Posing pt 2

Back in the 1970s a band called Roxy Music put out a series of album covers that had feminist critics steaming with anger. And those feminist critics were absolutely right to be angry. In the entire history of rock and roll, a music form that is not exactly pro-woman, these covers were probably the worst.

Here is their first cover:

Notice that the woman is posed as if thrown on the ground. Her face looks pained and her make and clothing have been messed up. This photo makes this woman an about-to-be rape victim and puts us in the rapist's point of view.

The really odd thing is that this cover was actually the work of one of the very few pro-feminist rock bands at the time. Roxy Music were the art-rock band. So how did it happen? Well, mostly because it was all meant to be a put on. That photo isn't meant to be erotic, it's meant to make fun of other people's idea of eroticism by exaggerating it.

And that all seems fine until you ask yourself if you can be entirely sure everyone is actually going to get the joke. What does a man who really hates women think when he sees that? (Or, for that matter, what does a woman who really hates women think?)

But we use that excuse a lot, here h/t Pastabagel, is a shot of Wonder Woman,

The important difference being that this isn't supposed to be a joke. It's make believe, to be sure, but the people who read this stuff are actually much more serious about it than Dostoevsky readers are.

At a site site is named "Bleeding Cool" (good name), Rich Johnston thought it would be fun to draw a bunch of male superheroes in that pose. Here is what he got:

It's quite telling to look at what things that are supposed to be only make believe reveal.

Roxy Music made four or five album covers on the line of the one above but it eventually got to them too. So they made a cover that responded to their critics. Here it is:

And you can see the difference right away. These women are actually doing something. And they are not trapped by our gaze because their interest is somewhere else, they are looking where they are about to throw those javelins. No, they don't look like they are very good at throwing javelins, they are just models after all, but it's light years different from the poses above. We are looking at these women because they are beautiful but the pose they are striking says, "I exist for myself first".

It didn't catch on though. In fact, the exact opposite happened.The really disturbing thing, as Pastabagel notes elsewhere, is that a lot of women who read comics rather like it that Wonder Woman poses as she does. They find it empowering. And Google Angelina Jolie or Beyonce and you will find both these stars specialize in presenting themselves as static, frozen sex objects in awkward poses as if ready for consumption by men.

He blames the art form. And there might be something to that. Taking the sexism out of comics and pop music might be like taking the violence out of football; it would still be a game but it wouldn't be football any more. But the deeper problem is this: women really like this stuff. An awful lot of young women look at the photo below and they don't see a victim of male sexism sacrificing herself up to our gaze. No, they think, I want to be just like her:

Not all the time but sometimes. In another indictment of the way comic heroines are presented, Laura Hudson writes:

Why is she contorting her body in that weird way? Who is she posing for, because it doesn't even seem to be Roy Harper? The answer, dear reader, is that she is posing for you.

And that reader, dear Laura Hudson, is you. You keep reading these things and while more men than women read comics, Beyonce specializes in posing that way for her audience who are mostly women. You might say Beyonce is a comic superheroine for people whose attention span is so short they can't even follow comics. Why does she contort her body the way she does in the video below? Because she wants to strike a pose that says, "I don't exist for myself, I exist for you". And millions of girls willingly embrace her as a role model. Stop blaming men because this is what lots of girls and young women really want:

The lyrics tell the viewer that Beyonce doesn't care what we think but everything else about this video tells us that she cares very much. She wants to exist for the man she is singing to and she wants to exist for us.

Posing

Womanly virtues Friday
This is the first in a series.

So let's do some decoding on this little annoyance that came up when I was browsing some site yesterday.

It's a funny question because if she is looking at you like that you don't really need to ask.

Except that she's a model and she's posing. We think, maybe what she really wants is for this photo session to end so she can get back to organizing her teacup collection.

When we look at a picture like this, the sincerity and authenticity questions seem like real questions.

• The sincerity question goes like this: She looks interested but does she really mean it?
• The authenticity question, which is not quite the same is, What is she really feeling?

And what I hope to convince you of is that neither of those questions ought to concern us.

Think of what happens when we teach a baby to smile. It's one of the very first things we teach a baby to do. As soon as the little wonder can see far enough to make out our facial expression, we smile at her. That's all it takes. She looks back at us, then we see a look of intense concentration on her face as she works it out, and then, like the sun rising on a perfect morning, she figures out how to smile back at us. And then she laughs.

That's an amazing thing. The smile we teach a baby is perhaps the most human thing there is. And the baby can't see her own face when she does it. As Wittgenstein says, we don't take account of the fact that we can imitate someone else's facial expression and know we have it right without looking in a mirror.

Another thing we fail to take account of is that smiling that first smile makes the baby happy. We think we smile because we are happy but that first smile makes the baby happy because she smiled. It isn't the expression of some "inner" happiness. No, she feels good "inside" because she has made this thing happen "outside". And we can do this all our lives. Need to cheer up? Try smiling.

Something similar goes on when a woman makes the facial expression the model is making above. We sometimes talk as if the "inside" and "outside" of her experience were independent of one another. As if she could be thinking of her favourite puppy that died while she was a little girl inside and giving us this expression outside. But she can't do that. She may have had sad news the morning of the shoot, but she has to put it out of her head to conjure up that expression.

And just as a baby learns to be happy by learning to smile, every girl learns to be aroused by learning how to put that expression on her face. And girls and young women spend billions of dollars every year on magazines, books and movies featuring erotic shots of women so they can learn from models and actresses how to put on the relevant expressions. Fashion magazines don't just show a girl what  clothes she could wear, they show her the ways she should stand and the facial expressions she should have while wearing them. It's one of the huge differences between boys and girls that boys don't do that. Boys don't need to learn how to be aroused any more than babies need to learn how to cry.

Yes, it can be faked but we put too much weight on that. That's why the sincerity and authenticity questions come up. But faking it is difficult. Which is why most people don't or can't do it. Most models don't fake it but get themselves into the mood for a photo shoot.

There are external tricks of course. Make-up is one. The photographer helped a bit in the shot above by centering the focus on her panties so the wrinkles in the silk show clear and crisp and her face is slightly blurred, making her look a little more aroused. But tricks only get a woman so far.

A woman can lie to us or to herself but the facial expression is not the lie. The lie is not a specific thing but the whole context. She lies by making the effort to get aroused early in a relationship and then not trying anymore after she has you hooked. Or by giving the impression that she only makes this efforts for you while loving someone else too. But the moment when a woman poses, she is telling the truth.