Zuska is the kick-ass alter-ego of Suzanne E Franks. When not dispensing Zuska's wisdom, Suzanne can often be found gardening, reading, or having one of her thrice-weekly migraines.
Bora pointed me to a post at The Phineas Gage Fan Club about an undergraduate student in Sweden who has been rather severely punished by her university for appearing naked in the pages of a "lad mag".
The department demanded that the student attend psychotherapy with a member of faculty, and that she apologise in front of her entire year. They then barred the student from going on work placement (which all the other students in her year were doing), leaving her to work in the department (presumably photocopying and boiling coffee).
I have to agree with Johan that this is an expression of conservatism, not an excess of feminism. That is, the student is not being chastised for perpetuating sexist stereotypes of women, or for contributing to the patriarchy. She's being chastised for, well, not being chaste. She took her clothes off and got nekkid - and she got caught.
You see, if this were really about feminism, the people the department would be upset with would be the the people who paid the student to pose nekkid, and the lads who buy the lad mags, thus creating a market for nekkid pictures of ladies. Yes, um, the department would have to chastise.....men!
Oh well. I won't hold my breath.
Let me just say I am not terribly in favor of young women posing nekkid or pole dancing to finance college careers. And I think I have made it abundantly clear in the past that I am clearly NOT in support of cheesecake calendars and the like, and do not see them in any way as "empowering" or whatever the hell young women are saying to delude themselves into thinking that objectifying themselves for men's sexual gratification is a Good Thing. But I am also not in favor of having authority figures punish young women who behave so foolishly, while the male consumers of these products go not only unpunished, but unnoticed and un-commented upon. If it's bad for her to pose, why isn't it bad for him to look? If it's okay for him to look, why isn't it okay for her to pose?
In an ideal society, everybody could pose nekkid for anybody whenever they wished and it would have no negative connotations whatsoever (excluding children; no pedophilia in my ideal society). But you can tell you're still living in a patriarchy when women are punished for sexcrime.
Comments
Interesting that it happened in Sweden which put in place perhaps the most enlightened and just prostitution laws in the world - the selling of sex is decriminalized whereas the buying of sex is criminalized, so the johns are prosecuted and the prostitutes get social services
http://www.justicewomen.com/cj_sweden.html
Posted by: bwv | May 22, 2007 7:36 PM
Interesting that it happened in Sweden which put in place several years ago perhaps the most enlightened and just prostitution laws in the world - the selling of sex is decriminalized whereas the buying of sex is criminalized, so the johns are prosecuted and the prostitutes get social services
http://www.justicewomen.com/cj_sweden.html
Posted by: bwv | May 22, 2007 7:42 PM
I am not sure the target of outrage should be young male customers who are addeled with testosterone poisoning. It seems to me that keeping the student around the department as punishment is really just an excuse for the old geezers to oggle her and fantasize.
Posted by: Tex | May 23, 2007 12:13 AM
"The department demanded that the student attend psychotherapy with a member of faculty"
What a bizarre story. The part which most nearly made me barf, though, was the last phrase in the quoted sentence. How could this student possibly have a productive therapeutic relationship (even if she needed one) with a member of the department which was in the process of disciplining her? And how could members of a psychology department possibly imagine that therapy could function normally in such a situation? Way fucked up.
Posted by: csrster | May 23, 2007 6:06 AM
"In an ideal society, everybody could pose nekkid for anybody whenever they wished and it would have no negative connotations whatsoever (excluding children; no pedophilia in my ideal society)."
In an ideal society, anyone, children included, could walk 'nekkid' down the high street and no one would bat an eyelid. Because no one would have been indoctrinated from birth with the perverted and unwholesome idea that certain parts of people's bodies are somehow 'naughty', or 'forbidden'.
We're not going to get rid of the sexual objectification of women until we get rid of the whole idea that female nakedness = sex.
Posted by: Ruth | May 23, 2007 8:47 AM
Ruth - sorry, that doesn't sound ideal to me. I _like_ the fact that my eyelids bat at the sight of someone sexually attractive.
Posted by: csrster | May 24, 2007 4:44 AM
"I _like_ the fact that my eyelids bat at the sight of someone sexually attractive."
What does that have to do with the nudity taboo? You appear to have seriously missed my point. The equation of nakedness with sexual attractiveness is indoctrinated. If your 'eyelids bat' whenever you see a naked woman, that is because you have been taught to associate naked women with sex. It's no more 'natural' than any other bizarre sexual fetish.
Posted by: Ruth | May 24, 2007 5:37 AM