Raunch Power

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Chapter One

WOMEN’S PLACE “Men are not aware of the misery they cause, and the vicious weakness they cherish, by only inciting women to render themselves pleasing; they do not consider that they thus make natural and artificial duties clash by sacrificing the comfort and respectability of a woman’s life to voluptuous notions of beauty when in nature they all harmonise.”

Mary Wollstonecraft 1792 (Wollstonecraft, 2006, pp. 92-93)

For the majority of history, women have been portrayed as the inferior gender. In every country at some point in time, women have been brought up believing their natural place is beneath men, specifically their husbands (Sarihfe, 2008). Simone de Beauvoir stated that ‘humanity’ is seen as male, and women are defined with reference to men, but not the other way around.

“He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other” (1953, p.

5). The women’s movement throughout the 20th century spread radical new ideas that are now thought of as common sense, such as the idea that women didn’t have to be wives or have children, that we should be able to study at prestigious universities, and that we should not encounter discrimination in the workplace (Levy, 2010).

According to Eisenstein, from very young, girls were subconsciously nurtured to accept the social system of gender roles, the separation between male and female worlds, where the male world was allowed power over society. Women generally still live by underlying ideal roles of conformity and obedience, whereas men are more often brought up with the ideals of being rational and powerful (1984). Men were, and perhaps still are, popularly seen to have a higher sense of justice – hence their prevalence in the political sphere. In A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft protests how can women be seen as just, when they are subjugated by injustice? (Wollstonecraft, 2006).

Chapter Two

RAUNCH CULTURE AND POST FEMINISM

“Men are not aware of the misery they cause, and the vicious “Raunch culture, as the milieu of lads’ mags, go-go dancing and Girls Gone Wild has come to be known, is unquestionably a strategy of control.”

Laurie Penny 2011

(Penny, 2011, p. 5)

Raunch culture is a recently-emerging social influence often seen in men’s magazines and reality television shows like Girls Gone Wild and Jersey Shore (Penny, 2010). This culture encourages women to objectify themselves for their own “empowerment”. A related context mentioned by Sarihfe is ‘gender materialism’, when women are used to entice men to purchase a product – therefore creating an underlying ideal of women as possessions (2008). In Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, she states that the ‘beauty myth’ today is portrayed as being about life, sex, and praising women, when in reality it is about consumerism, politics, and sexual control. It is seen as being all about woman, but is really circulated around men and their desires (2002).

The idea that being sexy is empowering is a notable feature of ‘post-feminism’, which some argue is misguided in it’s intentions and is reverting back to objectification under the guise of authority over oneself (Levy, 2010). The ideals of the earlier feminist movement was more circulated around political issues and enabling women to make decisions about their lives that aren’t influenced by traditional social construct (Douglas, 2010).

According to Gill and Scharff, some feminists were critical of the beauty industry due to the restrictions on what is considered beautiful, generally because certain ideals of beauty were created in order to first sell products. This can be juxtaposed against the post-feminist ideology that striving for beauty is enjoyable and can be empowering (2011).

Chapter Three

SEX SATURATED AND ENTERTAINED

“The glossy, overheated thumping of sexuality in our culture is less about connection than consumption. Hotness has become our cultural currency, and a lot of people spend a lot of time and a lot of regular, green currency trying to acquire it.”

Ariel Levy 2010

(Levy, 2010, p.31)

The presence of raunch culture is easily spotted in the contemporary entertainment industry, from musicians such as Rihanna, to franchise Girls Gone Wild, to powerhouse entertainment brand Playboy. The music industry has a massive part to play in the sex-saturated world we live in today. Walter states that in an analysis of popular music videos, 84% contained sexual imagery, 71% contained women wearing provocative or little clothing, compared with 35% of men (2010, p. 71). Many contemporary songs, particularly those pertaining to the hip hop genre, promote degradation and even violence toward women (Hamilton, 2008).

Female athletes who make it to the Olympics often end up being seen as sexual objects, whether through the editing of the official coverage of the games or photoshoots in men’s magazines such as Playboy and Maxim (Levy, 2010). This objectification is magnified in advertising and endorsement, where female Olympians are selected for their appearance rather than their abilities (van Gilder Cooke, 2012). The television channel NBC in the United States ran a video montage called “Bodies in Motion” to reportedly ‘show their appreciation’ for the bodies of the Olympians of 2012. This video contained slow-motion pieces of footage from the games, was predominantly focussed on beach volleyball players, and was made up entirely of scantily clad female athletes (Ryan, 2012).

