Blog #6 – New Ms. Booty

For me, this article relates to some short presentations I did at the beginning of this semester. I was reading up on some books/authors that had recently come to my attention—Pamela Paul and her book Pornified and Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs. The later takes a special issue with Girls Gone Wild and the culture of female hyper-sexuality and sexual callousness that surrounds the interplay of promiscuity, binge drinking and college campus “sexual liberation.” Both books talk about how this changes the way that men interact with voyeurism, sexuality, and dominance.

Even questioning the play of sexuality in popular media is almost immediately foreign to pop, but I have to respect women like India.arie coming out with promises to not strip in their videos, even if it means losing valuable awards of recognition to Alicia Keys. I also quickly ran out of common ground in popular debates against pornography—I somewhat mistakenly found myself at the Porn Nation event on campus where Michael Leahy quickly admitted his powerlessness to porn and incited the audience to call upon the grace of Jesus to transform our hedonism. I felt like my views against pornography in it’s modern form left me still, as a whole, much more sympathetic with Kate Bornstein’s radical sex positivity and refusal to yield to discussions judging anyone’s sexuality. So I feel like I’m the odd-ball out—I’m a humble quasi-buddhist, feeling like media and sexuality shouldn’t be mixing in the way they are, and feeling like I don’t really see eye-to-eye with most of the people who agree with me on that… I’m a feminist, and I refuse to reconcile that with any branch of the religious right (unlike much of the anti-pornography feminists of the 80s).

So, why do I have beef? Bubba Sparxxx was praised as introspective and ahead of his time when he released Deliverance, so why is he now trying to compete with Fergie’s Humps to get air play? Why do artists sell their own work short?

One thing I’ve learned this semester is that it’s hard to take a stand against something to universal as pornography and visual exploitation of sexuality in media. I can be enraged about what one musician puts in their videos (saying that, I’m recalling a really disturbing parallel that Dreamworlds draws between a gang rape scene in a movie and 80s hair metal videos) but then I look at my own life and those of the people I love, and I realize that we all participate in this misogyny and patriarchy in confounding and complex ways. My best hope is just to speak my views, admit that I’m not perfect, and try to live my life as clear of this broken system as I can.