International Women's Week, postscript: Some thoughts on WAP

Some thoughts on WAP

(I'm not going to include a link because I only link to music I think worth listening to more than once.  I have seen WAP and have no intention of watching it again.  But if you don't know what it is, and are wondering what the fuss is about, you will have no trouble finding it on youtube.)

My generation grew up alongside feminism, and many of us absorbed its messages.  We know that women suffer asymmetric threats of violence, that many women live under brutal restrictions on their behavior, that our society imposes double standards on women, that women are treated unfairly in the academic and business worlds, and that commodification of women’s bodies damages them and exacerbates all of these other ills.  Many people, women and men alike, want to see change -- and we have been getting change.  Slow, uneven, but change nonetheless.  Today, a majority of Americans would agree that prurient objectification of women is bad, even if conservatives and liberals have different reasons for feeling that way.

 

When it comes to media depictions of women, there is a strain of thought in feminism that the key issue is not whether certain kinds of images are good or bad, but symmetry: If men and women have different rules for what they are allowed to do, that is bad; if the rules are the same, that is good.  In this view, liberation does not come from censorship or suppression, but from equal treatment.  It is a reasonable argument, and probably the only one that is not going to get bogged down in arguments about particulars.  I'd say it comes close to my own views on the subject.  This brings me to WAP.

 

The liberal/cultural media are celebrating WAP as some kind of feminist triumph.  They seem to be giddy over how much it upsets conservatives (this looks similar to the way conservatives tell racist jokes just to “own the libs”.)  I have seen serious commentators argue that because these women had total artistic control over the project, and because they are expressing their sexuality as freely as men are supposedly allowed to, this is an exercise in leveling the playing field, in putting women on the same footing as men.  Really?

 

What does it look like when men make photos or videos that sexually exploit women?  Well, there is a lot of female flesh on display, being shaken, spanked, oiled up, tied down, pushed up, and more.  It seems pretty obvious that the symmetric exercise would be for female producers to make videos that exploit male bodies the same way. (Do two wrongs make a right? That's where the symmetry argument is problematic.)  So what do we see in WAP?  Female bodies, being shaken, spanked, oiled up, tied down, and pushed up.  No men to be seen.  The conceit that this is an exercise in liberation is risible.  A group of women have completely internalized the pornified expectations of the “male gaze” and projected it right back, in technicolor. 

 

I grew up with a feminist mom, and was exposed to the various permutations of feminism as it evolved.  I was familiar with Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer, and my mom got one of the first subscriptions to Ms. magazine.  I knew that feminism was not monolithic—some feminists aligned themselves with the censors on the right, condemning public displays of sex as inherently exploitative.  Others, exemplified by Greer, wanted women to be liberated to be fully sexual beings. 

 

What all of them agreed on was that commodifying women’s bodies, putting women on display just to titillate, is a bad idea.  As a cultural liberal myself, I see liberals’ celebration of WAP as a nauseating exercise in denialism and hypocrisy. By supporting this, we pull the rug out from any credibility we may have had to lecture society about the evils of objectifying women. There is plenty of feminist pornography for those who want it.  WAP is porn, but there is nothing feminist about it.