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The supersexualised market and its
mindless validation encourage the assumption that feminist and all
equalitarian struggles have ended, that equality for all women and
men has been achieved, and the deserving lot can now have anything
they want. Its sexy-selfish template trivialises all social
commitment and mocks any serious engagement with arts, literature,
politics, or spirituality.
In the market culture, money forms the ties of affection and love.
Personal relationships, like other things in life, are the
function of wealth and possession. Promotional ads seldom depict a
man's economic success without possessing a playgirl or a trophy
wife, the more (women) the merrier. This fits in with the concept
of possession—possessing property leads to possessing fetching and
fertile females. The neatness of the fit between economic success
and sexual success is not surprising since both are manifestations
of the same dominant ideology and value system. This is in sync
with the traditional—patriarchal—concept of woman as a maal
(property). The modern capitalist commodification of woman is just
an updated version of the patriarchal objectification of woman.
The commercial culture just packages the old heterosexual
stereotypes in a new feisty vocabulary of female empowerment and
an exuberant celebration of the body.
The market appeals to naturalness and ubiquity of sex to sell or
service, which in its turn makes sex an object of exchange and
commerce. The marketers promise that there is no happiness or
sexual bliss that your money cannot buy you. Thus, sexuality
unleashed and celebrated in the market is never free in itself. It
is a symbol, as John Berger says, for the good life in which you
can buy whatever you want:
“To be able to buy is the same thing
as being sexually desirable…the implicit message [is:] if you are
able to buy this product you will be lovable. If you cannot buy
it, you will be less lovable.”
[John Berger, Ways of
Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin, 1981), p. 144.]
Since nothing defuses the
arbitrariness of capitalism like sex, the three-letter word,
especially the female sexuality and its pornographic commercial
celebration has taken the centre stage in the market. In order to
lure customers and sell things, the presence of a half-clad model
with bedroom eyes has become mandatory to sell everything—from
sofa and car to beer and hard liquor. Ads often dismember
women's—and now men's, too—bodies to emphasise their erogenous
parts to promote the products. Pointing to the female
objectification at its most pernicious, Margaret Atwood contends
that the powers that can invoke or bring in anything—national
debt, patriotism, or other “noble” or “moral” cause—to exploit the
female flesh:
It [the female body] sells cars, shaving lotion, cigarettes, hard
liquor; it sells diet plans and diamonds, and desire in tiny
crystal bottles… It does not merely sell, it is sold. Money flows
into this country or that country, flies in, practically crawls
in, suitcase after suitcase, lured by all those hairless pre-teen
legs. Listen, you want to reduce the national debt, don't you?
Aren't you patriotic? That's the spirit. That's my girl. She's a
natural resource, a renewable one luckily, because those things
wear out so quickly…."
[Margaret Atwood, “The
Female Body,” in idem Good Bones.
Couch House Press,
1992]
Above all, the market commercialises
sex by stereotyping sex roles. Inculcation and normalisation of
masculine and feminine stereotypes is necessary for boosting sales
and turning sex into a thriving industry. The market-induced
standards of hot body (that rarely match what most women and men
actually look like) immensely enhance the scope to give hopes—sell
things—to the less feminine, the less masculine . The bottom line
is: solution to your sexual problem is something you have to pay
for. Buying the product will supersexualise you. In
advertisements, the tag line goes something like, Hey guys! Want
to become alpha male, seductive female! Want to heighten your sex
appeal and overall confidence!
Then, buy the magic grooming
products and colognes! Instinct from Axe, Swagger by Old Spice,
Magnetic Attraction Enhancing Body Wash by Dial. Body wash. Face
wash. Exfoliating wash. Body spray. Body hydrator. Shaving cream.
Deodorant. And, of course, shampoos, conditioner and hair gel.
According to a 2010 report in The New York Times , worldwide
retail sales of such products for boys ages 8 to 19 would be
around $ 2 billion. And sales of beauty products for young women,
of course, would be many, many times higher. Sex sells!
