Erasure of the breast
Feb. 4th, 2004 11:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
The female breast. A thing of beauty. A source of food. According to the Object Relations school of psychoanalysis, our first 'object'. According to baseball coach Tommy Lasorda, 'disgusting'.
The absurd kerfuffle over Justin Timberlake's exposure of Janet Jackson's right breast during the Superbowl reminds us again just how far American culture is from 'good object relations', and how little able it is to acknowledge its own origins, 'the feminine' or 'the other'. 'That was the most disgusting thing that I have ever seen at a sports spectacle,' said Tommy Lasorda of 'the object', Janet Jackson's right breast. 'They just absolutely ruined the fact that it was one of the greatest Super Bowl games that I have ever seen.'
In a country where television represents 10,000 violent acts each year, and where, by age 18, the average young person will have viewed an estimated 200,000 acts of violence on TV, the partial uncovering of a breast was 'disgusting'.
I've been thinking a lot recently about 'the feminine' as an aesthetic and moral model. I can summarize my position on this quite succinctly:
There is a weird collusion in puritan western cultures between a spurious 'feminism' and the most reactionary values of masculinity: machismo, violence, hawkishness. This collusion is negotiated thus: 'It's a tough old world out there, and women, if they're strong, can be just as tough as men.' Thus we get, for instance, the armour-plated robo-women of Helmut Newton's photographs, the Tank Girl meme, or the leather-and-studs outfit Janet Jackson wore at the Superbowl. I call this the 'police woman' model. At a certain point in the 1970s television seemed to have exhausted the authoritarian themes of cowboy and police dramas, with their emphasis on violence as a way of solving problems. More liberal values seemed to be prevailing, and the program-makers felt the need to adapt. But instead of moving on to gentler, more nurturant, more aesthetic values, television gave us Angie Dickinson as Police Woman. There was a spurious feminization of the moribund genre. Spurious because it valorised female values on the condition that they fell into line with male values. While Angie Dickinson was wearing her police uniform, you could almost forget that she had breasts. In fact, to remember that she did made you a 'sexist'. You were supposed to practise, in your own mind, a breast erasure.
Just as Tarantino today is said to be portraying 'strong women' by showing women characters 'as bloodthirsty as any man', so 'Police Woman' was portrayed as a tip of the hat to the feminist movement. Anyone who points out that feminism means more than the pumping of female blood into a wilting male death-erection, and that making women into ersatz men is in fact an erasure of female values which might stand apart as a role model for men, can easily be accused of essentialism, reductionism and misogyny. And yet it is the puritan western cultures themselves which are misogynist.
I try and imagine a society where female values are dominant. My head crowds with questions like: 'But what are female values? Who defines them? Can't women be anything they like?' I note that I don't seem to question masculine values so readily, and this problematizing of the female and not the male worries me. Sure, gender is both a biological fact and a social construct, and there might be room for a playful gap between the social signifier and the biological signified, but why does being female seem more of a 'construct' than being male? Why, in other words, do we seem eager to show 'femaleness' as a collapsible house of cards and yet leave 'maleness' intact? Why, in the name of avoiding a reactionary essentialism, do we dismantle existing alternatives and destroy the very pluralism that might save us? For, more than ever, we need positive role models which are not American and not male.
Watch Japanese TV and you'll see that there's a gesture as common there as acts of violence are on American screens. That gesture is someone tasting food and saying 'Oishi! Tasty!' In this 'oishi moment', played out dozens of times a day, we see some hallowed Japanese values: That the aesthetic is important. That there is a close relationship between the aesthetic and practical craft skills like cooking. That it is an important and sociable gesture to nourish and to please someone else. That social harmony is a delight. And that 'the feminine' is a respected and protected identity which can be held up to the whole of Japanese culture as a role model in prime time. These are 'breast values'.
I find it telling that the only Japanese cookery show to have made it to America is 'The Iron Chef'. It's as if the soft and feminine side of Japanese food shows had to be removed, replaced by a medieval gladiatorial contest. I also find it telling that in America Japanese restaurants look like this. Given these mediations of Japan -- what we could call, with a nod to the Object Relations school of psychoanalysis, 'the removal of the breast' -- I think it's hardly surprising that the first thing Americans notice as a mark of true difference when they visit countries like France, India or Japan is the strong presence of a femininity which, in their own culture, is embattled, repressed, lost. Some American travellers might see the breasts on French and German billboards as 'exploitative' and the cookery shows on Japanese TV as 'reactionary'. Others might see them as marks of respect for the feminine, something their own culture could learn from.
