The Genesis of Perving, ad quod Servetus respondit: ONE

Response to Judiang‘s post here, as I didn’t want to threadnap, though writing here may inadvertently have that effect. Feel free to comment in either place on this question if you’re moved to do so. The question of objectification that lies at the heart of Judiang’s post has intrigued me for some time. I’ve written about it here repeatedly in tangential ways, but this is my first post that takes on the topic directly.

[At left: Richard Armitage in Wellington, March 13, 2011. A photo that always triggers my objectifying tendencies. Servetus likes her men to smile while they are being objectified. In the original photo from which this head shot was taken, Mr. Armitage was being used to advertise the close ties between England and the Commonwealth countries in response to a crisis. Now, since I don’t care about the person with whom he was photographed, I simply use the cropped photo to make me grin.]

In this post and elsewhere, I understand or define objectification as the reduction of a person to the status of a thing, which is then instrumentalized for a specific purpose. More narrowly, sexual objectification involves the reduction of a person to a thing for the purpose of sensual or sexual gratification. A few disclaimers: I am myself a major objectifier (sexual and analytical) of Richard Armitage, so hopefully nothing I write in this post will make anyone think that I’m pointing fingers at anyone beyond myself. I’ve copped to my feelings about objectifying Richard Armitage and the reasons for them, but everything about this blog has turned out to be a journey and my feelings on this topic certainly will go on that journey, as well. Also, I’m not criticizing you if you agree with Judi, or prefer a simpler discussion of these things. Nor do I think less of anyone who just looks at pictures of Richard Armitage and thinks, “beautiful!” “sexy!” “I want him!” or something salacious, and nothing beyond that. I think those things, too. Short of engaging in actual endangerment — and looking at a picture and admiring it, no matter what you think in response, does not directly harm Richard Armitage in any practical way — what you do and think as a fan is your affair.

[At right: another photo that often sends me down the road of objectification. Richard Armitage, 2007. One thing that almost always lights the flame of sexual objectification in my belly is the beginning of the crinkle in the left corner of his mouth. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com.]

I understand Judiang to be making the following assertions: that art is, inter alia, a means of capturing or making permanent the beauty of the human form; that art only objectifies when sexual arousal is its primary or sole objective (i.e., when it is pornographic); that photographs of beautiful living people are the practical equivalent of art that idealizes the human form; thus, if appreciating art does not constitute objectification, neither does appreciating the beauty of the living Richard Armitage, especially since many (most?) fans also discuss matters beyond his body. Judi adds an additional argument in support of her derivation of the origins of art and appreciation of the human form: that is, that even when such appreciation ends in lust (or solely in lust) on the part of the viewer, this outcome is a natural result of the instinctual imperative of the human species to reproduce. She concludes that pictures that are beautiful do not exploit as long as they are made or used in the service of appreciation of beauty. Finally, she adds, Richard Armitage is an adult with agency and has made the decision to appear near-nude, so that in any case, he is not being exploited or objectified against his own will. In the end, she terms fan protestations that Armitage is also, or more importantly, a talented individual, political correctness, which can be dropped without worry because we all really understand what’s going on when we admire Mr. Armitage’s body.

[At left: There it is again, that crinkle on the left side of his mouth. A publicity photo from 2005 or earlier. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com. Servetus thinks she got her preference for smiling men from a boyfriend who told her that he liked pornographic images of women better when they were smiling because he felt then that they were not being exploited.]

Judi and I agree on a great deal, as is probably already clear to anyone who’s read this blog for very long. Judiang says in her post that we should not be so worried about sexual objectification. I agree with the argument that hand-wringing about it is pointless, as I do with much of what she says there. For instance, I share her amusement about the apparent compulsion among many fans to insist, after the response to his beauty, that one is just as moved by his talent — although I would add that the fact that Armitage is “more than a pretty face” is a credible explanation for why we continue to watch him once we’ve become slightly more immune to the power of the pictures to flummox us. Moreover, I agree, on the whole, with the point that Armitage’s physical appearance is irretrievably part of his appeal and that his embodiment can’t be meaningfully separated from his acting talent, something I called “the Armitage morass.” I also share her opinion that Mr. Armitage’s appearance topless or nude from the rear reflects his own adult decisions (see section III of that very long post, entitled “Beauty as Problem”). And I’ve frequently compared Mr. Armitage’s physical appearance to various pieces of Italian art (like Judiang, to David, to mannerist style in which certain body elements become elongated to stress their sensuality or attractiveness, and very early on, very briefly, to Renaissance angel styles).