For profit-maximisation at any cost, the market exerts a wider set
of pressures on people, especially youngsters, to embrace and
engage in casual sex. The market is saturated with sexual imagery
and content whose effect is to reinforce the idea that sexual
activities are central to our life. Teenagers are bombarded with
publicity that shows premature sexual activity as a benchmark of
being cool, trendy and advanced. The most perverse aspect of
selling sex is the advertisers' growing tendency to presenting
children in sexually provocative clothing and poses to sell
products—a marketing method that has come to be known as
“corporate paedophilia.” Even the most reputable companies indulge
in such crime to up their sell. Philosopher Clive Hamilton
contends that corporate paedophilia is so “widespread and
unremarked that it stands as testimony to the Freudian denial on a
mass scale.” Citing the phenomenon of young cheerleaders as sex
symbols, he says that the delusion of the mothers who insist that
their daughters' routine are in no way sexual—despite the short
skirts, clingy tops and bottom-thrusting—would be shattered if
they “spent five minutes with their ears open, listening to the
lechers on the terraces as their daughters performed.” He makes
the point that such consent and acceptance has been “extracted by
subtle coercion—not by the other party but by social groups and
the wider culture.” In an oversexualised climate created by the
market forces, participating in sexual shows and activities by
youngsters can be a way of winning social approval and group
acceptance.
[Clive Hamilton, The
Freedom Paradox , (Noida: Allen-Unwin with Viva, 2009), p. 203.]
Biological
model of sexuality
Since the market is already saturated with sex and porn, there is
a mad race among the marketers to produce even more stimulating
words and images to get the public attention and peddle sex as a
master solution to all problems. The love of lucre blinds them to
the fact that seeing sex as panacea is as reductive and dangerous
as seeing sex as sin. Earlier, sin used to be “to give in to one's
sexual desires;” now, it is not to have “full and repeated sexual
satisfaction.” Today, it is sin not to have full libidinal health,
full sexual expression “but in the same old puritan
form—alienation from body and feeling, and exploitation of the
body as though it were a machine.” Indiscriminate sex is being
hailed as a substitute to the anxiety of aloneness and emotional
depletion compounded by a dwindling community life. Sexuality,
seceded from intimacy and social sensitivity, is hailed as
liberation.
“What goes into building a
relationship—the sharing of tastes, fantasies, dreams, hopes for
the future and fears from the past—seem to make people more shy
and vulnerable than going to bed with each other. They are more
wary of the tenderness that goes with psychological and spiritual
nakedness than they are of the physical nakedness in sexual
intimacy.”
[Rollo
May, “Antidotes for the New Puritanism,”
The Saturday Review ,
26 March, 1966. Italics added.]
Earlier, she wanted more intimacy
and he wanted more penetration; now she has caught up, well…
overtaken him in divorcing sex from intimacy, if we are to believe
libertarians like Katherine Millet whose sensational memoir The
Sexual Life of Catherine M. is advertised by the publisher as “a
manifesto of our times—when the sexual equality of women is a
reality and where love and sex have gone their own separate ways.”
* [Katherine Millet, The Sexual Life of Catherine M . (London:
Sepent's Tail, 2002).] The thesis statement in Millet's memoir is
stark: “Fucking is an antidote to boredom. I find it easier to
give my body than my heart.” She gives explicit accounts of
hundreds of sexual encounters, especially orgies in which she is
penetrated in every orifice. She boasts of having had sex with a
hundred men in one single night. She admits she cannot remember
most of them and did not even see many. But she is so sure that
only through such sexual abandon can we find full freedom and that
any criticism of her remorseless sexual orgies is not just
neurotic but oppressive as well. This form of free and
depersonalised sex is being hailed in the society set as a major
triumph of the female power rather than actualisation of
primordial male or female fantasy in which all finer feelings
drown in a sea of testosterone. The blunt biological point of
“anatomy is destiny”—“penis fits vagina”—is being stretched to the
dangerous extreme by asserting, “love is the victim's response to
the rapist,” or, “when rape is inevitable, lie down and enjoy.”
