Whose Pleasure?
Girls Gone Wild is a symptom of our culture’s stunted view of female sexuality.
By Lisa Jervis
Thursday May 17, 2007
While there are a number of flaws in Garance Franke-Ruta’s proposal to curb young women’s participation in the boob-flashing-fests of Girls Gone Wild and its ilk (which, it’s only fair to mention, Garance fully admits), the response of some lefty-type guys (and at least one woman)—and the chatter of most of their commenters—pretty much completely miss the point.
These guys jump to protest the potential infantilization of hot chicks, defend young women’s rights to earn a living from porn, and point out the absurdity of Garance’s Law, which would render a gal unfit to show her titties when she is perfectly free to join the military, vote, and have an abortion. Meanwhile, no one is talking about the culture that has produced hordes of young women eager to lift their shirts in response to drunken requests from frat boys and their older, camera-toting brethren. And that makes it almost irrelevant that these lefty dudes are right about the absurdity and the infantilization and the often-quite-good wage of sex work. It’s also well worth noting that so many discussions conflated drunken flashing with actual paid sex work; it took quite a bit of commenting before people pointed out that the girls who go wild get nothing in return except branded swag while the company that owns their images makes millions.
Though Garance’s excellent follow-up corrects many of her critics’ misapprehensions and explains why current laws are ineffective against Joe Francis’s criminal and sleazy behavior, there’s still a crucial piece missing from the discussion, one that even feminist bloggers have only hinted at. Somewhere in all this blogospheric sound and fury, we’ve got to be able to find a way to examine and counteract what girls (and boys too) are taught about female pleasure and desire.
I appreciate Garance’s thought experiment (which, in my opinion, is really the best way to view her proposal) because it at least attempts to examine women’s interests beyond an overly simplistic it’s-my-body-and-I’ll-flash-if-I-want-to watered-down “choice” feminism that disingenuously posits a world in which power is no longer gendered and individual decisions have no ramifications beyond the individual. But her experiment fails because it looks at only the half of our culture that punishes women for sexualized exuberance. What about the half that rewards women—with attention, praise of their hotness, and even (slightly) more sophisticated things like assumptions about how cool and free and comfortable they must be with their bodies and sexualities—for showing their goods?
The Girls Gone Wild phenomenon has been produced by a culture that, for all the progress we’ve made around de-stigmatizing sexual expression, especially for women, still conceptualizes female sexuality as being primarily about display that brings pleasure to (presumably male) observers. But what about women experiencing their own pleasure in ways that render an audience irrelevant? Girls and women are steeped in cultural messages saying it’s more important to look like someone else’s version of sexy than to experience sexual pleasure. They’re taught that you might want to make out with another girl because men think it’s hot, not because kissing girls might feel good. Girls wear the latest short skits and lacy tops to schools where their sex ed is abstinence-only, and a mini-gaggle of pop stars got famous for saving themselves for marriage while simultaneously cultivating junior-sexpot personae. Movies about girls exploring their sexuality get harsh treatment from the MPAA while their boy-focused counterparts become hits with far raunchier content and, not coincidentally, lots of scenes where guys watch their female classmates undress. Just one example of many is “Coming Soon,” about a trio of high school girls’ quest for an orgasm; the film’s masturbation scene had to be significantly trimmed to earn an R rating. “American Pie,” on the other hand, was an R-rated hit revolving around male masturbation—and the only time a girl gets close to touching herself, the guys are secretly watching her on a webcam.
By pointing this out, I’m not denying that it can indeed be fun and sexy to show off your body, and that the attention you get in response can also be sexy (though as all women know, it can also be incredibly creepy). But if we’re going to make any change in, to use Garance’s phrase, the supply side of late-teens porn, we need to change the cultural context of sexuality at all ages. We need to examine where the sexiness of being looked at comes from: without question, the consistent, multifaceted, exhausting—yet inexhaustible—barrage of messages that female sexuality is about making a display that gets someone else off has a lot to do with it.
