Once again, a blatantly biased, sensationalist, vitriolic commentator has found something wrong with Bowdoin, liberal arts colleges and the entirety of higher education. Or in other words, it’s a day that ends in ‘y.’
It hopefully comes as no surprise that the Internet is not conducive to respectful, thoughtful dialogue between parties who disagree with one another. But for the sake of our nation and world, we do need to be able to have those conversations somewhere. We must be able to engage in good faith with our opponents, even—and perhaps most importantly—when we seem to fundamentally disagree with them.
Unfortunately, The Daily Caller’s Katie McHugh—author of the April 4 “Bowdoin College publicly displays pictures of naked female students posing in groups because art”—seems uninterested in engaging in such conversation, although I would gladly welcome a change of heart. And I see no benefit to feeding the Internet trolls. We do not need to enable temper tantrums and hurling of partisan rhetoric with our attention.
That said, I would like to contribute in a small way to the ongoing discussion about the “Celebrating Women, Celebrating Bodies” exhibit. I’d like to respond to one comment that, unlike most others, made an interesting point that deserves a thoughtful response. The Daily Caller comment was: “First feminists complain about women being objectified, then they post naked pictures of themselves for everyone to see and say it is empowering.”
Truthfully, I don’t believe that the Orient is the ideal forum for responding to this point either, partially because this response will end up on the Internet, subject to all the miscommunication and mudslinging that exist there. However, I have no better means of beginning a discussion with the person who made the comment. I would welcome that person and others, whether you agree with me or not, to engage with me in person about this topic moving forward. We communicate so much more productively when we’re face to face.
Objectification means viewing people not as people but as objects, devoid of human personalities and desires. Sexual objectification involves denying people’s subjectivity by seeing them as, or making them into, a mere instrument of sexual pleasure, or into a “sex object.” One way of doing this is to speak about or think about someone only in terms of their body, either their whole body or a specific body part.
There are different opinions on whether or not it is possible for someone to consent to being sexually objectified, but that is a separate conversation. Here, what is important is that many of us feel strongly that non-consensual sexual objectification of anyone of any gender is unacceptable and highly problematic. A significant amount of pornography, advertising, and other forms of media turn people into sexual objects. It is often tremendously unclear if the participants fully consented to be portrayed as such. We also find language of sexual objectification in our cultural discourse about sex and sexuality. We speak of sex in terms of conquest, relationships in terms of possession, and bodies in terms of control.
This brings us back to the photo exhibit. One argument might be that the women in the exhibit (myself included) consented to being objectified. This seems highly unlikely since the stated aim of the exhibit we chose to participate in was to challenge the sexual objectification and societal regulation of women’s bodies and selfhood. It would be more accurate to suggest that participants consented to the risk of being objectified; we consented knowing that in contemporary American society, nude female bodies are always at risk of being seen as purely sexual things to be consumed by others, even though this was the antithesis of our goal.
But we still have to answer the original comment: if objectifying women was the opposite of this project’s intent, why did the project involve nude female bodies?
First, I would ask why there seems to be the assumption that female nudity implies a desire to be sexualized. In other words, why do we assume that when women get publicly naked, the only or main reason they are doing so is to gain sexual attention?
Second, I believe that the exhibit cannot be about sexually objectifying the women who participated (unless the purpose of the exhibit is entirely misconstrued) because the images conscientiously refuse to reduce the women to their bodies. These images deliberately hone in on each person’s individuality and personhood, granting them subjectivity rather than denying it.
In these photos, we are not posing in deference to a male gaze. We are not posing sexually or explicitly. We did not police our bodies in order to fit societal norms of what constitutes proper femininity and female beauty. We smile, make funny faces, laugh. We are shaved, unshaved, small, big and everything in between. There are artistic shots full of shadows and beautiful lighting. There are props that speak to us and our personalities, from sports equipment to lab goggles to CDs and books. Unlike sexual objectification, where women are non-consensually reduced to their bodies, to their female-ness, here women assert their selfhood and agency. How can we be objects when every aspect of the project was designed to present us as full, complex, intricate human beings?
I therefore believe that to see this exhibit as facilitating female sexual objectification requires misunderstanding both the concept of objectification and the aim of the exhibit. Undoubtedly, nudity—and particularly female nudity—makes a bold and controversial statement in our current society. But I firmly believe that sometimes we need something that shocks us out of our complacency and acceptance of the status quo to get us thinking and talking. My hope is only that we can think and talk with one another in good faith.
Michelle Wiener is a member of the Class of 2014.