As women, we live in a disciplinary society, and in spite of all its manifestations, central to the discipline of women in contemporary society—and in many modern and pre-modern societies—is the Control of sexual desire. This control is reflected not only in the increasingly strict censorship system, but also in popular culture and life. Today, there are only two most vicious humiliations of a woman. These two kinds of humiliation occur in any situation, regardless of the occasion, and become weapons to refute any words and actions of women: one is slut humiliation, and the other is slut humiliation. Appearance humiliation. They put any woman into two categories, one who is sexually attractive and slutty, and the other who is not sexually attractive and worthless. Behind this humiliating mechanism centered on sex is such a moral education: a woman’s body should have all the virtues of a sexual object, but no sexual desires are allowed in her mind. Thus, the morality of sexual shame imposes absolute oppression on women in the sexual field.
So, under what circumstances can women regain their sexual sovereignty and maximize their sexual power? My answer is: in porn; the reason why I express my love for porn stars time and time again is based on the idea – which is the main point of my little essay today – that porn stars show themselves The nakedness completes the reversal of women’s power in the sexual realm.
sex and power
Sexual discipline occupies a central position in the discipline of women, and has its double inevitability. Sex has always been the basic way of linking power, knowledge and sexual experience, and the tabooization of sex is inevitable in the development of capital power. On the one hand, sex is at the center of the political and economic issue of population, and the control of sexual behavior ensures the control of labor; control over people’s thoughts.
The tabooization of sexuality reached its peak in the 16th and 17th centuries in the West (masturbation became the most important topic of atonement) and in the Ming Dynasty in China (Cheng-Zhu Li’s so-called ‘preserving nature and destroying human desires’)—both in the nascent period of capitalism. The emergence of capitalism promotes such a production relationship, with the emergence of institutions such as academies, workshops (workshops), the army, the training of the body through the mechanism of power, and the operation of discipline, the human body becomes ‘tame’ ‘, ‘useful’, ‘compliant’. However, discipline has such a problem that it can only punish and correct behavior, but it is difficult to explore the thinking behind the behavior. In other words, in behavior-based discipline, people are punished for explicitly violating a code, and the tentacles of power have not yet been able to control people’s thoughts. The solution to this problem is the criminalization of sexuality.
Sexual desire can be the key to linking behavior and thought precisely because it is completely natural, internal, and physical. Sexual pleasure is the most equal and immediate pleasure that everyone can obtain. It has nothing to do with any other conditions, only one’s own body; anyone who touches (or does not need to touch) the sexual organs can obtain this pleasure. Censorship of physical pleasure, combining sexual pleasure with lust and greed, seeing physical lust as the source of sin, and by linking sex with morality, power controls the body beyond the ‘useful’ body An investment, but an investment in desire and decency.
Of course, control of sex is never equal, and sexuality is criminalized in a gender-neutral way, but
Under the influence of a patriarchal system that saw women’s virginity as a resource of property, debauchery seemed to be the only charge on which women were tried. There is such a story in Zibuyu, saying that a woman is entangled by a monster, and every night the monster copulates with her and her lower body is in unbearable pain. The woman begged for mercy, but the monster said, I don’t mean to harm you, I just love your beauty. The woman also said, a certain girl is more beautiful than me, why don’t you pester her? The monster replied, a certain girl is upright, and you go to the Chenghuang Temple in a certain month and see a man in front of you, peeping in the sedan chair, secretly admiring him, you are not upright. In this story, the reason why the monster defends himself is that his violation of the woman is out of his love for beauty, so his behavior is not hurt, but has legitimacy; and the reason why the woman is violated is exactly the same: Because she loves the beauty of men, she is lewd and deserves to be violated.