Such biological model of sexuality is a dangerous nonsense because
sex is not simply a natural bodily function. Of course, sex is a
drive or instinct, but like all human drives and instincts, sex,
too, is developed and cultivated in society. Though natural, sex
involves a decision, a judgement. Even for the believers in free
sex, it is neither involuntary nor indiscriminate. Defining sex as
purely biological can be questioned from many anti-essentialist
perspectives. Foucault demolished the sexuality-as-biology thesis
in his History of Sexuality , along with the assumption that such
a natural, biological sexuality could be “liberated” outside the
society and culture. Sexual identities are not merely the
expression of natural instincts, but are social and political
constructs as well.
“Sexuality has always been the site
where the future of our species, and at the same time our truth as
human subjects, are formed.” Foucault rightly sees sexuality as a
historically and culturally constructed domain of experience that
is shaped by social relations of power. As he put it, sexuality
constitutes “an especially dense transfer point for relations of
power: between men and women, young people and old people, parents
and offspring, teachers and students, priests and laity, an
administration and a population.”
[Michel Foucault, The
History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1976, 1990, p. 103.]
Sexual needs, values and emotions
are shaped by society and politics. The assumption—and
theorisation—of the Freudian Marxists and feminist radicals of the
1960s and 70s such as Herbert Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich and Shere
Hite that took a categorically biological view of sexuality, along
with the optimism that sexual liberation will overcome capitalism
and transform the social order was naïve and utterly wrong. *
[Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation: A Philosophical Inquiry
into Freud (London: Routledge, 1956); Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual
Revolution: Toward a Self-Governing Character Structure , fourth
edn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969 [1930]); Shere
Hite, The Hite Report on Female Sexuality (New York: Dell, 1976).]
In fancifully yoking Marx and Freud together—by proposing that
workers and women couldn't be free until they were liberated from
sexual repression and the tyranny of traditional family
structures—the likes of Reich and Marcuse overlooked the social
and material conditions under capitalist order. Their fascination
with the body and the pleasures of consumption (mass market
kitsch, shopping malls, television soap-operas) displaced the
traditional Marxist focus on conditions of material production.
They forgot that Marx himself had dismissed free love as a
“bestial” prospect, tantamount to “general prostitution.”
[See Francis Wheen,
Marx's Das Kapital ( Bhopal : Manjul Publication, 2008), p. 105]
It is notable what he writes in the
Communist Manifesto, “Our bourgeois, not content with having wives
and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to
speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in
seducing each other's wives.”
[Robert C Tucker, ed.,
The Marx-Engels Reader , Second edition
(New York: Norton,
1978), p. 488.]
He follows this up by asserting that
only the abolition of the capitalist system of production would
lead to the abolition of prostitution “both public and private.”
The New Left's fond hopes that unfettered libido will not only
liberate sexuality but also oppressive structures of power and
patriarchy did more harm than good to the cause of a social
revolution. Seeing sexuality as merely biological was, is,
essentialist, one-dimensional, not very different from the dogma
of evolutionary psychology. No wonder, sex-centred radicalism
ended up with women simply internalising male ideas of sex and
power. The concept of free sex was easily co-opted by the
capitalist forces which went on to build a massive sex industry,
based on pornography and prostitution in the wake of the sexual
revolution. Now, it is clear as daylight that far from unalloyed
pleasure, “free sex” is also the site of extreme selfishness,
promiscuity, relationship risks, commercial exploitation, male
violence, rape, pornography and prostitution. Sex is no exception
to the truth that the extreme of anything leads to absurdity,
sickness and decay. Sex has its place in life but when it is
employed as a therapy to fill up social insecurity and emotion
vacuum, and taken as a substitute to social action and
transformation, it becomes dark and dangerous—a tool in the hands
of oppressive forces.