Girl bands, from the Spice Girls to the Pussycat Dolls, have generally at some point alluded to their image and oeuvre being empowering or sexually liberating to women.

However this blatant use of sexuality, and the use of it to gain

attention, has a direct impact on young girls who want the attention that their favourite celebrities have (Hamilton, 2008). This is seen in lyrics from the Pussycat Dolls; “Boys call you sexy and you don’t care what they say. See, every time you turn around they scream your name.” (Jerkins, Thomas, Thomas, McCarty, SamwellSmith, 2008), and from another girl group, Sugababes; “I’m busy showing him what he’s been missing, I’m kind of showing off for his full attention.” (Austin, Buena, Buchanan, Range, 2005).

Walter has stated that pornography has a much larger presence in the lives of young people due to the widespread availability of internet access (2010). This has affected many design-related industries including music, advertising, television, and magazine and newspaper publishing which have begun to adopt aesthetics and ideas that end up similar to soft pornography (Walter, 2010). However, in Sarihfe’s interview with raunch culture critic Ariel Levy, Levy states that it is the culture to blame rather than the media itself (2008). In her own book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, Levy adds that teens become very confused by the messages they are sent from different areas of their lives. Magazines and reality shows are saturated with sexual imagery, near-nudity, and instructions on how to be ‘sexy’, whereas at high school the majority of young people are taught in sex-ed classes to ‘just say no’ (2010).

Chapter Four

THE

NEGATIVE SIDE OF SEXY “In the hypersexual culture the woman who has won is the woman who foregrounds her physical perfection and silences any discomfort she may feel.”

Natasha Walter 2010

(Walter, 2010, p. 125)

Teenage girls in contemporary times are encountering increasing pressure on how they should look, behave, and even think. Douglas believes that teenagers in general are expected to be unruly and defiant, however girls are also told to obey the preexisting standards of image and behaviour. Therefore, “if they behave like true adolescents, they can’t be feminine, and if they adopt the mantle of femininity, they aren’t really adolescents”, which makes being a teenager exceptionally confusing for girls (2010, p. 53). During the past few decades, women have penetrated the traditional hierarchy of power, however eating disorders have become more and more common, and plastic surgery has become the fastest growing specialist area in medicine (Wolf, 2002).

In the western world, one in every hundred females suffer from a serious eating disorder (Penny, 2011, p. 22). Girls’ magazines are often filled with instructions on how to get the perfect beach body, as well as a plethora of imagery of young and thin female models and celebrities, all of which adds to the external pressures to young women to conform to what’s ‘ideal’ (Hamilton, 2008). According to Gill & Scharff, our society has brought up girls that simply don’t believe they are ‘good enough.’

These girls are always dissatisfied with themselves, internally and especially externally, and they continually want to somehow transform themselves (2011).

Television makeover shows are quite popular with the young female demographic, and the majority of these shows promote plastic surgery as something positive and easy (Walter, 2010). Douglas says that in many reality shows about plastic surgery, the subject is shown to have low self-esteem, and that the reason for the surgery is to ‘empower’ the subject (by pointing out every feature that does not conform to conventional beauty, and proceeding to change it) and therefore make her a more confident human being (2010). Many, if not most, advertisements and other imagery depicting women present the unnatural, surgically enhanced body as ‘natural’, which causes women to believe that what they have ‘naturally’ is not good enough and therefore must alter themselves (Gill, 2008).

Chapter Five

THE

ILLUSION OF EMPOWERMENT “TV and film producers understood that girls and women liked seeing women with power in entertainment programming, and that advertisers would be satisfied as long as such fare sold mascara, Oil of Olay, Ultra Slim-Fast, and push-up bras.�

Susan J. Douglas 2010

(Douglas, 2010, p.53)

Women have been enticed to become involved in a capitalised culture based upon the common knowledge that ‘sex sells’. This new cultural influence is seen under the premise of empowerment, while also alluding to the feminist principle of the ‘right to choose’ (Penny, 2011). There is an unnerving similarity in contemporary times between liberation stemming from feminism and liberation stemming from capitalism (Power, 2009). An example of this is seen in a beauty article in Harpers Bazaar Australia, that links red lipstick to Beyonce in her music video for Run the World, a song about female empowerment. The beginning of the article says, “here’s a girl who obviously got the memo that when one leads a radical all female army into battle, nothing screams defiant vixen like red lips” (Kelly, 2011, p. 211), and goes on to list which designer lip stick brands you should go and purchase.

