Paging a Gender Theorist!
Ah, television. When I was a little kid, it went off at night. I was always thrilled to be able to stay up long enough to watch the broadcast end for the evening, to see the treacly "sign-off" message, usually stuff about god and country. Then the long "beeeeeeeeeeeppppppppp" and test pattern. At least that's how I remember it.
Now, though, there's no "off" to tv. It's "on" all the time. And not only is it "on," there's more of "it" in the form of hundreds of channels. So, the need has arisen to fill airtime, all the time, with whatever. I experienced this myself last May when three photos I had posted on my Flickr site were actually deemed worthy of headlining the 5 o'clock news in the huge Los Angeles market. They ran for days on end, and I was contacted by media outlets and individuals all over the world. My sides have only recently stopped aching from how hard I laughed at the earnest assertion that three pictures of me legitimately constituted "news."
But since I have been teaching feminist theory for nearly two decades, I was actually well able to understand why these pics were deemed newsworthy. And I was able to write about it. And I was able to explain all of this to a number of reporters who wanted to talk to me about it. So I was in the rather bizarre position of both being the body talked about and the talking head talking about the body in question. No problem. I can handle it.
However I am sorry to say that it is rare to see someone like me well versed in gender theory holding forth on the news. For instance, this morning Fox ran a piece about some blogger who posted a picture of a young athlete from Southern California. The man who put her picture on his website wasn't interested in athletics; he wanted to turn her into a sexual object and share that object with the other men who visited his blog.
And now a high school pole vaulter finds herself in the unwanted position of being the focus of worldwide attention, not for what she can do, but for what she looks like.
We've come a long way, baby.
As Fox introduced the various experts they'd corralled to discuss this issue, I eagerly waited to see which one had expertise in feminist theory. Answer? None. Well, why expect a feminist to be asked to explain the dynamics of sexual objectification, right? No, much better to have a male therapist and some woman who hopes that this young woman athlete "leverages" the attention into celebrity.
None of them could explain the fundamental problem, one which comes right out of Feminism 101. Athletes are valued for being active, strong, independent, individuals. We associate these characteristics with men because we operate on a fictive binary which relegates human females and males to opposite sides and claims that the two do not share the same abilities (or "dis"-abilities as in the case of women). Of course an athlete like this one immediately exposes the false nature of this dichotomy. She is an active, strong, independent individual. And a woman.
Under the male gaze, however, she becomes relegated to the role of passive object. Our sexist patriarchy understands females primarily as accoutrement to men. How is this female useful to males? Ah, as a pleasing, passive object of desire. Let the dehumanization begin!
The victim of this unwanted sexualization probably doesn't identify as feminist. Most young women today do not. Yet feminism has made inroads: she knows what is happening to her feels "demeaning." That's because it is. Would that we educated our children about the way institutionalized sexism functions. Then they would not be forced to apprehend a world which works in certain ways without having the tools to understand--and resist--those ways. Seems obvious. Yet this enforced ignorance about feminist theory is ideologically useful, for without it, men would have to justify having a world which grants them unearned privilege and asks those of us who are not like them to enjoy and appreciate being called inferior.
And to enjoy their enjoyment of our bodies rather than our own.
So the discussion about this pole vaulter is stuck in whether or not it was "legal" to reprint her photo; whether or not there's such a thing as "privacy" anymore with the internet; whether or not she can actually use this to her advantage, in spite of being sickened and frightened by the attention.
As to the gender implications, the "why did this happen?": silence.
I remember walking through the LA County Museum of Art when I was a little girl, looking at all the paintings of naked ladies. My young mind struggled to make sense of the world into which I was being socialized, and, so, faced with the images of so many nude females, I thought "I guess that's what people paint." It's not much of an explanation, though it is the simplest one. Aren't such parsimonious theories best?
No. Indeed naked ladies are "just" what "people" paint. Yet there's much more to be said about who those "people" are; they are men. And why they do it: most of the images of women we see in our world come from the "male gaze," a view of the female as a passive object designed for male pleasure. This designation comes at the expense of female autonomy and the erasure of female subjectivity, as young Stokke has found out. "No one really sees me," she says, in spite of the fact that tens of thousands of people are looking at her image plucked out of its athletic context and handed over to men so that they can continue to feel superior. In this worldview, there is no female "self" to see.
Simple? Yes. Simply unacceptable.