Commercially packaged femininity
A total exclusion of labouring bodies and concealment of less than
perfect faces and bodies in the corporate media tell the sinister
story of sex, lies and advertising. In its ruthless pursuit of
profit maximisation, the market culture has deceptively
appropriated, mutilated and domesticated the liberating feminist
ideas against an unbalanced and sick society. A feminist
sociologist explains this nefarious trend:
Cultural images of women's beauty—and implicit ratings of their
bodies—are replete throughout the culture…. Advertisements
admonish women to be afraid—afraid of aging, afraid of food,
afraid of being alone, afraid of having too small a bust. They
promise that with the right products, a woman can be beguiling and
seductive, as long as you change how you look. Smooth your skin,
wear the right scent, change your hair colour, colour your lips,
and above all, be thin! Why? To attract men. And, if the ads don't
work, the articles tell you month after month how to please men:
“Touch him this way,” “The one word he's dying to hear during
sex,” “How to make scent your secret weapon” (an article on
so-called “man-entrancing elixirs” at the workplace—as if all
women needed at work was the sexual attention of men!”). And how
does feminism fit in this? Advertisements tell it all: “The New
Movement”—an ad for hair gel or “the new women's movement”—the ad
copy for the bra! So not only do advertisements tell women exactly
what they have to buy to have the right look, they have also
appropriated the women's movement by claiming that new freedoms
allow you to buy the right products.
[Margaret L Andersen,
Thinking About Women: Sociological Perspectives on Sex`and Gender
, sixth edn. ( New York : Pearson, 2003), p. 56.]
The gap between an iconic perfect
body and the natural body produces shame—and misery—for both women
and men. The perceived lack of ideal femininity or masculinity
even ruins many lives. The shame permeates the core of both their
emotional lives and their personal selves. It manifests itself in
the “obsession with diet, with exercise, and even with having
surgery so that her body can be an object of pride and measure up
to the cultural ideal of beauty and femininity.” In
advertisements, women's bodies are often fragmented in parts—the
lips, the eyes, the breasts, the legs—each requiring a
product-solution to enhance their values. From dieting and
frenetic exercise, the fetish of a perfect body and obsession with
weight and shape has led to the mushrooming of the cosmetic
surgery centres. Facelifts, nose jobs, liposuction, breast
augmentation, breast reduction, tummy tucks, buttocks lifts are
the new ways to achieve the ideal of beauty. Go under the knife
and take magic pills for fuller lips, slimmer hips, convex
breasts, concave belly. Not long ago, 22-year-old Solange Magnano,
a former Miss Argentina , died after complications during cosmetic
surgery on her buttocks. Her death was mourned by a close friend
who said, “A woman who had everything lost her life to have a
slightly firmer behind.”
While being commodified, women are made to believe in their new
subjectivity and empowerment through a seductive discourse of
playfulness, freedom and choice. Women are encouraged to cultivate
erotic appeal and capitalise upon every aspect of it because
sexual attractiveness is a personal asset that offers money and
mobility. Catherine Hakim, for example, gleefully argues in a
provocative book that women can—and should—use “erotic capital” to
enhance their power “in the bedroom and the boardroom.”
[Catherine Hakim, Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital (
London : Allen Lane , 2011).]
Fortunately, not everyone is as
hunky-dory as Hakim, seeing lookism as the royal road to women's
empowerment. “Midriff advertising,” Rosalind Gill points out,
“adds a further layer of oppression. Not only are women
objectified now as they were before, but through sexual
subjectification they must also now understand their own
objectification as pleasurable and self-chosen .”
[Rosalind
Gill, “Supersexualise Me!”, in Feona Attwood, ed, Mainstreaming
Sex: The Sexualisation of the Western Culture ( London : I B
Tauris, 2009), p. 107.]
Gill argues that the supposed sexual subjectification of women actually re-sexualises women's bodies
within a rigid heterosexual economy, in which power, pleasure and
subjectivity are all presented in relation to traditional
heterosexual relations. “Far from empowering women, it requires
them to internalise and own an impossible view of women
sexuality.” It promotes a uniform standard of female beauty and
sex appeal that excludes a large number of women who cannot meet
these narrow sexy standards.