[At right: a Cats-era photo. Left corner of the mouth!!!]

But I also find a few points of difference from Judi that may be worth considering. On the whole, I think that images inherently objectify just as any kind of representation or analysis does, that these photos we love so much objectify Mr. Armitage, and that when we ooh and aah over them, we participate in this sort of objectification. How we “should” *feel* about those processes is a separate question. On that level, I don’t disagree with Judi, or at least not much. Although I’m convinced conceptually by a lot of what feminist critics say about pornography, for reasons that have to do with my relatively strong feelings about freedom of speech issues and my fairly strong pragmatism, I’ve never been a principled opponent in practice, and I use pornography myself for the purposes for which most people use it. I can’t separate myself from the culture in which I live or pretend that I do not react to the currents all around me, that the things that drive sexual arousal and the boundaries around its acceptability for me are something I can define independently of what is on offer for everyone else. But nonetheless, I can question them, and while I don’t think there’s any point in forbidding objectification, I do think that admitting that it is occurring can lead to honest discussions over it and self-examination that are worthwhile. Maybe a world without sexual objectification is possible, and if so, I would probably like to live in it. Admittedly, I tend to be a both / and as opposed to an either / or kind of gal, and that attitude characterizes my response to this problem.

It may help to explain my position if I start to present my objections via a discussion of my disagreement with a major premise of Judi’s argument: her asserts about the natural tendency of humans to evaluate other humans sexually on the basis of our evolutionary priority to reproduce. I’m a historian, so I’m naturally going to be skeptical of any non-contextual claims about human nature; as a poststructuralist manqué, I also tend to see evolution as a discourse, a representation of reality, which is at best opaquely knowable, rather than a true statement about it. I think it’s illusory to suggest that our evaluation of reality is somehow accurate; what we “know” is always colored by what we believe, although of course at present we are encouraged not to consider this possibility. As Wesley Kort writes, “[O]ne of the regnant beliefs of our culture is not only that we operate without beliefs … but that we live without the assistance of culture, encounter reality directly, and see things as they really are.” Of course there are gradations in my perception of the epistemological status of the sciences, as there probably are in yours; I find less to criticize in the conclusions of evolutionary biologists (who describe and document how processes like reproductive advantage work) than I do in the work of evolutionary psychologists, who talk about how humans respond cognitively or emotionally or behaviorally to evolutionary forces that operate below their conscious radar. Much of the latter seems to me either crudely essentialist or simply unverifiable by any sort of scientific testing. In any case, a lot of what I object to in Judi’s post stems from my rejection of evolutionary discourse as an objective statement about reality. In what I say below, I’ll be making a fairly conventional cultural historical argument.

[At left: cover of the first issue of Playgirl, June 1973. Source: wikipedia]

