Objectifying the Female Form
Written by Aiman Khan
Thumbnail Photo by Geoff Brooks on Unsplash
Women’s bodies have been a topic of discussion for many centuries. Western media has increasingly begun to notice this collective fascination of the female form and uses that preoccupation to create unrealistic standards of what it means to be a woman. While women’s emancipation in developed countries has given us many of the rights we enjoy today, the media has piggybacked on these new freedoms to overtly sexualize and objectify girls.
In some ways, society has become desensitized to the absurd hyper-sexualization of women that goes on in the media. After all, seeing ‘au naturel’ women on our social media feeds, online, on TV, or in video games is nothing out of the ordinary. We see it as a marketing gimmick, and some may even condone it as sex-positive empowerment.
But do conversations around femininity need to revolve around overt sexualization? Or is this a cultural pushback against the old notions of modesty and repressiveness that women have faced over centuries? If so, is there a better way to structure the conversation around women’s bodies without seesawing between sexual repression and unbridled objectification?
Photo by Geoff Brooks on Unsplash
Through the Ages and Around the World
Before the soft power of the American media, culture had been the defining dictator of beauty ideals around the world. There were times throughout history when the focus was on men rather than women. In Ancient Greece, for example, men were deemed the fairer sex and the masculine form was idolized. You can see this in the way Greek statues of the time were sculpted. Greek women, on the other hand, were expected to be pale and plump as an indication of their husbands’ status and wealth. In contrast, the Ancient Egyptians prized symmetrical faces and slender frames for both genders.
Society during the Italian Renaissance (circa 1400-1700) valued a full-bodied figure for women, as did the Victorian English. Around this time (from 1837 until 1901), the appeal of a cinched waist skyrocketed with the upper-class men, and soon thereafter the corset took hold as a staple for women’s wardrobes across most of Europe and North America. As a result of this frenzy for tightlacing, women suffered serious internal organ displacement in order to achieve the perfect waist.
Europeans were not the only ones reshaping women’s bodies to fit the unrealistic mould of their society’s fantasies. In the Han dynasty of China (circa 206 BCE to 220 CE), for example, foot binding was a popular practice. Inspired by the grace of Emperor Li Yu’s consort when asked to perform a dance with her feet bound, Chinese gentry started binding their daughters’ feet to achieve the ideal measurement of around three inches. Wanting to emulate the rich and powerful, commoners followed suit, and soon all social classes of China were practicing foot binding. Lotus feet, as it was called, became a national status symbol. If your feet fell under the ‘iron lotus’ category – of around five inches or larger – good luck finding a husband.
The process of foot binding was significantly painful and started anywhere between the ages of 4 to 9. While there were certain regional variations, the toes and the arch of the foot were generally broken and bound up, leading to severe discomfort and the possibility of infection later in life. By the 19th century, around 40-50% of Chinese women and almost 100% of all upper-class women were estimated to have had their feet bound. Today, this practice has been outlawed in China.
Women in African countries like Mauritania, Nigeria, Kenya and Morocco (among others) were undergoing another transformation to ensure their success on the marriage market. Dating as far back as the 11th century, force-feeding girls (as young as 6 years old) enormous quantities of food was a common practice. In societies that correlate a high BMI to wealth, fattening up girls ensured that they would be considered attractive prospects. This is still practiced in many of these African nations today.
While body modifications in the form of scarification, tattoos, body piercings, cranial deformation or genital mutilation were common, these were generally undertaken for spiritual reasons or cultural affiliation and extended towards both sexes. Throughout history, we see over and over again the same pattern of policing women’s bodies across the world just to satisfy society’s arbitrary fixations.
Advertising and the Media
With the rise of Hollywood, Western beauty ideals were now in a league of their own. The post-World War II liberal attitudes towards sex led to a cultural overhaul of the restrictive notions of the past. The days of the Betty Crocker housewife were on a decline (circa the 1950s). Women’s sexual emancipation began giving rise to sex symbols like Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, Brigitte Bardot, and Raquel Welch. Playboy magazine had just come into circulation, and the first Barbie followed fast in its heels. Sex sells, and has done so since as early as the 1870s. But with the advent of motion pictures and visual media, sexual imagery started to take centre stage in ad campaigns.
Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, was the first to promote the idea that consumer behaviour can be swayed through subconscious messaging. This is evident in the sexually suggestive ads of today. Sexualization in advertising comes in different forms, such as subliminal messages meant to be consciously overlooked by consumers (sexual embeds), or referential formats such as double entendres, or lighting and music that is meant to be sexually suggestive, or outright provocative as in the behavior of the models in the ads. This kind of subliminal or overt erotic messaging has been shown to be an ‘above-average technique’ for marketing, but it normalizes the objectification of the female form to wide demographics.
The activist Jean Kilbourne first brought public attention to the advertising industry’s hyper-sexualization of women around the late 1960s. Time and time again, she explained that ads not only sexually objectified women through little to no clothing, submissive body language and dismembering (by focusing on certain parts of the body instead of the whole), but also created unrealistic ideals through the use of makeup, lighting, airbrushing and camera angles - not to mention the infantilization of grown women, and sexualization of younger girls that takes place in ads and the fashion industry.
Photo by Joe deSousa on Unsplash
When Calvin Klein used the male form in the same sexualized, objectified way, it was so shocking to consumers that the advertisement garnered national coverage in the U.S., and sparked immediate outrage. Kilbourne’s 1979 lecture series was later adapted into a documentary that has now been updated to reflect current changes in the industry.
Today, Photoshop and computer software have allowed advertisers and celebrities to promote body image ideals that are not only unrealistic but may even be impossible to attain naturally. It doesn’t help when celebrities go under the knife to achieve these measurements, but continue to promote false health and fitness lifestyles. This instills the idea in society that there is such a thing as a ‘perfect body,’ and that it’s attainable simply by working out and following the right diet,or by buying sponsored products. Just like in Victorian England or the Han Dynasty, women are now attempting to transform their bodies in ways that are unnecessary and a risk to their health and wellbeing. This is reflected in the increase in cosmetic procedures and surgeries worldwide.
Despite the body positivity movement, the media still tends to highlight young, thin Caucasian women. In fact, older women are rarely visible in the media, and even today younger and younger girls are being used in ads and the fashion industry. As a result, there is a relative dearth of older women in the media, and ageing naturally comes at a steeper price for them compared to their male counterparts.
The objectification of women on such a large scale is hard to bypass on a subconscious level. Aside from the obvious mental health issues created by unrealistic ideals, the representation of women in popular media is also becoming increasingly graphic. For example, the portrayal of popular artists in the music industry is almost always pornographic to a degree. Just take a look at artists like Nicki Minaj, Miley Cyrus, Cardi B or Meghan Thee Stallion. These artists have a significant reach across the globe and to a wide variety of demographics, including young, impressionable girls. Sex-positive feminism has loosened the cultural reluctance to broach the topic of female sexuality and afforded women the opportunity to advocate for their sexual freedom - a feat previously unimaginable in societies structured around religious notions of modesty and ‘purity.’ However, on the other hand, the pornographic depictions of women we see in the media today normalizes and glamorizes provocative behaviour to impressionable girls for profit - a radical reversal of the old script that may come with its own set of issues much like with its former conservative conventions.
One of the Boys
This is not to say that we need to repress female sexuality as a move towards real empowerment. Women choosing to be sexually provocative as individuals can be an expression of their identity, just the same as women who choose modesty or even asexuality. Let’s not conflate the idea of masculinity or rejection of femininity with real feminism. The Boy’s Club has generally always served as a barrier to women in the workplace. As a result, many women might internalize this misogyny to the point of repressing their own sexuality or femininity by choosing to align with more traditionally masculine behaviour. Some women may scoff at the idea of makeup, traditionally feminine clothing or behaviour. That in itself could be a manifestation of deeper-rooted issues revolving around the cultural perception of women. The goal is to allow women to decide how they want to express themselves on their own, without the larger media and general society imposing certain expectations.
These conversations around the female body have always bordered on politics – even more so now with globalization and increased diversity. We need to be able to separate the idea of women from sex and submissiveness. That is going to look different on an individual basis, but we can all agree that the ideals we see in the media and advertising industry were never meant to benefit women. In fact, for most of history, the concept of the ‘ideal woman’ has catered to the male fantasy rather than for the advance of women. It’s high time we ground conversations around the female body on the basis of health and well-being, rather than the whims of society or the motivations of profit-seeking industries.
References
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1740144517300141?via%3Dihub
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_in_advertising
https://books.google.ca/books?id=nVrveFtVrJ8C&pg=PA149&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_positivity#Victorian_Dress_Reform
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_objectification
http://thedailycougar.com/2018/04/03/women-hypersexualized-ads/
https://www.grin.com/document/337767