1) What you can earn – selling you body — as a world top model
2) What profits a team of two NZ women entrepreneurs are making selling sexy lingerie to pregnant women (advertised in dominatrix pose)
Is this women’s empowerment today? I’m in two minds.
Jacqui
I find it very funny, and rather sad, how empowerment for women is so often put forward as the ‘freedom’ to be sexual creatures. Yes it is a good thing that sex is no longer the taboo subject that it has been in the past, but a living in a society which accepts or even expects all women too look and act in a certain way with regards to their sexuality and presentation is hardly what i’d call freedom. I remember watching the Pussycat Dolls perform on a talkshow and the lead singer spoke about empowering women with their music. I find this difficult to comprehend, as unless their sexual orientation differs from a strictly heterosexual one, the way they dress and dance seems to be directed at men, not the ’empowerment’ of women.
With regards to the lingerei being sold to pregnant women, i would say it highlights the pressure that women feel to look and behave in a certain way ALL of the time – as sexual creatures.
If a woman prefers to dress in a provocative manner, then she has the freedom to do so. However, it seems to have become somewhat of an expectation. This reduction of women to merely sexual beings, without acknowledgement of their intellectual and spiritual self, is not empowerment.
I guess even in the 21st century and how we are supposed to be modern and of technologis-ed, the old addage that ‘sex sells’ still exists. We are still and (i think) will be constantly surrounded by the idea women having to be sexy all the time.
Unfortunately I haven’t been able to locate the dominatrix-posed pregnant model so I can’t comment on that scenario, but a few things came up for me when I heard about this on the radio.
My first thought was that perhaps those people, who find the lingerie shots of pregnant women distasteful, are also those who find women breastfeeding in public so offensive.
What comes to mind is the history of shame around pregnancy for (especially unmarried) women; women have been shut away until they gave birth (preferably to a son/heir). I think women are still expected to some extent, to hide their pregnancy …so much of what is rendered abjective (think horror films and the like) has derived from images and themes circumscribing pregnancy and birth, which are often construed as being in some ways abnormal or repulsive (monstrous feminine) … this comes to mind when I think about those who feel their delicate sensibilities have been offended upon witnessing a woman breastfeeding in public.
Pregnancy and breastfeeding are often conveyed as the antithesis of what is “sexy”; is this because once a woman has a child, she becomes “unavailable” to men? Is that why pregnant women make some people uncomfortable?
Lactation or any other female bodily fluid is often more socially offensive than smoking.
I am fascinated by the fact that sex is often presented as desirable (as long as it’s between youthful, beautiful & heterosexual people!) but pregnancy and sex or pregnancy and sexuality/sensuality are rarely synonymously articulated. Women are frequently sexually objectified until they are with child, and then their role is fulfilled; they have come to the end of the road as it were….like this is our only role!
It reminds me of the character in Desperate Housewives who has little children; she’s the only one who is not portrayed as “sexy” (in or out of the show).
The only way in which I have seen women rendered as ‘sexy’ when pregnant is construed as fetishistic.
I like that the model is being photographed by her husband (would have been better if she was being photographed by her wife), because it makes commitment and family appealing (when most texts encourage an anti-family, individualistic consumerist narcissistic mentality).
I also like that the lingerie company was an initiative which arose out of women’s friendship of putting their heads together. They own the company, and this is important because women’s bodies are still largely ‘owned’ by men.
I don’t find the photographs offensive, or distasteful. I don’t find them particularly EMPOWERING (filing her nails?) interesting idea with the turn table….don’t get that but ok…maybe they can work on that one….
And if I was pregnant, I’d definitely be purchasing their products, because the lingerie is just gorgeous.
The question is why women around the world are gone crazy using their body to show their empowerment or gain power? It is very simple. For thousands of years women have been oppressed and they did not have the sexual freedom that men had. They could not have sex for pleasure and their bodies had become something to be ashamed of and therefore they were encouraged to hide it and never use it in a so called sinful manner. Now after thousands of years all of a sudden women have been given freedom to do what they had not been able to do for thousands of years, of course they are going to over do it and of course they are going to go crazy about it simply because it is something new. I give you an example, lets say you imprison a bird in a cage for years since it was born and the bird thinks life in a cage is the real world and there is no other world. you open the door after years and you try to free the bird, you could see that the bird hesitates first from coming out of the cage because it is afraid of the new environment that it had not seen before but after a while slowly it comes out and then jumpes out of the window and if you follow the bird around you would see that it looks like the bird has gone crazy running around and flying around like it will never stop. and now this is the women situation is today’s world, they are new to this situation, at first they hesitiated but then they came out and more and more women have joined in and now they are in the stage where they have gone crazy but after a while this sexual freedom becomes normal and more women won’t try to over do it and they will come back to the same level as men are now.
James, I think it’s important to remember that women “using their bodies to show empowerment or gain power” isn’t something that exists in a vacuum. Women aren’t crazy – patriarchy is! 🙂
Melissa, I was not talking about women in general. As Yasmin in her comment mentions pussycat dolls or even spice girls or dixie chics and lots of other music bands who are dedicated to empower women’s role in society, you got to think how they are trying to do that, and I am not necessarily saying that they are gone crazy in a bad way, in fact over doing it is normal as i mentioned in my example. don’t forget males (not in general, those who use stereotypes and don’t see women as equal;),are as new to this environment as females are and they too have gone crazy…All i am saying is that this is the aftermath of thousands of years of women being oppressed by both male and themselves and in many societies not being considered as an equal humanbeings. I am sorry if i offended you but i was talking about lots of women in mass media such as the above music bands or individuals like Paris Hilton…and I don’t see anything wrong with it because after all it all comes down to individual’s choice…regardless of being female or male…there have been women like Viriginia Wolf who did not use their bodies to empower women and she made a great difference to women and society and there have been also women like Madonna who have and they have made a great significance to women and the society too…I just hope that some day as a male or female when you use your body to create arts or even maintain pleasure, you would be doing it for personal reason and not so much for empowering one gender and that day you won’t be harrassed or labelled as someone who is selling their bodies… 🙂