The Rise of "Strangely Unsexy" Instagram Exhibitionism.
"And Why It Hurts Women"
Camille Paglia:
The pro-sex pop-culture academic contends that misguided posts and Hollywood ignorance plague the current generation: "It's time for a major rethink of women's self-presentation."
Welcome to the flesh parade!
For the past century, women in the Western world have liberated themselves by shedding more and more clothing, from beaches and ballrooms to today's boldly bare-all Instagrams.
The pro-sex wing of feminism to which I belong celebrates this historical trend, which has been accelerated by Hollywood and the fashion industry as an expression of female power and autonomy. But is there a downside? With unapologetic exhibitionism now commonplace for both workplace wear and online dating, are confused messages complicating sexual relations and deepening the divide between men and women?
Since it was launched eight years ago, Instagram has grown into a global obsession, used by more than twice as many women as men. Mating has morphed into a digital mirage, dizzyingly multiplied on Snapchat and Tinder. Instagram's tweaked, filtered photos and videos are both boon and curse, sharpening self-definition yet intensifying social anxieties and risking physical safety via hypersexualized self-advertisement and fantasy.
As a veteran defender of pornography and staunch admirer of strip clubs, I have to say that an overwhelming number of today's female-authored Instagrams seem stilted, forced and strangely unsexy. Visual illiteracy is spreading: It is sadly obvious that few young people have seen classic romantic films or studied the spectacular corpus of Hollywood publicity stills, with their gorgeous sensual allure.
The leading artist of Instagram eroticism remains Rihanna, who for several years uploaded one brilliant image after another, often via the intuitive camera of her best friend, Melissa Forde. Rihanna understands magic, mood and mystique — sex as a shimmering state of mind. But the bright and shiny surface of too many of today's female-generated Instagrams conceals a bleak and regressive reality, with men in the driver's seat for careless, hit-and-run hookups.
The sexual revolution sought and won by my 1960s generation envisioned women as responsible, mature free agents, equal to men. We certainly did not foresee that "booty pics," reducing women to their buttocks like Stone Age fertility totems, would become a wildly addictive genre of Instagram self-portraiture. Pop music after Madonna became increasingly sexually explicit, but the current epidemic of radical carnal display probably began with Britney Spears flashing her bare midriff in the Catholic high school scenario of her 1998 video "… Baby One More Time."
Ironically, sexed-up online exhibitionism has escalated as Hollywood movies have steadily lost their once world-famous genius for portraying romantic passion. Nuanced character drama has faded in an era of fast-action video games and superhero blockbusters. A-list women actors with skinny, Pilates-toned bodies seek "important" roles, not bittersweet stories exploring the mercurial vulnerability of love. Meanwhile, a movie ostensibly about sex, like the first installment of Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), was a lifeless and clinically antiseptic bore.
No American movie in decades has approached the blazing sizzle, conveyed simply by eye contact, of the first encounter of Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) and Scarlett O'Hara (Vivien Leigh) on the grand staircase of Gone With the Wind (1939). Electrifying onscreen energy was once generated by stark sexual polarization — old-fashioned gender differences, rooted in biology. Campus gender theory, with its universal androgyny and rigid social constructionism, is box office poison.
Here's a short list of incandescent star couplings whose heat is now rarely duplicated by Hollywood, even in its monotonous remakes: Anthony Quinn and Rita Hayworth in Blood and Sand (1941); Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not (1944); John Garfield and Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946); Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal in The Fountainhead (1949); Laurence Harvey and Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8 (1960); Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968); Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were (1973); and Michael Douglas and Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction (1987).
It's telling that most of these heady erotic effects were produced onscreen with virtually no nudity, which was strictly curtailed by the studio production code from the early 1930s to the late 1960s. The sexual candor of small-budget European art films inspired American moviemakers to break free of industry censorship. The next big step in liberalizing body display was the exercise boom of the 1980s, which was kicked off by Jane Fonda's best-selling workout book and video and made skimpy, formfitting leotards an everyday fashion statement.
The massive entrance of women into professional careers in the 1970s put a spotlight on workplace attire. John T. Molloy's Dress for Success books advised ambitious women to present themselves conservatively with sober colors, modest necklines and low pumps. That all changed with the arrival on nighttime TV of two ruthless businesswomen, Alexis Carrington Colby (Joan Collins) on Dynasty (1981-89) and Abby Ewing (Donna Mills) on Knots Landing (1979-93). Collins and Mills created a stunning formula for glamorous power dressing that still flourishes today. But many of today's young professionals sporting stiletto heels, miniskirts and plunging bodices might not realize that to wear that fabulous drag, you need a killer mind and manner to go with it. Alexis and Abby incinerated the landscape with their ferocious willpower.
