Month: April 2014

Why I tweeted a picture of my boobs

Followers on my Twitter may have noticed that I stuck up a topless picture. I’d love to say it was a picture of my boobs, but in fact it was only one of them, as my baps had an argument shortly after they sprouted, and haven’t spoken since.

You don’t tend to see norks like mine in the media, widely-spaced, outward-pointing and subject to the laws of gravity. In fact, you don’t see many boobs at all in the media, and when you do, it’s a very narrow range: they’re almost invariably attached to white cis women, and a certain size and shape. And when they’re presented, they’re almost always sexualised. Tits, according to the media, are sex objects. We don’t see the way they swing when you bend down to find a clean pair of socks, or the way they hang as we take our bras off after a long day. We don’t see the fun of boobs, or the fact that they can also be used to feed babies. When we’re shown boobs, we’re expected to approve of their sexiness, leer a bit and enjoy patriarchy.

The media has control over presentation of breasts, so nothing is going to change. They like having the monopoly. And it’s for this reason that our views of boobs are restricted to how the men who own these publications–the lad mags, page 3, and so on–want to see boobs. It’s a male fantasy, a sense of entitlement.

Social media, of course, presents a major challenge to the traditional media model, and this is where we can really make things happen. I posted a picture of my baps in a fairly innocuous photo, and I’d love for others to do so too. Let’s flood the world images of the genuine diversity of our bodies, and show that nudity isn’t a shameful thing at all. There’s a hashtag–#normalisenudity–and a tumblr. A few people have already participated, and I’m inviting you to, if you feel safe doing so (the tumblr will accept anonymous submissions).

Given the current state of things, given the way capitalist patriarchy has controlled nudity, I can completely understand how terrifying this is for some. I posted a picture of my jubblies because I can as well as wanting to flick a v-sign at capitalist patriarchy. But if you want to join me, please, please do. Let’s try to reclaim and normalise nudity.

ETA 03/04: Welp, men have gone and trolled the hashtag, so maybe avoid that. The tumblr’s still going strong if you want to use that though. Also, the fact that men pissed their pants over this shows that it’s threatening them 🙂

This is the most misogynistic thing I’ve seen today

Above is a video for the No More Page 3 campaign, and it is the most misogynistic thing I have seen today.

In case you don’t want to watch it, the narrative centres on a man buying a copy of a certain tabloid newspaper, and being stalked around by a topless woman every time he opens the fucking thing, which has a devastating impact on his family and leads to his young daughter making some paper mache norks. It’s so fucking ghastly and misogynistic I’d think it an April Fool, were it not uploaded a few weeks ago.

The whole thing reeks of largely discredited scarlet woman tropes as well as deliberately sexualising children. It’s the sort of thing I’d expect to see made in the 1950s: sexy lady destroys innocent family, and it’s all her fault. The man is not held accountable; indeed, he looks just as perturbed at being relentlessly tailed by the Page 3 girl as the video invites us to be. The blame is laid squarely on the woman, not anywhere else as we are invited to stare at her and mutter to ourselves that she shouldn’t be there.

And let’s talk about sexualising a child, because you know what publication has never, to my knowledge, put out images of little girls wearing false breasts? The Sun. Or, indeed, anything else I can think of, except that fucking video. Yes, we’re meant to be horrified by it, but do you know what I really don’t want to look at? Images of little girls wearing false breasts. Most of the internet and print respect this. Of course they couldn’t have gone for a girl just taking her top off and being cool with it: it was their intention to sexualise this child’s body as much as possible while simultaneously saying “look how terrible this is”. It’s like the Sidebar of Shame in the Daily Mail, except they’re seriously expecting us to fall over and applaud their feminism for this.

It’s sadly not uncommon for initiatives like this to fall back on objectification and sexualisation. In Playing The Whore, Melissa Gira Grant explains that this is the dominant discourse in carceral feminist initiatives against sex work: that sex workers are expected to be seen but not heard, that when they are not being held up as victims, they are being held up as the enemy. One can also draw parallels to PETA, who like to treat women like meat in order to make people eat more vegetables.

Make no mistake: this is what is going on in this video. Somehow, No More Page 3 have managed to produce something that manages to be more objectifying and misogynistic than what they claim to oppose.

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ETA 1553 01/04/14: The “official” campaign account have distanced themselves from this video following complaints due to its misogyny. This marks a reversal on their original position, where they tweeted it excitedly. It is worth noting that while the “official” campaign do not endorse it, this video is not incompatible with any of their campaign talking points.

ETA 1612 01/04/14: The official account also allegedly deleted a tweet describing the video as “fantastic”. As I said before, there is no way this video is incompatible with the main talking points and aims of the NMP3 campaign. I would really like for NMP3 to engage with and talk about why using the imagery and tropes in this video is as misogynistic, if not more so than NMP3.

I’d also like to clarify that, when I refer to “No More Page 3” throughout this post, I’m not necessarily referring to the “official” campaign, but the movement itself, which, being ostensibly grassroots, ought not to be limited to a single Twitter account!