, and its semiotic iconography, represented through the use of costume, sexual positions, and toys.

Traditionally, the woman has been seen in a manichean role by the male gaze, the Whore-Madonna complex that is at the root iconography of the Christian male’s sexual desire -- the virgin Mary, the maternal, and holy, and the Mary Magdalene, the whore, prostitute, the lustful image that has attracted men over the ages.  By playing upon, and manipulating, this dual role in sexualising the attitude of women, we can see how the female may in fact have more power in relationship to the male, and can empower herself economically, by playing out these roles in pornographic discourse; the woman, once the sexualised object of male affection, is now the subject of discourse, whose manipulative powers trigger the spectator‘s desire, and force him, and sometimes her, into an economic relationship, where she has the power to govern discourse through the unbridled use of her sexualised body, playing roles of virgin, whore and mother, as the moment deems fit.  Ultimately, through manipulations of sexuality, the genderisation of women is no longer under the control of patriarchal ideology, but is constructed by the woman, who must create alternative sexual images that challenge the hegemony of the established patriarchal roles that women, in the past, have been forced to embody.

What is seduction and what are the images that seduce men, and women, to become enticed by pornography, and how does pornography eventually empower the feminine, in her own construction of gender roles between man and woman, woman and woman, and woman with the spectator’s gaze, in itself?  And how is the industry of pornography, a multi-billion dollar industry, able to empower women economically and politically, while enabling them to reconstruct their socially acquired images of femininity through mass media, particularly the internet?  Is it the passive female agent that attracts the spectator, both male and female, in becoming enticed by the sexual act, or is it the active, dominant role of the woman, which ultimately challenges the position of patriarchal dominance within society?  And in the end, who benefits most from the pornography itself, the actor in the film, or the consumer who indulges, or the directors and producers who distribute the spectacle, and in fact market new constructs of femininity, through scripted and improvised dramatic enactments of sexuality, in order to reconstruct our notions of the role of women in the sexual act, itself?  Finally, what kind of neo-liberalism admits this form of discourse, and allows for the pornographic, prostitution that we can witness everywhere on the world wide web?

It would appear that feminism itself is far from dead.  Rather, new vehicles and avenues for achieving sexual equality have opened up through new channels of sexual exploration and fabrication of the expression of femininity, desire and beauty, what it means to be a woman, and the gender roles that can be constructed and rearranged through multi-media discursive genres, and their ensuing power relations.  In “My Life as Decoration,” Mamie Van Doren states that,

few films of the period [the 1950’s] contain strong feminine characters because the studios -- in concert with the half-assed piety and thinly veiled hypocrisy of the censorship boys from the Johnson and Hays offices -- created images of women dreamed up by men.  There were very few women then in executive positions at the studio  There were no women as studio heads. [6]

Of course, since that decade, women have gained more power as studio executives and are now capable of forging new depictions of women, in stronger roles, in cinema and television, be it the character of “Lemon” in Thirty Rock, or Julia Robert’s character in Pretty Woman.  In Van Doren’s day,

if you were an actress called upon to portray one of those images [constructed by the male psyche of the 50‘s,] you were required to live your life in accordance with the restrictions of that image -- or else.  There was no tolerance of illegitimate children, extramarital affairs, or nude layouts in men’s magazines. [7]

Of course, by performing these roles, Van Doren did achieve a certain amount of fame and economic success, but she admires the contemporary position of women who are able to challenge the accepted notion of feminine beauty, as exhibited by mainstream photographs of famous, pregnant, cinematic icons, exhibiting the beauty of the maternal:

I did a photo layout for Playboy in 1963 that earned me the enmity of many in the Hollywood establishment. (It also earned me money.  I had a young son to support.)  Jayne Mansfield had done the same thing the year before with the identical result.  This was many years, you will remember, before nude, pregnant actresses would appear on the covers of women’s magazines.  (And more power to Demi Moore, believe me!) [7]

