Sunday, April 15, 2007

If You've Got It, Flaunt It? A Literature Review

Although most feminists would agree that patriarchal societies have suppressed female sexuality for centuries, feminist thinkers have formulated a wide range of opinions regarding how women should experience themselves as sexual beings. In order to assess multiple feminists’ thoughts about women who choose to publicly experience themselves as sexual beings by flaunting their femininity and sexuality, I scoured the Internet for literature on this topic. The ten sources I located, a few of which I have already discussed in previous postings, are evidence that feminist scholars and thinkers have been conflicted about issues surrounding female sexuality for decades.

In their 1998 book Feminism and the Female Body: Liberating the Amazon Within, S. Castelnuovo and S. R. Gunthrie argue that the female body is an important vehicle for female empowerment because both women’s minds and bodies are sites of patriarchal oppression, and that women may most effectively assert control over their bodies through physical discipline. The authors advocate bodily strength and wellbeing over the weak prettiness and “restrictive body beauty norms” that they perceive “mainstream feminists” (131) to encourage, and they reference female bodybuilders and martial artists as women who experience physical and mental liberation because of their engagement in “empowering physical practices that challenge the feminine body beauty discourse” (62). Castelnuovo and Gunthrie are proponents of women finding power within themselves and meaning in their lives not by adhering to traditional norms of beauty or by emphasizing their feminine sexuality, but through mastery of their physicality. This concept does not claim that women should look or behave like men, but instead encourages females to develop their own unique physical strength.

Holland, Ramazanoglu, and Sharpe similarly claim in their article Power and Desire: The Embodiment of Female Sexuality that society wrongly assumes the female body to have a fixed essence of femininity; the body is socially constructed, according to the authors, which causes women to feel pressure to adhere to a prescribed ideal of physical femininity. However, other women have embraced patriarchal notions of female physicality by practicing oversexualized behaviors usually reserved for erotic dancers. According to the post “Housewives, Pole Dancing, and Empowerment?” from the blog Feministing.com, middle-aged suburban women across the United States have recently embraced a form of aerobic exercise based on pole dancing. The craze has so thoroughly penetrated the nation that The Sopranos and Desperate Housewives have both displayed characters engaging in this type of aerobics, and pole dancing itself has become normalized to the point that mini-poles can now be found at extravagant bat mitzvah parties (Feministing.com).

The females who participate in this activity claim it to be empowering because groups of women do it together for fun and for each other’s gazes only. Joan Price, author of Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk About Sex After Sixty (2006), explains that she and other proponents of pole dancing aerobics do not find the activity to be degrading because of the clear difference between women choosing to strip in front of men to avoid poverty, thereby putting themselves in demeaning and potentially dangerous situations, and middle-class women throwing single-sex pole dancing parties.

Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, disagrees with this mindset. According to her, many women have internalized men’s objectifying views of themselves and now strive to embody these fantastical ideals to feel empowered. This has led to the rise of what Levy labels a “raunch culture” in which women harshly critique each other’s bodies and strive to exude sexuality; however, raunch culture fails to empower women, Levy states. For females to truly experience bodily empowerment, she advises that women invent their own forms of sexual expression not based on the male gaze.

What could be a reason for the increasing number of females willing to have an oversexualized appearance? According to Claire Hoffman, reporter for the Los Angeles Times, modern American popular culture is saturated with sex and exhibitionism thanks to media sources. In her article “Joe Francis: ‘Baby, give me a kiss,’” a story on the mastermind behind the Girls Gone Wild soft-core porn empire, Hoffman describes that, after speaking with many scantily-clad young women in clubs who bared their breasts for the GGW crew, she realized that today’s youth—accustomed to cheap video technology and reality TV—consider the camera a source of validation. Many American women seem to believe that striking racy poses for a film crew may “catapult them to Paris Hilton-like fame” overnight (Hoffman). Young females may also feel validated by receiving a man’s selective sexual attention; as one GGW participant named Jannel Szyszka explained, “Whoa—Joe's, like, trying to talk to me, like, out of all the girls in here” (Hoffman).

Despite the fact that I am now familiar with many different viewpoints regarding female sexuality, I still believe that women should not strive to find empowerment in an stereotypically "sexy" feminine appearance. Women who dress and act in oversexualized ways could profess to be reclaiming activities originally used to please men in order to mock or show apathy towards patriarchal ideals—a strategy similar to that of African Americans who refer to each other as “nigger” to lighten the word’s racist connotations—but this intention may not be apparent to men or even other women. For instance, a woman who claims she likes to wear a short skirt “for herself” when she goes to bars is probably not coming across as a sexually empowered woman to male strangers; instead, her appearance is most likely encouraging others to view her as a consumable object.