These women [fat women, older women, disabled women, lesbians and
many other “unattractive” women] are never accorded sexual
subjecthood. The figure of the “unattractive” woman who seeks a
sexual partner remains one of the most vilified in popular
culture. … Sexual subjectification, then, is a highly specific and
exclusionary practice, and sexual pleasure is actually irrelevant
here; it is the power of sexual attractiveness that is important.
Indeed, the two are frequently and deliberately confused in
midriff advertisement.
[Rosalind Gill,
“Supersexualise Me!” in Feona Attwood, ed, Mainstreaming Sex,
pp. 104-5.]
When one's identity and self-esteem
is so deeply tied up with one's body image, the body however
beautiful turns into a structure that does not allow blossoming of
one's individuality. The more women are ensnared in this kind of
body politic—accepting looks as key to their self-image—the less
(the worse) they think about themselves and others. This was
brought out dramatically in an US survey some time ago in which
over half of young women said they would prefer to be hit by a
truck than be fat.
[Deborah Rhode, The
Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law ( New
York : Oxford University Press, 2011.)]
Consumer culture targets both women and men with standardisation
of femininity and masculinity, but women become more vulnerable to
the beauty ideal because the female body is displayed as an object
of power, and that power is based on beauty. Though images of men
in popular culture are also stereotyped, they are generally shown
in dominating, self-assured postures—as masculinity still means
“natural” power and control—while the new femininity is like
consuming and celebrating a kind of emancipatory nakedness. In
other words, if man and woman are defined and judged by just their
anatomies, he is still on top. As anatomy remains destiny, he is
still the mover and she is the shaker. As the popular culture
pushes women to “channel energy into being seen rather than into
being strong, attracting becomes a substitute for acting.” Far
from liberation, succumbing to lookism is a trap that perpetuates
the worthiness of a woman in terms of hooking a powerful man and
“sharing his bed, bearing his children, and wearing his name.”
Only a thin line separates the commercially packaged femininity
from a willing victimhood.
Erotic capital and prostitution
The pursuit of erotic perfection does not lead to personal or
social bliss; it leads to a sex industry that lures women and men
with promises of sexually-oriented shortcuts to success. “Want to
buy a Rolex…a Contessa…clothes from Gucci, a sunglass from Rayban
…Don't worry if you don't have money … You have a pretty face, a
wonderful body that you can use and get those dream items.” No
wonder, all kinds of prostitutions are flourishing today—in
addition to the traditional body trafficking induced by abject
poverty and force which continue to blight millions of lives.
(According to the UNICEF estimate in 2010, 1.8 million children
are forced to enter sex trade each year.) Perhaps for the first
time in history, thanks to the rise of consumerist culture of
raunch, classy prostitutes and painted, perfumed gigolos have
gained a global respectability. With the consumerist fever
sweeping the world, the item girls, the models, the porn stars
have become the role models—and envy—of many middle class
youngsters. Singing the virtues of their “noble” professions, many
pin-ups, porn stars and their patrons are penetrating the media,
the market—and now even parliaments. This phenomenon, represented
by the likes of Silvio Berlusconi, the former billionaire playboy
prime minister of Italy , is currently more visible in the
Euro-America, but the trend is gaining ground globally.
Today, there is no dearth of defence lawyers of prostitution, such
as Camille Paglia and Katherine Millet, who are outraged by any
criticism of prostitution. The decision to become a prostitute,
they argue, is a free choice no different from becoming a
schoolteacher, a waiter or a truck driver. In their view, sexual
morality or coercion is a myth, and negative stereotyping of
prostitutes is solely due to crass ignorance and outdated moralism.
This is part of their philosophy of sex which hinges on the idea
that sex—impersonal, paid, or anything—is more enjoyable when it
is free of any expectations, obligations or intimacy.