The trick is to help young women navigate and respond to the barrage without patronizing, faux-feminist posturing; reinforcing outdated virgin-whore ideas about what kinds of girls lift their tops; sighing over the outlandish behavior of kids today; or discounting or denying girls’ behavior as simple false consciousness—all of which is happening way too much, both in feminist circles and elsewhere. If we can’t widen our analytic lens enough to see this, then we’re going to be stuck in Joe Francis’s world forever.
Lisa Jervis is the founding editor and publisher of Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture.
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Comments
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Good points, all.
That said, you’re missing an important distinction — it’s not just about sex and sexuality, but about attention.
I know some girls who find it sexy to show off their bodies.
I know other girls who don’t find it particularly sexy, per se, but do it anyway — because they enjoy the attention it brings them.
Count me in on any effort to change how female sexuality is viewed in our culture for the better — but at the end of the day, countless men and women will be, for lack of a better term, attention whores.
The difference is that if you’re a male attention whore, your options are far more limited, and usually involve exposing your neuroses to the world on YouTube or playing the guitar in a spandex thong in Times Square. Women, on the other hand, come with a pair of Attention Magnets built-in. The result is predictable.
— Joe - May 18, 03:18 AM - #Fantastic article.
— Liz Funk - May 18, 09:54 AM - #In regards to “attention whores,” isn’t it indicative of a problem if women today can allegedly acquire attention easiest by taking off their clothes for GGW? I think the more pressing point is, what kinds of messages have we been sending young women that makes them think that being sexually exploited is fun or empowering? And why can’t our society give young women “attention” for doing things other than being eye candy?
I regret to inform you that many, many writers, theorists, and scholars have already discussed the “culture that has produced hordes of young women eager to lift their shirts in response to drunken requests from frat boys and their older, camera-toting brethren.” This article also gives no unique view-point, and no unique evidence. If you’re going to write a feature, feature something tangible. If you’re going to write an opinion, write a new opinion. I’m at a loss for why this article was written.
— Marcus Burroughs - May 18, 02:51 PM - #Marcus: yes, you’re right, there have been numerous articles written about cultural mores that breed boob-flashing, but those articles have not tended to offer nuanced arguments that critique media and larger culture while also staking a claim for women’s desire and women’s agency. (Well, Bitch magazine has run such pieces, but that’s about all – so Bitch’s cofounder is right to carry the torch into other media).
My guess is, though, that you don’t care about all that. You call Jervis unoriginal, but your comment is about as stale as day-old toast in terms of tired flame-war insults…
— Jennifer Pozner - May 18, 05:18 PM - #Great piece. I’m just sick to death of how female sexual desire gets distorted and flattened in mainstream media and in most public conversations. You do a great job of offering highlights of the cultural minefield in which girls and women attempt to develop a sense of sexual identity. And wow, does it seem hard for some folks to grasp the concept of gendered hierarchies and power.
— Alison - May 18, 06:04 PM - #Wonderful article however misguided. The topic is unworthy of the time and attention you put into it. Sex sells. Nothing will ever change the base human nature, one that drives a market economy. Sex is one of the strongest urges of the human being, even moreso when coupled with our obsessive-compulsive tendancies, inferiority complexes, control and abandonment issues and various neuroses. Saying that these women are whores or implying that the men are pathetic does nothing to address the real problem: we are all being used – by one another.
— Duron J Davis - May 19, 10:29 AM - #““In regards to “attention whores,” isn’t it indicative of a problem if women today can allegedly acquire attention easiest by taking off their clothes for GGW?”“
Not at all!
IMHO, the vast majority of people today — male and female — are relatively uninteresting.
That said, biology being what it is, a good chunk of those uninteresting women will become interesting to me if they take their shirt off.
It’s not a crime to be an uninteresting person, and you can go through life just fine as one — so it’s not like these are desperately broken people.
And yet, to actually become an interesting person, with insightful things to say, and gain my attention by that route… that’d be hard. It’d take a lot of time and effort.
