Nigella Lawson
BODY LANGUAGE
There’s a poster, a huge sky-stretching poster: it features a woman, or her almost bare torso; shoulders, neck, a transparent black T-shirt over unconcealed – indeed, heightened – nipples. It’s an advertisement for Vogue.com (that’s Vogue-dot-com) though the dot is typographically missing.
I don’t say it isn’t witty (and the other almost bare torso woman in a cleavage-revealing crossover spotty silk shirt, pulls off the same arch trick), but that is hardly remarkable. What is strange, though, is that this is an advertisement for a glossy magazine, or the online version thereof, aimed at women. It is inconceivable that even 10 years ago any advertising copywriter would have thought that women would be attracted by hugely sexualised images of themselves.
Well, I say it’s strange, but perhaps I’m doing what Seventies feminists called “internalising”: holding views imbibed from male culture. Men expect women to be insulted by being sexualised; a garage mechanic would be disturbed were his female customers to look lewdly at his nudie calendar. All women, if they’re honest, know they hold their gaze away out of strenuous effort.
But those Seventies feminists also felt insulted by those girlie calendars. The question is, does it make a difference if this nudity, or if not nudity then pronounced suggestiveness, is aimed at women themselves?
And the second question has to be, why do we want to see such sexualised images of ourselves?
I am hesitant about stating that the intention makes a difference to the image. I am suspicious of those women who believe wearing a bustier is a political statement and that any reaction to their state of undress is untoward because they’re doing it “for themselves”. But it’s hard to insist that any sexualised image of women is demeaning or insulting: for one thing, we live in such a sexualised society that to go in for special pleading is to ignore the wider picture; and for another, to believe that female nudity is offensive is in some way an implicit admission of female self-hatred. The female body is not to be denied or to be decried. In our hearts, we know that.
But perhaps there is a link between both questions, or rather their consequent answers. Those who believe that showing cleavage or strutting your stuff is OK if it’s in the pursuit of your own, admiring gaze, are simply showing themselves to be narcissists. The fact that they believe there is a moral good inherent in the pose is, however, telling. But I believe that the growing female appetite for these similar sexualised images must stem from the same thing. In other words, it’s narcissism rather than sapphism.
You could argue that they are one and the same thing. To renounce difference, to be attracted to bodies of the same sex could at some level be a form of self-absorption. Heterosexuality is not necessarily an expression of self-hatred, however. On the whole, it is through difference that we understand, and appreciate, what we are ourselves. But when the female eye is held by a barely dressed model, we are in fact immersed in an idealised version, vision, of ourselves – and we love it.
The Vogue.com advertisements are not exceptional. All women’s magazines seduce their readers with sexy acres of female flesh.
But the difference between these images and the ones purveyed expressly for men lies not just in the disparity of fleshiness (the less pneumatic models that women’s magazines go in for is a scant excuse for propriety) but in the reaction to them. We look and imagine we are the subject: it is not objectification. It’s in a different way that men imagine themselves the subject: we do not imagine that these near-naked women are looking at us. Perhaps, then, the female motivation to look is more confused.
In truth, this confusion isn’t just pictorial. All women trying on clothes in a communal changing room are entranced by the other women stripping off. We don’t stare because we know that to do so would be misconstrued. Or that’s the excuse. But women want to look at other women. What we believe is our motivation is anxious interest: we nervously compare other women with ourselves. Perhaps in all that there is an element of erotic interest. Such matters, though, are hard to disentangle from general curiosity. Perhaps, too, there is that matter of having been always the object of the gaze of others and longing to know how it is to be the consumer, not the consumed.
The difficulty in that is that again we run the risk of internalising. While men might understandably cite the pull of difference, the lure of femininity, in the body, it doesn’t quite make sense that we, too, feel our feminine selves best expressed through sexual display. But for a woman to feel that feminity, our own sense of ourselves, comes out of bodily awareness is odd. It turns us into the willed protagonists of a lifelong costume drama.
In an age which has seen enormous erosion of traditional sex roles, it appears that it is no longer sufficient to be a woman: we have to turn ourselves into some parody of femininity – in the same way that women who first broke down the boundaries of gender turned themselves into parodies of men.
Perhaps we in the 21st century should be as politically aware as our sisters a few decades ago. For perhaps it’s the case that this current feminised eroticism is itself a product of capitalist materialism. We’ve turned our bodies into assets, a declaration of our worth. And men, women, it makes no difference: we are all consumers now.