This last half of 2014 has been a crazy year when it comes to nude photos. Some have been stolen, some have been leaked by the receiver, and some have even been taken and shown off by the subject.
Why is it that, in this society, men drool over leaked photos of women and can never wait for another set to come out, but when ladies choose to unclothe for a photoshoot and release them they become offensive?
Everyone wants to see a woman’s naked body until she makes the decision herself to undress, and then her morals and standards are put into question. People don’t seem to understand that when a woman exposes herself it is not exploitation because she choses to do so. It becomes exploitation when a man forces a women to expose herself, or exposes her body without consent. It is exploitation when a man decides that he has the right and privilege to display, in any manner, a woman’s body in a sexual manner.
I want to specifically mention the Kim Kardashian nude photo. I know a majority of you have seen them, and if not they are super easy to imagine. After having a baby, Kim was brave enough to do an artistic nude photoshoot for Paper magazine. Comments like “she’s someone’s mother!” were abound as soon as the photos were released.
Society has a serious problem with seeing women as their own beings- the rhetoric of “someone’s daughter, sister, mother” is a common one, also tied into rape culture. This is an issue because people are unable to see females as just another human being- they have to be thought of as someone’s property, or as a title like The Mother, The Virgin Daughter, and so forth. Kim having a child should have no bearing on what she does with her body, and it is a disrespectful idea that as a mother, women lose their right to their bodily autonomy. This effect can also be seen in the pro-life arguments.
When Ray J leaked Kim Kardashian’s sex tape, the world went crazy over it. Men ate it up, and it stayed at the top of the porn video listings for months and months. But when she turned it around and made money off her infamy, and then decided of her own accord to do a nude photoshoot, slurs abound are being thrown around by men and women alike. It is sad that people feel the need to shame a woman who is so comfortable with her body, but it goes to show how much society expects women to hate their looks.
You're conflating two disjoint groups under the umbrella of "men". Or maybe "society". In this case, there *is* an excluded middle. The ones who drool over stolen porn are not the same as those as who condemn voluntary nudity. In fact, the moralists are consistent in always condemning what they consider to be inappropriate nudity -- whether stolen or voluntarily released.
ReplyDeleteSo if you look back in time during the "involuntary exposures", you'd find the moralists saying the same thing they did at the more recent voluntary ones. It's just that their words were buried under all the drool. You may or may not agree with their position on "nudity is bad, regardless of its source" --- but it has been around for hundreds of years.
I wish you had mentioned how excited women were when Joe Jonas and other men released nude, or almost nude, photos of themselves and how women all over the internet were reposting them. It is just another double standard our society has today. I think it would've made this blog stronger, or maybe it could be another idea for a separate blog post. Regardless, I lay somewhere in limbo between agreeing and disagreeing with this post. I agree that it is ridiculous that people are leaking nudes, but I kind of feel like its ridiculous that women and men feel they need to post a nude picture of themselves to prove a point. I just think that we shouldn't really care either way. We're all human- if you've seen one boob you've seen them all. I don't see the big deal in it either way. We feed into the whole fuss whether the pictures are leaked or if we post them ourselves.
ReplyDeleteOh no, I used the wrong Jonas brother in this comment. My apologies everyone! It wasn't Joe Jonas, it was Nick Jonas.
DeleteThe Purple Octopus, I completely agree when you mention how women went crazy over the half naked photographs of people like Nick Jonas on Instagram and Facebook, emphasizing the double standard. Also, because it was Kim Kardashian who posed nude for this cover it was seen as a bigger deal rather than if it had been someone who is not constantly in the spotlight. Women pose half nude on covers of magazines like GQ all the time and it has never turned into a huge debate like the cover of Paper magazine has.
ReplyDeleteAgain with the broad brushing. There is no unified category of "excited women" or "women going crazy". There is a universe outside of the internet. Rest assured that many women were not excited or crazy.
ReplyDeleteYou slightly make a valid point, but never once did I, or Blair Waldorf, state that ALL women went crazy or that ALL women were excited.
DeleteBlair wrote "how women went crazy". There was an opportunity to qualify it that was not taken, like "how some women went crazy" or "how many women went crazy."
Delete(And since I just finished posting about "Ze", I'll point out that the above is an example of how I avoid gender-specific pronouns. I could have written "He had the opportunity", but might have guessed wrong and undercut my argument. So that is a place where "Ze" would have come in handy...)