But the evolutionary point is a mere buttress of an argument that is actually made about the nature of images and art. So, one place we could start to analyze this matter in response to the way these questions are connected in Judi’s post is by asking whether looking at Richard Armitage (or pictures of Richard Armitage) and deriving aesthetic or sexual pleasure from them is the same thing as looking at particularly beautiful representations of the human form in art of previous centuries. Are the perceptions of Michelangelo’s contemporaries the same as ours, or even comparable? Is it the case that humans have always admired beautiful depictions of the human form, but that now we have come to understand that this activity is the result of natural human instincts? A historian would answer this question by saying perhaps, but the way that they have done so, the standards operating in each case, are both primarily conditioned by culture rather than by biology. The influence of cultural forces explains why notions of beauty do not carry across time and space, but always vary and operate within a particular context. It’s certainly not the case that the naturalistic representation of beauty has always been the primary or only context for determining what constitutes a beautiful representation of the human form. The influence of culture also explains why, for instance, that until my own lifetime, since the 1970s or so, it was not widely socially acceptable in the United States for women to consume images of male frontal nudity. This development (usually associated with magazines like Playgirl and Viva) was the result of targeted marketing that encouraged women to “consider their sexual appetites for men’s bodies as equivalent to those of heterosexual men for women’s bodies.” (Playgirl, which is still in production, now enjoys a significant proportion of gay male readership, but that wasn’t its initial planned audience.) I’ve been party to some fairly racy conversations about how Mr. Armitage might look if pictured frontally nude. That we have those conversations — in virtual back rooms, of course, and always in relative privacy — is at least in part a result of the fact that cultural standards have made it acceptable for us to do so. I suppose some people might argue that in consuming Playgirl, women were being allowed to admit an inherent biological desire, but even so, the form in which that formerly forbidden, now permissible, desire was to be expressed had to be culturally mediated. In short: we had to be taught to define as beautiful objects of desire — whether at rest, as at first, or erect, as the genre developed — photographic representations of the penises of gorgeous strangers.

That I myself –like many of my readers, presumably– find such pictures beautiful or arousing is undeniable, but it also testifies to my place in history. If it were the case that evolutionary instinct controlled desire, we might conclude that we would only desire those bodies that conveyed a sense of reproductive advantage. In contrast, however, culture teaches us that all kinds of bodies that might not even be reproductively viable are attractive (one thinks of the debates over anorexic-looking women who do not menstruate, women with prepubescent figures, who are presented to us by people in the fashion industry as attractive). Culture determines what can be successfully sexualized in any historical context, and this process is incorporated in the creation of art. This claim brings us to ask the question of what art as a representation of the human form actually does. That is, art is not really a naturalistic representation of the human form, although it may involve that particular style (during the Italian Renaissance, that element of art was striking, and there have been periods of realist art, for instance in the later nineteenth century, and then again with the advent of photography, that have emphasized naturalism, which we might call “the appearance of being natural”). When we look at art, we do more than judge its beauty independently based on an eternal or inflexible or evolutionary standard — in the case of naturalism, by the criterion of what appears more real, for instance — but rather, the judgment of beauty involves taking a position on the legitimacy of aesthetic standards; that is, even if biological imperatives play a role in it, it is nonetheless an inherently value-directed, value-intensive activity, one directed by cultural producers. Art and artists thus do not merely respond to human drives; rather, they are aware of these aesthetic standards and seek to move us on this basis. We appreciate art, but it also manipulates us based precisely on the standards we use to evaluate it.

[At left: Claire Newman Williams photo of Richard Armitage (2009). Thought by many observers to have been altered to suppress eye and laugh lines. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com.]

I discussed this dynamic a bit in the post I made on the photo that Judiang posted (and of which I didn’t ever finish writing the second part. Oh well, I can always hope), and diagrammed the ways in which the shading of the photo directs the eyes toward particular elements of the photo and away from others. The photo is reproduced here above right. This problem is accelerated in capitalism, which seeks not simply to satisfy the desires of consumers, but even more to give rise to desires in us that we didn’t perceive before. It appears particularly acute in the current day, considering all the controversy over photoshopping of images of women in order to enhance their attractiveness. I’m sure everyone remembers the Dove evolution commercial — which unmasked the artificiality of the beauty industry as seen through advertising, even as it undermined the ethical impact of its own argument by trying to sell us a beauty product. Even if the image of Lucas and Maya weren’t shopped at all, Mr. Armitage is still made up and (un)costumed for a particular role in a way that attempts to provoke our interest based on a particular canon of aesthetic values. Moreover, some images of him are clearly photoshopped; it would frankly be odd if they weren’t.

Richard Armitage as John Porter in a promo photo related to Strike Back viral video by David Clerihew. Source: Русскоязычный Cайт Pичардa Армитиджa; I got it from Richard Armitage Net.