In Power’s One Dimensional Woman, she uses irony to express a common perception of what it is to be feminist today: “Feminism offers you the latest deals in lifestyle improvement, from the bedroom to the boardroom, from guilt-free fucking to the innocent hop-skip all the way to the shopping mall – I don’t diet so it’s ok! I’m not deluded! I can buy what I like!” (Power, 2009, p. 29).

As mentioned in part I, when potential for profit is seen in a social movement such as feminism, corporations and advertisers dilute and twist the ideas for their own commercial gain. Modern feminism encouraged women to focus on their personal desires and freedom, but that has now been turned around and sold back

to younger women with notable additions of “consumerism and self-objectification” (Walter, 2010, p. 65).

A number of scholars have created a new term, ‘commodity feminism’, to express how corporations have attempted to utilise the force of feminism for commercial gain – while overlooking it’s social and political side (Gill, 2008). Feminism is seen as ‘women gaining the things they want’, and while many feminists would argue that this would include their desires on the socio-political spectrum, others can believe it includes women enjoying shopping for, and consuming, goods such as shoes, chocolate, handbags and wine (Power, 2009). Gill states that women are often now presented as pleasing themselves without male approval, but in doing so they ‘can’t help’ but gain men’s admiration (2008).

Although women’s rights have come a long way from a century, and even a few decades, ago, it seems that whenever one milestone is accomplished, another issue arises. Raunch culture has increased the objectification of women under the façade of being empowering, and much of post-feminism has watered down original feminist principles to create a more patriarchal-society-friendly version of the movement. The widespread depiction of ‘sexy’ women in the media has created an ideal of what the perfect woman should look and act like, which has caused low self-confidence in women of all ages who are becoming increasingly surrounded by such imagery. As the media does with most social movements and subcultures, feminism has been turned into something that can be capitalised upon, while the more pressing objectives of the movement have been ignored. Although some of the new “empowered” culture can be seen as positive, there is still a long way to go before this empowerment no longer is linked to impossible ideals of beauty, and being an active consumer.

REFERENCES Austin, D., Buena, M., Buchanan, K., Range, H. (2005). Push the button [Sugababes]. On Taller in More Ways [CD]. New York, NY: Island Records. de Beauvoir, S. (1953). The second sex (H.M. Parshley, Trans.). New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.

Douglas, S. J. (2010). Enlightened sexism: The seductive message that feminism’s work is done. New York, NY: Times.

Eisenstein, H. (1984). Contemporary feminist thought. London, England: Unwin.

Gill, R. (2008). Empowerment/sexism: Figuring female sexual agency in contemporary advertising. Feminism & Psychology, 18(35), 35-55.

Gill, R., & Scharff, C. (2011). New femininities: Postfeminism, neoliberalism and subjectivity. Hampshire, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hamilton, M. (2008). What’s happening to our girls?. London, England: Penguin.

Jerkins, R., Thomas, T., Thomas, T., McCarty, J., Samwell-Smith, P. (2008). When I grow up [The Pussycat Dolls]. On Doll Domination [CD].

Santa Monica, CA: Interscope Records.

Kelly, E. (2011, September). Loud mouth. Harpers Bazaar Australia, p.

211.

Levy, A. (2010). Female chauvinist pigs: Women and the rise of raunch culture. Victoria, Australia: Black Ink Books.

Penny, L. (2011). Meat market: Female flesh under capitalism.

Winchester, England: O Books.

Power, N. (2009). One-dimensional woman. Winchester, England: O Books.

Ryan, E. G. (2012, August 9). Someone at NBC apparently approved this creepy, porny video of female Olympians. Retrieved October 7, 2012, from http://jezebel.com/5933302/someone-at-nbc-apparently-approvedthis-creepy-porny-video-of-female-olympians/ Sahrife, K. (2008). Women and the rise of raunch culture. New African, 478, 28-29. van Gilder Cooke, S. (2012, August 11). For Olympic women, the pressure to look perfect lingers. Retrieved October 6, 2012, from http:// olympics.time.com/2012/08/11/for-olympic-women-the-pressure-to-lookperfect-lingers/ Walter, N. (2010). Living dolls: The return of sexism. London, England: Virago.

Wolf, N. (2002). The beauty myth (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Harper Perennial.

Wollstonecraft, M. (2006). A vindication of the rights of woman.

London, England: Penguin.

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