[Camille Paglia, Vamps
and Tramps: New Essays (New York: Vintage, 1994); Katherine
Millet, The Sexual Life of Catherine M]
Decades ago in India, Durga Bhagwat,
a Marathi author of repute, made a similar point, arguing that
prostitutes render a valuable service to society, and that the
flesh trade is a noble profession, to which Raja Dhale, a dalit
writer, retorted, “Then, why don't you join the noble profession?”
The condemnation of prostitution is not based on a puritan bigotry
but on a profound truth that our body and we are not two entities
but one, and by selling the body we sell our dignity and integrity
that anchors our individuality. When we put a price on our body,
we debase not only ourselves but also all those who value us as
individuals. Our sexuality is not a commodity that can be prised
free from our beings, and sold in the market like other consumer
products. Prostitution and pornography are human trafficking. Such
marketing of human sexuality is not a tribute to either physical
beauty or human freedom but a perversion of both. “The case
against pornography is the case against the interest that it
serves—the interest in seeing people reduced to their bodies,
objectified as animals, made thing-like and obscene. This is an
interest that many people have; but it is an interest at war with
our humanity."
[Roger Scruton,
Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (London : Oxford University
Press, 2011), p. 138.]
The pornification of market society,
however, is part of a bigger phenomenon in which the power and
wealth of those who prostitute their bodies are nothing in
comparison to those (such as corporate CEOs and power pimps) who
prostitute their minds to the highest bidder. Physical or
intellectual, prostitution never fails to debase and dehumanise
relationships and values. But the prostitution of mind is perhaps
more odious, because it prepares the ground for perversion and
corruption of the whole culture. The intellectual prostitution,
though seldom recognised, has for long afflicted humanity, and has
in fact been far more prevalent than the business of selling one's
body. There is little doubt though that the business of selling
one's mind and body has never been as flourishing as it is today,
thanks to the ruling market forces which give the powerful
prostitutes several other glamorous identities to hide their
primary profession. Today, the most successful prostitutes, of
both physical and intellectual variety, are those who remain
invisible (as prostitutes).
On the surface, the sex roles appear to have changed in a radical
way but has it brought more satisfaction to women and men? Has it
really liberated women? If yes, how many and from which
caste-and-class background? As a young Indian woman who writes on
the politics of the body observes, “If one realises that we belong
to a caste society that once demanded that untouchable women bare
their breasts and not wear blouses, we'll move closer to
understanding the male gaze that predominates advertising today.
…The stereotype of a sexually liberated woman desperately yearning
for the zipless you-know-what is another corporate creation that
only manifests male supremacy and female subjugation. …The
promotion of this licentiousness serves the material interests of
the ruling classes. Those who advocate such a de-moralising of
society have no tolerance to declass and decaste it. [It]…is an
absolutely apolitical project. The nude woman in a corporate
advertisement …cannot speak at all, not even to save herself. It
is merely a corporate appropriation of the feminist notion of
freedom that does not envisage any social change. Sex and the City
and its many clones may be about lusty and liberated women but
they do not have a single care about the rest of the world.”
[Meena Kandasamy, “All
You Who Make Love To Mannequins,” Outlook , December 26, 2011 .]
The consumerist culture celebrates
hypersexuality and peddles the idea that the young and the sexy
means new brains, new bodies that bring in new approaches and new
ideas. But this is appearance, not reality. It is not a movement
away from the traditional trajectory of domination and
subordination. Behind the facade of celebrating youth power and
sexual freedom, it indulges in a new kind of reactionary politics.
The supersexualised market and its mindless validation encourage
the assumption that feminist and all equalitarian struggles have
ended, that equality for all women and men has been achieved, and
the deserving lot can now have anything they want. Its
sexy-selfish template trivialises all social commitment and mocks
any serious engagement with arts, literature, politics, or
spirituality.
Braj Ranjan Mani is
the author of Debrahmanising History (Manohar, 2005).
This write-up, which
is published by countercurrents.org,
is
excerpted from his forthcoming book,
Reconstructing
Knowledge: Transforming the Self and Society.
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