My point here is that we’re not really admiring Richard Armitage when we admire a picture of him, or at least not only him. We’re admiring a work of art that has been manipulated to meet the aesthetic standards of our own period, standards that we are taught by our culture and that we pass on and develop participate by participating in. For some ethically troubled readers, that status of an image could potentially serve as a relief — if we’re not objectifying a person, but rather an image, there’s no damage to the person, right? On this view, if the person who allows the image to be made of him consents, that frees us in a certain sense. In contrast to some of the roles he’s played, Armitage is not a prisoner; we are not perving on (to use Judi’s phrase) torture or coercion. On the other hand, it’s clearly the case that the image engages in an objectification of the person pictured based on the aesthetic standards of the person who created it and in line with what s/he thinks viewers of the image will like to consume. By viewing images of Armitage we clearly participate in processes of sexual objectification that are carried out for our benefit by people who wish to sell us something — people who both assume we want to consume what they have on offer and seek to shape our desire to consume further such products. What CP said in response to pictures of bound John Porter that surfaced in April, one of which I reposted above, puts it particularly well:

the actor is an accomplice to this scenario. In order for this photograph to exist, someone tied his wrists behind his back and told him to get on his knees, and he willingly complied. No matter how believable Porter’s distress, still I know this. What I’m seeing, then – the strain of taut muscles, the heaving chest, the desperate eyes – is being performed for me, and I too am an accomplice.

Yes, the actor consents to his objectification in this scenario. But, as CP points out, he consents at least in part because we have already indicated (or have been assumed to indicate) that we, too, consent to the objectification and indeed approve of it.

I’m not saying that it’s wrong to appreciate Mr. Armitage’s own particularly fine human form, but I do think we also have to acknowledge that we think it is fine because of the cultural atmosphere in which we live. Moreover, we need to understand is being sold to us as well — not on the basis of responding to our reproductive desires or evolutionary priorities, but at the behest of an industry that exists to sell us images of men for our pleasure and to profit from this activity. This industry then seeks to convince us that we need ever more images like this one, better ones, with ever higher resolution and even more perfect skin. That this industry tells us that our desires are natural (or come from our evolutionary “hard-wiring,” a metaphor that always bothers me when I read it, since human synapses are only deceptively similar to physical electric circuits, and while they have “natural” components, they also are heavily influenced themselves by matters such as habit or habituation) is also part of their marketing technique.

Richard Armitage, photo extracted from a tv magazine cover, Fall 2010, by Heathra. Source: RichardArmitageNet.com. Even here, there’s still a bit of that left corner oral crinkle.

In short: I don’t think we can say that images of Armitage are not exploitative. They are certainly exploitative; they are certainly objectifying in the most basic sense of instrumentalization. (For a philosopher’s definition of objectification look for yourself here: I think that many of us, including me, objectify Armitage in at least two senses of this definition.) Every time I have a frustrating encounter with a colleague and flip over to a screen with a beautiful photo of Mr. Armitage, one that calms me down or sends a jolt of dopamine through my system, I’m instrumentalizing him. I make him a thing to give me joy. Every time I watch the train scene to imagine that I’m the one being kissed, I’m objectifying. Images of him are tools for my pleasure. That fans also discuss Mr. Armitage’s considerable dramatic talent does not mitigate the objectifying function or status of images of him. No one who puts an unbelievably beautiful picture of his face and eyes on the front of a television magazine is hoping to sell most readers the magazine on the basis of the acting talent of the artist pictorialized. They want to sell that arresting glance and the synecdoche that it implies in the mind of any viewer who knows who he is and some who may not yet do so. Moreover, even if I were willing to claim that images of Armitage did not cause me to objectify him, that would not mean that others were not doing so on the basis of those images and perhaps justifying it as “natural.” I think it’s fine to say we like to look at him because images of him are beautiful and desirable, or because they make us feel good, or even because we find them arousing. I do not even necessarily claim we should stop — any such claim would probably be pointless. We just should not deny that we are also objectifying him when we do so, or imply that we are not active accomplices to the processes I’ve described above, or that this activity takes place because inter alia we are also being sold an argument about how doing so is natural, so we don’t have to feel guilty about it or even consider it worth being aware of. And that we buy this argument: with our minds, with our eyes, and, most decisively, with our credit cards.

***

Next piece: on what art does, with especial attention to the Renaissance.

~ by Servetus on October 7, 2011.