Sharks, skulls and coke

[imomus]

The sneering skull snorts a huge line of coke into her broken nose then turns to you. "I'm going to kill you," she growls.

That's a reductio ad absurdum of the iconography I pick up from a single edition of sharky UK style magazine Dazed and Confused, a magazine which recycles fashion-punk attitude endlessly. Publisher: Jefferson Hack, ex-partner of Kate Moss, the model currently forced into a big public mea culpa over her coke habit. (Personally, I'm with Tracey Emin on the issue. Coke sucks.)

I call this "sharky style", and the West is full of it. It's how we picture ourselves. We have sharky cars, sharky watches, sharky bands, sharky sports stars, sharky buildings, sharky white teeth (even when sharky tobacco companies are selling us cigarettes that first yellow our teeth then leave us dead in the water, static in a cloud of blood). They're all fit, these sharks, in the Darwinian sense. They kill their competitors. They're likely to kill you too... unless you can make yourself look and act like them!

The reasons the sharky style attitude (sneers, skulls, coke, killing) is so prevalent in the West (and just how much further can it go? Style mags filled entirely with bloody-toothed sharks? What if sharks become extinct and look like losers?) are various:

1. It's cool to kill: Yeeh-hah! It's very hard, confronted by someone who's threatening to kill you, to assert that they're trivial or uncool or a loser, just as it's hard not to admire an actor waving a pistol in a Hollywood poster. A sneer, a threat or a pistol transforms a model or an actor instantly from a passive, plaintive object, vulnerable and desperate for our approval, to a powerful subject, indifferent to our cries for mercy, not only genetically superior to us (and therefore more fit to reproduce) but on the verge, here and now, of snuffing out our DNA with a single shot to the head.

2. Empowerment: A woman can never be a sexual object when she's about to kill you, even if she's naked. A working class or black youth never looks like a sad victim, ready for a visit from a social worker, if he's pointing a gun at your head. Violent imagery is empowerment, innit? Like those killer-girls in "Baise Moi!", women too can be rapist-murderers, and all's right with the world! Instant justice from the barrel of a gun! A level swimming pool for all sharks, regardless of race, colour, gender or creed!

Actors, models and musicians are, of course, all a bit gay and girly to be "just about to snuff out our DNA". But it's the nerd's revenge, isn't it? No wonder it takes its inspiration from punk; who could be more nerdy than Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious? I mean, they were more like minnows than sharks, weren't they? Yet one of them, sharked up by drugs, turned out to be a real killer.

3. Drugs as a metaphor for consumerism: That great long line of coke the skull is snorting... it's a metaphor for the addictiveness of the consumer end of capitalism, just as the skull is a metaphor for the murderousness of the producer end of capitalism. You're not supposed to enjoy consumer societies. That would lead to widespread epicureanism, to wholesomeness, to health. No, plethora is supposed to lead to addiction, to guilty pleasures, to sin, to death. At the production end, well, if you get in the way of the producers you'll be disposed of, your body dumped in a quarry in Columbia. One human life doesn't matter much, my friend. If you're at the consumption end, your duty is to get addicted to the product, to buy it reliably, and to die promptly, without placing too much strain on the social health network of your state (if it has one).

And meanwhile, your style sharkiness is just for show because it's a metaphor for the real sharks, the ones on the floor of the brokerage, the ones in business suits, the ones with the power for which "empowerment" is a mere metaphor, a bit of fancy dress. Yes, the middle-aged, balding men in suits are the real sharks. They don't look like sharks themselves, though. They look more like elderly pigs or walruses.

"Dazed and Confused has found innovative ways to present brands to a uniquely influential readership that demands to be addressed on its own terms," waffles the Dazed and Confused press-pack. "Dazed has translated the following blue chip brands for the style audience: Coca Cola, Nike, Evian, Converse, Motorola, Canon, Hilfiger, Tiger Beer, Topshop... to name only a few."

"Demands, translated". The "style subculture" who read Dazed speak a different language from the language of capitalism (or at least some heavily-accented dialect) and therefore "demand translation". Once translation occurs (largely a process in which dominant values become visual metaphors in the subculture, because the subculture doesn't tend to read much), the basic concepts of the mainstream culture can appear, quite unchallenged, in the subculture.

The thing that interests me is this: not all social systems model themselves on Darwinism, and not all style mags require everybody to look and act like a shark. In fact, it sometimes seems like only the Anglo-American model does these things. There is nothing inherent in systems of production that demands shark-like imagery, or "empowerment" through skulls, sharks, and snorting.

Yes, you guessed it, I'm about to tell you that Japanese magazines have peaceful nature imagery, and unashamedly feminine women (the women of the future!) and reassuring pictures of cakes and cafes instead of skulls, sneers, and coke. That Japanese capitalism seems to be a production system with less viciousness and vulgarity than any other. Well, not quite. I'm going to show you.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Look at the sharky Western women, so independent, sassy, feisty and mesomorphic! So much the future for all women of the world! So castrating, and so empowered by acting like unpleasant assholes (if only for the camera). And yet, deep down, so guilty, so addictive, so unable to experience pleasure, so unhappy! My drugs hell, by Kate!