The images you see on this page are from Coin Coin magazine: a Japanese-French review of art, design, music, fashion, food. Its strikingly un-American approach to art, the breast, food and pleasure makes a nice contrast to the MTV Superbowl debacle. After falling ill for stress-related reasons, Emiko Hanawa, a model with Ford Models and Elite Japan, decided that 'the disorder of the food is conspicuous in today's society'. She got interested in 'healing cooking', preparing meals which 'hear the voice of the body and the heart'. Perhaps she could have added 'the breast'.
I leave you today, dear friends, with the first edition of a new bilingual art magazine from Japan, Art It. Examine the cover. Wondergirl, wonderland, and a bare-breasted woman. A glimpse of civilisation. Feast your eyes, Americans!
(no subject)
Date: 2004-02-04 01:07 pm (UTC)I felt uncomfortable in my undergraduate sociology classes because of the essentialism with which the male was consistently treated. In the American 'gender studies' or 'women's studies' curriculum, the male is more often than not an unproblematic actor in a drama in which the problems of woman, female, and femininity are uniquely at stake. Where masculinity and maleness do become the focus of inquiry, the inquirer is most likely acting under the rubric of 'queer studies'. The man himself remains untouched.
While people who are in a position to know more about these things than I do assure me that a tide is turning - that, in their terms, the 'stalled revolution' of feminism is becoming aware of itself as ground to a halt precisely at the doorstep of the unproblematic male, its inflexible other - in the discourse on 'gender' we are still heir to a legacy of one sided inquiry into the female condition.
It is interesting to note that this problem aligns itself with traditional American ideas of woman - as flexible,soft - and of man - as hard, definite, uncompromising. To put the above observations in this traditional context, one might say that women are 'soft' and flexible enough to become like men.
It seems this extended flexibility is quite perceptibly in the interests of powerful forces within America - broadly as in the Rosie the Riviter (http://www.rosietheriveter.org/links.htm) phenomenon during World War II, or more narrowly in the higher GDP that is possible with an expanded workforce. Of course, it is also threatening to certain power loci, which is why it is contentious. It is unclear, however, that there are any powerful interests to whom the American man's abdication of his unproblematic position as emotionless workhorse, tough guy, and bogeyman might appeal. One would assume, however, that given the right circumstances, man is tough enough to become like woman, to bear becoming like woman.
Clay Templeton
Technical Information Specialist
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Date: 2004-02-04 03:31 pm (UTC)The big question is, could a man be tough enough to bear a child? To give birth? I know that would scare me to death. In the words of the mighty Meatloaf: 'I would do anything for love, but I won't do that'.
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Date: 2004-02-04 04:21 pm (UTC)http://www.ananova.com/entertainment/story/sm_862708.html
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Date: 2004-02-04 10:54 pm (UTC)This seems to point in the direction of your recent theme of the importance of other being. I don't mean to completely erase the difference between male and female, but as indicated by a lot of the commenters to this post, it's really high time the idea of American Male was earnestly played with a bit. Although I have to admit - seriously - that John Wayne inspires in me a certain mystical awe.
I have appreciated the recent tributes to otherness and mystery. I have also noticed the deflections of potential questions about essentialism, and understood their necessity. I've been thinking, though, that what's really nice is a kind of relativist essentialism. This view accepts the shakiness of absolutes, but rather than resort to a kind of nihilism, it allows for an infinity of essences. This way, it's just a matter of choosing to invade the right essence at the right moment. This is what polytheism means to me.
At the moment, the American Male is simply too strong a god for my liking. It needs to be probed. Only science will make it have children, though. I read recently that women tend biologically to have a higher tolerance for pain than the men. Perhaps it would have been better if Justin Timberlake had knelt down and sucked on J.J.'s breast.
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Date: 2004-02-04 11:13 pm (UTC)