Here we see that sexual taboos are not equal, but imposed on women; sexual desire is the original sin, but not the original sin of men, not of monsters, not of prostitutes (as in Mary Magdalene, Jizibuyu tells another story of prostitutes, prostitutes are excluded from women, so they are the object of redemption, the object of redemption, not the object of morality); sexual desire is the original sin of virgins, and the original sin of women of good families , is the original sin of a woman who belongs and is about to belong to a man’s private property. Here, sexuality, as a supplement to chastity, realizes the dual control of male power over women’s bodies and minds. A woman without sexual desire is a complete sexual object: she is the object of the subjugation of the phallus, not the manipulator who uses the phallus to satisfy her own pleasure.
nude and naked
Based on the above discussion, we can make such an inference that in order for women to regain the sovereignty of their bodies in the sexual field, recognizing and displaying their sexual desires will be an indispensable condition. Direct displays of sexuality have been an important element since the feminist movement of the 1970s. Here, the sexual display is not a classical oil painting-like display of the beauty of the female nude, but a naked and obscene display of the female physiology. What I’m trying to say here is that although we see women’s ketone bodies in many other places as well today – like paintings, photoshoots, fashion magazines, women’s retaking of body sovereignty is not very effective in these places; Power flips by showing physical and sexual glamour can only be done by pornstars.
First of all, it needs to be stated that nude and naked are two concepts that must be distinguished; although the usages of nude and naked are almost interchangeable in popular culture today, they are at least in art history. has a completely different meaning. Nude, as a traditional subject of Western fine art, needs to meet strict conditions; only in this case can a woman’s body be called a nude: in content, a woman’s body inside and out To be completely separated, the artist can only depict the outside of the body without revealing a bit of the internal structure; in terms of technique, strict paradigms must be followed, and there are clear requirements for its posture and composition; aesthetically, nudes must only stimulate The spectator’s unerotic pleasure (although it is almost impossible not to experience sexual pleasure in the viewing process). In this way, the nude becomes an object of viewing, not a vehicle for thinking; depicting the nude signifies the artist’s subjugation and reorganization of the female body with his extraordinary talent.
And today, showing the female body in what we call decency and elegance in painting, photography, fashion magazines, etc., seems to be in the same predicament as the nude. A well-known example is Victoria’s Secret, and while it seems to celebrate women’s intimate moments — lingerie and near-naked bodies — what people say about the models betrays the failure of that celebration: people say, these women It’s sexy but classy, it’s not obscene, it’s healthy, it’s perfect, it’s the flesh of art. Here, sexy seems to be allowed, but its existence has many constraints, to healthy muscle lines (although behind this health is the model’s almost no carbohydrate eating habits and crazy fat loss before the catwalk and dehydration), to be demure without any vulgar demeanor; they signify a standardized, stereotyped sexiness that is still dominated by the male gaze.
Pornstars, on the other hand, represent the opposite of elegance; they are straight, nasty, completely open, with no cover to their inner organs, and they don’t meet all the decency that a nude demands. , and therefore naked. On porn sites, you can see naked women in any pose: all skin colors, all races, all nationalities, all heights, all body types, all looks. Here, sexiness and sexuality have lost their standards, and all one’s sexual fetishes can be accepted and satisfied.
Of course we see the bashing of porn sites – they objectify women, they hurt women. Undoubtedly, the accusation of harming women is perfectly justified on a legal level, but it is important to note that this harm is merely a by-product of the existence of pornography and pornography sites, not their primary purpose. In areas where the porn industry is legal, the harm of sex workers comes from coercion, exploitation and possibly accidental harm, but these secondary crimes are not specific to the porn industry but exist in virtually any area – for the purpose of forced labor Human trafficking, overtime work pressure (we can imagine 996, imprisoned workers in large factories, as well as work-related injuries and sudden deaths), and the accusation that pornographic websites objectify women is actually very difficult to establish; if it is said that pornography is aimed at women objectification, aren’t the male actors who cannot have a name in porn – even weakened to a genital organ – not objectified? However, no one seems to have ever accused porn of objectifying men, or rather, alienating people. In my opinion, porn and porn sites are not just a platform for objectifying women, but an arena for a reversal of female sexual power.