This type of exhibitionism was rare for the time, and stigmatised her ability to be hired for certain roles, as she explains; “the very men who would buy the magazine and gleefully jerk off to it would be damned if they would hire me for a role in a movie” [7].  However, she willingly played to the desire of the hegemonic, male public of the age, creating a new language of the Sex Symbol:

The studios packaged femininity to match what the public wanted.  What did the public want? Sex, of course.  But, after so many years of repression, we couldn’t bring ourselves to call it what it was.  We created instead a symbolic language -- a visual language written in flesh.  The metaphor we created was called the Sex Symbol [8]

This also involved the obliteration of the actress’ original identity, by taking away her name, and forging a star-system with a pseudonym:

We, the sex goddesses, became a sort of Castrati in the Movies -- a class of performers locked into our roles by our physical attributes.  Who could imagine seeing Mamie Van Doren playing a nun?  Who would want to?  No, glamour girls were born to be glamour girls.  When they could no longer be glamour girls, many found life unbearable. [10]

The woman of this age could only attempt to fulfill the male construct of feminine beauty and desire, and if she, “didn’t die trying to fulfill someone else’s idea of womanhood, [she] died when [his] idea no longer made sense in [her] life. [10]  In the ensuing decade, repression was conquered, and the media succumbed to a new kind of liberation.  Through the advent of television, “norms [were] turned upside down, bras [were] tossed away (thankfully!), and a new breed called the flower child would celebrate the body and spirit” with a hedonistic attitude [11].  Nonetheless, there is violence in the male-construction of female sexuality, be it in the repression of their intellect, or in the cosmetic surgery that they are coerced into subjecting their bodies.

Movies have always reflected the secret psyches of the audience.  Think about what a sexist idea glamour is.  Men find a woman attractive, and if she is not too smart, she is deemed glamorous.  Women may agree that she is glamorous, but that is based on her desirability to men -- a kind of acknowledgment of the competition.  Now, no one said we had to compete, but who can fight the instinctual behaviour or reproduction?  No one said that women had to have their breasts pumped full of silicone, or their lips pumped full of fat, but many a tit and lip in this town [Hollywood] has been enhanced because of the psychological pressure to compete. [11-12]

Nonetheless, within time, Hollywood has deliberately broken free from the male-dominated construction of female passivity, exemplified through the cinema of Jodi Foster, and even Thelma and Louise, as “only the strongest could break away from the hold of the male-dominated studio system” [12].  Today, mainstream cinema reflects the subtleties of woman’s rights, through stronger female protagonists, and unconventional representations of female beauty, and even same-sex relationships, exemplified by the young girls in Heavenly Creatures, or the gender-bending of the film adaptation of Virgina Woolf’s Orlando.
This male-construction of femininity is further exemplified by Kembra Pfahler, a movie star and professional dominatrix, when in, “The Turning Point” she alludes to the “artificial glamour,” as constructed by female performers, for the male spectator:
The truth is ugly, but like that old saying, it will set you free.  It is this aesthetic that I approach in my work, as a way of creating and, because my medium is public, sharing artificial glamour.  I have always felt more  like a criminal or a soldier than an artist, but this is slowly changing.  The vocabulary of images that I have developed through the band and through movies is a language that is not always spoken … [38-39]

Nonetheless, she acknowledges, that the gender construction is one of her own making, even if she is pandering to male desires, and that mainstream media is only beginning to allow the female performer to construct her own vision of sexuality, through the female-directed productions, and s/m performances:

demonstrating that I am something in between gender, elusive and fluid.   Chopsley was a character in one of my rock videos, which was banned from television because I exposed my breasts.  Assertions of female sexuality and the body usually only sneak through the mainstream if they are male-directed, as I experienced a few years ago. [39-40]

She is able to construct new visions of feminine beauty and desire, through her performance art and rock and roll performances, ultimately challenging the status-quo constructs of feminine beauty and the delicate power of the so-called second sex:
Their sense of me as a triple-x-from-another-dimension rock pervert in a scanty costume did give me the attention I demand in my outfits, but this attention was misdirected.  As a professional horror queen, I am the subject of my own in numerous visions of beauty, not an object of amusement and moronic prurience. [40]