[turkishb.livejournal.com]

So we have:

American = castrating
Japanese = anticastrating? (cumbuckets? hehe)

Thus

These females are both sexualized, and are both -attempting- some sort of sexual equity with males. The Americans do this by removing male virility and superimposing female virility, whereas the Japanese do what?

In the examples you give, none of these females look the least bit truly maternal... They look like girls playing House. They have ladles, but they don't cook. (This is my perception so far...) The are ostensibly Women, but really they are a figment of Women, the immature seed of Women: girl...

I wish you hadn't seized upon only this part of my comment... To talk about Kawai may be much more productive...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think that while Western feminism did seek to deconstruct both masculinity ("patriarchy") and femininity ("empowerment"), the populist version of it which has filled the media in the West has conveniently forgotten the deconstruction of masculinity. That's perhaps because if you deconstruct both genders, you're left in a strange (and sexless) landscape. Instead, "empowerment" has been conveniently mapped to "patriarchy" by the neat device of making women men. Japan is in a much better position now because femininity was never deconstructed there. Therefore it remains as a real ideal for both men (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/21/AR2005092102434.html) and women to aspire to. What's more, femininity and consumer societies work well together, because consumerism tends to feminize us all.

I'm perpetually asking myself the question "Why hasn't consumer culture made us more feminine and more epicurean in the West?" And I think the answer is that Platonism and Christianity (yes, my familiar betes noires) and our still-rampant militarism keep making us pull back from the feminine, and the sybaritic whenever (as last in the 1990s) they threaten to "soften" the West.

[turkishb.livejournal.com]

I definitely agree that Platonism has prevented our feminization, which is something I lament. As for Christianity, I find any system which relegates causality to subjective qualities (I am good so I won't be hit by lightening...or a hurricane) positively suspicious. :/ However, I can't say the Pagans always did much better. (And Japanese shinto animism seems quite Pagan!)

When I read Neumann's Psyche & Cupid I was struck by how little examination he gave masculinity itself. Psyche heals the wound between the Great Mother and the human girl by undergoing a series of essentially masculine trials, but yet never becoming masculine. Pysche attains a psyche that, while it can use "masculine" means, never becomes "masculinized."

What do you think would be the first step to deconstructing masculinity? Really, what are we thinking as masculinity? Death, progress, desire, animousity?

turkishb and imomus

[svenskasfinx.livejournal.com]

..out of most of what I have had the chance to read so far, your thoughts are getting closer to mine before I read what (i)Momus had to say.

I've been thinking about this long and hard, and on the whole as a woman from an "American" society.. yet transplanted in Swedish (wonderful) surroundings.. I have always noted the irony of the IMAGE of female..what sells (the sexual, the immature, the "cocky" self assured) and yet here we are trapped in a world where any power is really "token" when it comes to the style of marketing.. because now they step over to the new foot and take the woman from a "passive object" to a "power object" to be more of a challange to dominate (I suppose) I mean they still have everything the culture wants.. only with so much more edge to it..

and naturally woman are not at all happy, even as lesbians, without a man, in this phase of marketing...

The mother is the "de-sexualisation" of the female.. but the myth of the "bitch" and the "whore" still linger on...

What of the mother within it all.. after all Kali was "the great mother" giving birth, and then at the same time slaughtering.. not only the new born of her own womb, possibly, but anyone else who gets in the way of her desires..(she was eventually killed as we know) and her divine consort mourned... for it wasn't her bad nature.. and bad reputation.. he loved her, but in spite of it..

I get the impression that there are always going to be "darker" images of the female.. (and of the male) but just as history has swept many examples "under the rug" only to be discovered later on.. so is it with these images projected now by marketing..eventually it will dwindle away..to be forgotten..

remember we keep redifining in an on going way, what it is to be a man, what it is to be a woman, by our own personal standards and experiences.. and society has done that on a whole.. its the voice of those in control and it brings about a certain irony to the expectations.. expectation where age is NOT empowering but rather castrating also.. for men, and for women..

I've at last forgotten what it is I'm going on about anyway...
I'll bail out...of course it was Americans who often had a critique of Swedish women.. how maybe they were not so femine for being so independant and creatures of their own will and desire as a whole, from their perspective... I have a critique of the way populare culture in America, Hollywood in particular portrays women, supposedly independent and yet how many political representives ARE women in the US? Its not that women don't have the facility.. so what is it?

Why is it here that our political representives actually match up to the population? Where almost 50% of the population are woman (and respectively men) isn't it better that policy makers and represetives actually show that women are actually people too...

Lolitas... imature girls.. where are the older women? Do they all dye and dry up after having children? Is it the same reason why you never see any pregnant women in Hollywood films? Its embarssing to be old or a woman, or both...quite possibly..

forgive my temporary insanity...