Why should the average girl bother, if taking her top off gets her the attention she craves with far less effort?
It’s okay to be insubstantial.
If anything, pity the men! Uninteresting male attention whores have far fewer options at their disposal.
““I think the more pressing point is, what kinds of messages have we been sending young women that makes them think that being sexually exploited is fun or empowering?”“
If it’s a fair exchange freely agreed to, it’s not exploitation. It may be a stupid decision for one of the parties involved, but not exploitation.
If it’s not freely agreed to (i.e. while intoxicated), that’s a separate issue entirely.
““And why can’t our society give young women “attention” for doing things other than being eye candy?”“
Most people aren’t deserving of attention, male or female.
— Joe - May 20, 04:44 AM - #“If anything, pity the men! Uninteresting male attention whores have far fewer options at their disposal.”
Keep in mind the issues discussed above. Despite the title “attention whore”, it is much more telling of the culture at hand. As young women are consistently ignored in classrooms, workplaces, and other supposedly public domain in lieu of their male-bodied counterparts’ comfort, female-bodied individuals must find a way to seek the attention of others in another way.
Until we nurture the intellectual and self development of young women as much as we do young men, this will continue to be a growing problem. Whose pleasure it is when it becomes an obligation? Female-bodied people are not encouraged to speak, but once their blouse buttons are undone – it’s all spotlight. While I do believe the creator/owner of GGW must be put through the legal system, I also think we need to look at the other end of the problem.
Why not let women (this means YOUR classmates, daughters, wives, sisters, aunts, and others!) know that their input is as valuble as anyone elses’. This rule still goes for “uninteresting” people. “Uninteresting” men still have time reserved for their words.
I feel “uninteresting” means not fully self-aware. With so many life experiences and ideas to unfold, I somehow think that every person has something to say. It’s not a matter of interest. It is a matter of gender socialization and the exploitation thereafter.
— Chaaales - May 21, 09:01 AM - #That’s a much smarter take on the issue, Lisa, and pretty much what I was driving at both in the post Garance quoted from and in this follow-up post at the end.
The question has to be about what we do in society to raise kids to think that sex automatically stigmatizes women, that women are “about” this unsavory thing called sex, and each of us constantly has to suppress any reminders that we have anything to do with sex.
There’s certainly something wrong with a society that allows men to be sluts and something else, but pretty much defines women down to “just a slut” the minute we are aware she has something resembling sexuality.
(Remember, Bill Clinton was elected President after everyone knew he was a horndog. Can you imagine a woman with even a hint of that in her past being elected to the presidency?)
This is why I have been chafing over the relative silence of people objecting to abstinence-only sex-“education”, which carries a pretty severe message about women’s sexual agency (just aside from it being counter-productive). Why are people allowing this to happen?
First and foremost, we need better sex education, but we also need to think about why so many societies put so much stigma on female sexual expression. I guess that’s what Joss’ question is all about.
— Avedon - May 24, 07:16 AM - #Ooops, the preview didn’t work so I just hoped the HTML would take. Joss’ article is here:
http://whedonesque.com/comments/13271
And my follow-article is here:
— Avedon - May 24, 07:20 AM - #http://sideshow.me.uk/smay07.htm#05220043
This must have been the freedom and progress that Margaret Sanger envisioned, right? “Progress” as far as it has been concieved since the 20th centrury (perhaps starting even earlier with with Descartes) has proven to be nothing more than a utopian ideal that has failed to bring true freedom and happiness to the human mind and body and has instead turned humans into disposable (at will and fancy) objects of sexual desire with no concern about the development of truly meaningful human relationships. The sexual “expression” and what not described here is hollow and meaningless, and this article describes but one of many rotten fruits that progressivism has sown in the Western world. Perhaps the concerns expressed in this article should be examined in a historical or scholarly fashion, yet that is increasingly becoming a thing of the past, progress, you know. There is no growth, only dehuminisation, death, deicide, and detritus in the name of progress.
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