Given our rising concern about sexual harassment, it's time for a major rethink and recalibration of women's self-presentation on social media as well as in the workplace. The line between the public and private realms must be redrawn. Be yourself on your own time. The workplace should be a gender-neutral zone. It is neither a playground for male predators nor a fashion runway for women. Men may sometimes read literally what women often mean only symbolically. But complaining to and weaponizing a paternalistic Human Resources bureaucracy is not the path to women's true liberation.
The current surplus of exposed flesh in the public realm has led to a devaluation of women and, paradoxically, to sexual ennui. A sense of appropriateness and social context has been lost, as with Ariana Grande wearing a sleeveless minidress with bared thighs to perform from the pulpit at Aretha Franklin's funeral. That there is growing discontent with overexposure in Western women's dress is suggested by the elegant flowing drapery of Muslim-influenced designs by Dolce & Gabbana and Oscar de la Renta, among others, in recent years. An exhibition, Contemporary Muslim Fashions, opened Sept. 22 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.
One of the greatest photographs ever taken of a Hollywood star was Edward Steichen's 1924 close-up of Gloria Swanson through a lavishly embroidered black veil. It conveys tremendous power, dignity and enigmatic reserve. If women want respect in society, they must do their part to raise their own value. Stop throwing it away on empty display.
Paglia recalled her undergraduate days in the 1960s. School admin tried to impose an 11 p.m. curfew on female dormitories to protect women from "danger," this while letting the young men run free all night long. Paglia and her girlfriends told them to get bent. Today, young women are telling their critics to do the same, and rightfully so.
My grandfather worked in a shoe factory—he was an Italian immigrant. My father was the first to go to college in the family. There’s a directness and a robustness about working-class men–a vitality and authenticity that is not coming across in these feminist books. The more women succeed and rise up into positions of power, the more remote they become from actual masculine energy. I’m concerned as a college teacher about the romantic and sexual futures of highly successful career women.
Why?
Women are being told “you are future leaders.” Meanwhile, we are more than our jobs. One reason Sex and the City was such an enormous hit is that it expressed something that feminism won’t admit: we don’t know what we want. We don’t know if we want children or not. My generation produced the sexual revolution and your generation is stuck figuring out how it’s going to work. I want young women when they’re 14 to start thinking about what they want over the course of their lives. I think it’s criminal—child abuse—that they’re not told to do this [in school]. Right now it’s just sex education and putting condoms on bananas. Girls should be asked to think about what they want in their lives when they’re 50, 60 and 70.What’s been imposed on women is a male model of professional study and achievement.
What’s the solution?
If colleges and universities are really concerned about women’s rights, then they must adjust to a far more flexible structure to allow young women students to take leaves of absence if they want to have children early. Schools should say, “you can be married and have children. We’ll have daycare centres for you. You can take 10 years to finish your degree—husbands, too.” The presence of married women and men in the classroom would revolutionize gender studies. It would bring reality into the classroom.
What are your thoughts on the phenomenon of “rape culture” as it’s reported in the media and talked about on college campuses today?
It’s ridiculous. The one place we should be worried about is India. Why American feminists haven’t mobilized against gang rapes in India is an absolute outrage. This obsession with rape [in North America] is neurotic. There are attacks on men also. This privileging of the female victim is a distortion. To see the world in terms of rape is absurd. Throughout history there have been atrocities of every kind. Throughout history honourable men don’t rape.
Can we teach men not to rape, as some argue?
You can try to teach people to make ethical judgments. Telling a rapist not to rape? [Laughs] A liberal ideology is out there that people are basically good. It’s a bourgeois version of reality—this idea that the whole world should be like a bourgeois living room and anyone who doesn’t belong, you can retrain. No you can’t! I was raised in the Italian working-class way, which is “watch out!” The world is a dangerous place. It’s up to you to protect yourself, not just from rape, but from anything. The lack of imagination for criminality amazes me. There are people who are evil. The problem here is the inability of women to project themselves into the minds of men. Feminists say [proper, mocking tone] “women have the right to do whatever they want.” Of course we have the right to do whatever we want–to be jogging with earphones on with our breasts going like this [simulates breasts bouncing]. Yes you have the right to but it’s also stupid! I see with the eyes of the criminal. I must have a criminal mind.
Are there any worthwhile voices in feminism today?
Feminism is dead. The movement is absolutely dead. The women’s movement tried to suppress dissident voices for way too long. There’s no room for dissent. It’s just like Mean Girls. If they had listened to me they could have gotten the ship steered in the right direction. My wing of feminism—the pro-sex wing—was silenced. I was practically lynched for endorsing The Rolling Stones. Susan Faludi is still saying I’m not a feminist. Who made her pope? Feminist ideology is like a new religion for a lot of neurotic women. You can’t talk to them about anything.
"What Laura Kipnis has to say about drinking and rape on campus is not going to go over well with young women, but she goes ahead and says it anyway."