It is apparent, that the feminist performer can create a whole new iconography of sexuality for women, attaining power through the live spectacle and sado-masochistic routines in performance art.
Although, Andrea Dworkin claims that, “lesbian porn is an expression of self-hatred,” [87] there are many lesbians who would agree that the emancipation of sexual desire between women, pornographic or otherwise, is simply another form of feminist self-liberation.  By demonstrating the sexual passion between women, the feminist can begin to appropriate her own constructions of beauty, power relations and desire.  Naomi Klein sums the argument up succinctly, while commenting on, “Not a Love Story,’ a film narrated and directed by her mother:
I also watched interviews with feminists who said that these images were acts of violence against all women, that the only response to these other women -- the strippers and porn actresses -- was outrage and resistance.  ‘To be female and conscious anywhere on the planet is to be in a constant state of rage’.  Over and over again, the feminists said there was a war going on.  A war against women.  The enemy’s tools were naked pictures. [112]

Of course, Not a Love Story attempted to distinguish between pornography and erotica [112].  In her youthful gaze, Klein demarcates that she had always been afraid of male abuses of power through sexual exploitation of women: “to my nine-year-old eyes, feminists were the gatekeepers protecting me from the world of strippers, pornos, peep shows, and naked people -- the world of sex.” [113]  This was accentuated to such a point, in her psyche, that, “sex and violence became so intertwined in these screenings that I started fearing men in my own family and our closest friends”[114].  Finally, Klein astutely relates the pornographic images to the Montreal massacre of Marc Lepine:
About a month after the massacre, I watched Not a Love Story again.  This time, it all made sense.  I saw the stock-in-trade porn images -- the back arched, the head thrown back, the throat exposed -- for what they really were: the girl in the cafeteria at the University of Montreal, shot dead for being a woman who wanted something better. [115]

Despite Klein‘s sobering feminist analysis to depictions of the female in male-engendered pornography, she seems to temper her views towards the end of the text, while discoursing on the power relations exhibited by men and women during sexual conduct:
an essay I wrote outlining my new theories on heterosexual love (it was a women’s studies course […] I argued that to make up for society’s sexism, the man should relinquish all of his power to the woman.  The only way this unfortunate hypothetical pair could have non-violent sex was if the guy was never on top.  The missionary position, after all, was the physical embodiment of patriarchy. [116-117]


Finally, she concurs, that perhaps pornography is acceptable, and even in small doses, healthy, for women:

But part of me is also attracted to these women who brag they … aren’t afraid of the dark, can handle any sexist pig who pats their ass, don’t need any special privileges to get jobs, and even enjoy a little porn in their spare time.  [118]

Klein’s critique of pornography, her evident distaste for it, and yet a gradual acceptance of its place in contemporary culture, reveals that, even in the mainstream, pornography is an acceptable form of feminist discourse.

No longer defined as having a lack of power, the woman, who has traditionally envied the phallus and its demarcation of power in a phallocentric universe, in fact, usurps the dominant position of man, by exploiting her sexuality, triggering the desire in the spectator’s ego, through seduction, and selling her sexuality, in order to market images that would ultimately challenge the patriarchal dominance that the man has controlled throughout the ages.  Although, historically, patriarchal ideology has objectified feminine sexuality, in contemporary times, it is the woman, herself, who has radically altered the power relationship between men and women, and used her sexuality, not only to dominate multi-media discourse, particularly on the internet, but to empower herself, politically, economically, and with an international and trans-cultural scope, carving new visions of aesthetic beauty, the issue of attraction and desire.

Bibliography
Mamie van Doren.  “My Life as a Decoration.”  Click: Becoming Feminists.  Ed.Lynn Toronto: Crosbie  Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1997.
Kembra Pfahler.  “The Turning Point.”  Click: Becoming Feminists.  Ed.Lynn Toronto: Crosbie  Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1997.
Naomi Klein.  “Coming Unclicked.”  Click: Becoming Feminists.  Ed.Lynn Toronto: Crosbie  Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1997.


No comments:

Post a Comment