Are you sitting down? Bitch Ph.D. has taken a job as Culture Editor for the Suicide Girls news blog.
Well, you know me. “Porn-is-patriarchy’s-purulent-pantheon” is my middle name. So the news wiped the feckless smirk off the Twisty visage quicker’n a slap with a flappin flounder. It was, in other words, difficult not to regard this development as something of a victory for the Dark Side.
However, this post is not — I repeat, not — a referendum on Dr B’s personal career decisions [see Note below]. Instead I wish to address a couple of the remarks the Professor made in response to the response to the announcement. Which I will get to in a moment.
But first, if you have never heard of Suicide Girls, all you are missing is a teen porn site. An enormously popular teen porn site, yes, but like all teen porn sites, it is run by men and exploits women, because it’s, you know, porn.
So what’s the big whoop? Suicide Girls is marketed, not as “traditional” porn, but as a hipster “pin-up” site. It’s a meaningless distinction that nevertheless seems to confuse people. Suicide Girls’ hipsterness — which, as a former hipster, I am sufficiently credentialed to critique — lies in the supposed transgressiveness of its supposedly “redefined” porn/beauty standard. Instead of emulating the pneumatic blonde boobness of Pamela Anderson, the chicks are gothy, punky, pierced and tattooed. They have names like “Vivisect,” “Havok,” and “Sorrow.” They are “given a voice” through site-sponsored blogs* in which they publish their apparently sought-after views on video games and awesome poetry. These blog “voices” supposedly empowerfulize them like no pornulated girls have been empowerfulized before.
Alterna-chick apologists for SG-style pornulation — who, with their keen hipster’s eye for irony, embrace the lexicon (“pin-up” vs. “centerfold”) of a quainter, Bettie Pagier porn epoch — point to the website’s purported (and invisible) “female-positive” stance as evidence that Suicide Girls models are not exploited like conventional Penthousian objets de smutte. Naturally, there are ex-Suicide Girls who, noting that the site re-pimps their photos to hardcore sites as they decline in popularity with the SG staff, and that subscribers to the decidedly un-feminist Playboy have free access to SG, see things rather differently.
As we have seen time and time again, two things happen whenever anyone “transgressively” redefines beauty (or sex, or femininity, or motherhood, or anything else popularly believed to be the purview of women). One, the transgressive redefinition only transpires when there is money to be made and flesh to exploit. Two, although it represents only a cosmetic shift in art direction, the new line of sexbot demarcation is touted and accepted as some kind of paradigmatic feminist breakthrough.
Remember the Sexual Revolution? Now you have to service a bunch of men rather than just one. The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty? Size 6 is the new size 2. Bust magazine? Where to “stock up on gorgeous cotton pajamas and lingerie.” Suicide Girls? “Porn even feminists can love.”
Suicide Girls, it turns out, is just niche-porn for honky scenester dudes. The women are all just as skinny, gloppy with makeup, young, hot, and clichéd as any models anywhere; they just sport a little more facial hardware, as specified by their subculture. The purported free-wheelin’ Suicide Girl vixenality, billed as an expression of the models’ empowerful “sex-positive” choices, is actually only a function of their having chosen from the limited sexuality menu determined by hetero male fantasy. As one BitchPhd commenter put it, “Sexist alterna-guys have this stupid fantasy about the perfect girl: She’s “alternative” and poetically sad inside about, well, the sadness of sad things; she’s all feisty and spunky and shit but always somehow does what alternaguy wants; and she’s all tough and fighty yet tiny and cute.”
But I digress.
The remark of Dr. B’s to which I mean to strenuously object is this:
“Whether the net effect of a hipster porn site is positive, or whether, just like mainstream porn, it’s ultimately exploitation pure and simple, is obviously an open question.”
Not to me. Pornography, as I so un-cogently argue above, is pornography, and its net effect has been shown by smarter people than me to be globally detrimental. The idea that the nature of the subculture with which a paying customer identifies — in this case, the audience of voyeuristic perv exploiters all dig punk rock — can somehow exempt porn models from the trenchant evils of commodification, strikes me as fanciful. Neither can I see that the “feminist” element, i.e. allowing the Suicide models to publish these closely monitored and censored blogs, represents any great blow for women’s sexual sovereignty.**
“I don’t think,” continues Dr. B, “that porn can be pointed to as promoting beauty ideals, though it might well be to blame for promoting fucked-up ideas about sex.”
Dr. B and I are in agreement about the fucked-up sex ideas. That’s because my argument is that in our culture “women” as a concept is indistinguishable from “sex.” We have always been the sex class, but now, thanks to the internet, sex and the male-dominant practices normalized by porn are so conflated, and those practices so universally pervasive, as to degrade women as we have never been degraded before. Because pornulated sex, with its dominant/submissive fetish, is so ubiquitous, and because beauty practices exist only to advertise sexual availability, I contend that all beauty ideals begin with porn. My case can be boiled down to one word.
Labiaplasty.
Genital amputation is merely the latest point plotted by the Twistitute for the Study of Mainstreamed Pornography on a continuum of sexual oppression that contains such venerable porn-generated beauty tortures as the Brazilian wax, hair bleach, dieting, the push-up bra, liposuction, the stiletto pump, and the boob job.
Porn, O young onions, is nothing but the graphic reproduction of prostitution. Just as male dominance has created the conditions that produce prostitution, it has created the conditions that produce porn. Under these conditions, all commercial sex is coercive and exploitative, even if women “choose” it, because women do not have agency in a patriarchy.
Note: We amicably disagree de temps en temps, but I am as fond of Dr. B as a spinster aunt can be of a internet personage she has never completely met. Once I even guest-blogged at Bitch Ph.D. I consider her a homey. I will therefore nuke without compunction comments that attack her personally (the proper place for those is on her blog, hardy har).
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* Which is not to say that Suicide Girls management encourages freedom of speech. Punitive action seems to be the result when models express too much “negativity.”
** Certainly someone has pointed out to these girls that you don’t have to pimp yourself on the internet to have either a blog or a “voice”. Of course, once they’ve signed the restrictive modeling contract and have resolved not to express too much “negativity,” they’re assured of quite the audience; the Suicide Girls “community” is fairly mondo, with several hundred thousand visitors a week. I regret that there is perhaps an aesthetic argument against giving teenage girls quite so wide an audience for these “voices.” Quoth SG model Niche, “I was sooooooo sick when Lorelei and I shot this… The “Pneumonia days”… But I had a blaaaast and she helped me feel hotter than I ever thought possible.” Oy vey.
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