In last week's class we watched another interesting documentary on media and body image. Most of the documentaries in class I really enjoyed, but little of the content had been all that new to me. When I saw we were going to watch yet another documentary on body image, I was anticipating just more of the same. We had already watched one on sexual stereotypes, women in advertisements, and two on masculinity (which and one on Disney that discussed every angle on gender and media representation I expected to see in the class, but America the Beautiful was different. It was less an education film than a documentary, a narrative with characters you loved to watch or loved to hate.
Darryl Roberts' documentary was a refreshing look that was more investigative than agenda driven. Certainly there was some craft with how the story would be told, but overall the film felt more like an exposure to a culture with fascist beauty standards perpetuated by top media firms and the fashion industries. I was surprised to learn that one reason designers show off very thin models is in order to save costs on fabrics. On the one hand, this made sense--there was a logic to it, but on the other, the logic was perverse! The only costs being taken into account are monetary, with all social and emotional costs for millions of little girls being externalized and marginalized. (And I thought it was exclusively to sell a standard in which very few could attain and thus people would perpetually be spending money on all kinds of projects which only the wealthiest could ultimately keep up with and thus achieve the ideal and make it all the more prestigious. According to one report, to upkeep a diva appearance, the average woman would spend approximately $450,000 in her lifetime on beauty products and procedures!)
Also interesting, a couple men of possibly the lowest common denominator in society were interviewed including one guy who could care less about women as anything more than fuck object and servant and another who would have won at evolutionary psychology bingo. According to this one doctor(?), humans had evolved to prefer lighter skin so that they could spot diseases further away--something that makes no sense since it would be to assume genetic determinacy and would be irrelevant to explaining how skin color is a cline that varies by latitude, not so much genes. It was almost unbearable to watch how offensive he was to one woman of color who sought his help, making her skin five shades lighter to make her more "objectively" beautiful, then getting ubber upset and defensive when she left, calling her a "loser" just like the Amerindians who continue to live on reservations. She also, according to him, had no more excuses for her status since she had never been a slave like her ancestors. I really wanted Roberts to sock him in the face, even though I'm usually opposed to violence. This was one man who was never going to "get it."
Most interesting of all was the whole narrative that tracked Gerren Taylor's rise and fall as a supermodel, from "the giraffe" to the "obese." As one interviewee noted, Gerren had not so much self-esteem from modeling so much as an inflated ego, an ego-enhancement. From my own personal experience and observation, ego is often the utmost detriment to self-esteem. And so we saw how true this was, as Gerren crashed and burned because she was neither thin nor white enough by European standards. It was audacious to hear how many people had called her obese. I'm assuming this was done out of spite and/or jealousy. The extend to which Garret and the other girls in the video really believed they were "ugly" was extremely disturbing. How odd that someone could have so much certainty about something so subjective!
On pornography
Somethings I would have liked to see more of in this class are positive and subversive and alternative media. Too often we have to hear about all that is wrong with the media that it makes us progressive folk sound like a bunch of whiners--I'm guilty of this in my class too, of course. I feel that showing some scandalous and creative forms of media expression would be more empowering to people in the class showing that there are still ways to resist cultural hegemony and disrupt the meanings and identities we have inherited.
Besides that, I would have also liked to see less focus on gender and more on sexuality. Yes, the two are very related, but we left untouched one of the most powerful social forces in the media over the last several decades--pornography. Pornography is quickly creeping its way into every mainstream outlet including corporate advertisements (i.e. Carl's), cable television (i.e. Nip/Tuck), and video games (i.e. Grand Theft Auto). Very little of class was devoted to discussing sexual identity and politics other than the one day on GBLT in the media--which was one of the most educational days for myself. When sex work was discussed in videos, it generally painted women as victims and objects, rather than agents. I think it would have been great to have more discussion over how sex workers are portrayed by the media for it seems very few people really take the time to listen to their voices and instead opt for speaking for them.
Sex worker politics aside, pornography has had such a radical shaping of people's sex life ever since porn became freely accessible to anyone with a web connection. I recently watched several documentaries on pornography and had a hard time swallowing some of the statistics (no pun intended). For instance, the porn industry racks in more dough than all of major league sports in the country combined. One documentary was about an experiment to see what effect pornography would have on one's perception if one were to watch it everyday for a month. Both men involved had significantly less happiness with their current partner and belief in commitment and found themselves less sexually disciplined. After a month of recovery from the exercise, their opinions rebounded back to where they were before. In another documentary, the filmmakers followed Anabelle Chong, who became famous after breaking the world record by sleeping with 251 guys in 10 hours. It was pretty sad, given that in the end word gets out when she visits her family in Singapore that she isn't so much an artists as her teacher and other expected to be but a porn actress. She leaves them shamed and returns to the US promising all that she will bring them honor again, but ends up returning to the industry--probably because of finance issues since she was never given $10,000 from her infamous gangbang even though she had risked her life.
My favorite documentary was Pornography: The Secret History of Civilization. It is a six-part series that discusses erotic art from ancient Rome through the middle ages and renaissance up into Victorian England and the sexual revolution, concluding with an analysis of video and internet porn's influence on both technology and sex life. I recall watching Gail Dines give a talk on pornography and its collusion with capitalism via Playboy, which helped sell a new lifestyle after the war as well as a new persona. I've heard both positive receptions of Kinsey and Hefner in promoting sexual liberation, but also heavy criticism over their methods and exploitation. In either case, it cannot be undone, and for better or worse, if it weren't for porn, VHSs victory over beta may not have been secured. In addition, broadband internet and cybersecurity Dines claims were the products of enormous demand for high quality and quantity porn.
The perfect vagina from heather leach on Vimeo.
As was seen in America the Beautiful, a surgery on the rise is vaginal correction, in which women are unhappy or embarrassed about their labia minora wither because they are asymmetric or enlarged compared to the pornography they or the men they are interested in are used to. Recent studies even tell us that men are influenced to mimic acts in the films they see such as choking women and ejaculating on their bodies. Dines believes that porn, at least the porn industry is a threat to healthy and private sex lives, especially now that the person next to you can be looking at it next to you on his cell phone or that any child could accidentally stumble across it, typing in the most innocent of searches such as white house. Porn is no longer less impossible to avoid than it is impossible to censor.
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