The Commodification Of Women's Bodies
”If I looked like you, I would be rich" I have heard this phrase so many times, sometimes from women but mostly from men, so let’s talk about it.
On the 23rd of February 2000, Jennifer Lopez wore a stunning jungle print silk chiffon Versace dress to the 42nd Grammy award ceremony, and although the dress was a last-minute outfit choice, and had already been worn by three other celebrities including Donatella Versace herself, it became a pretty big deal after it was seen on Jennifer Lopez's body.
This iconic dress moment was before social media culture so it was hard for people searching for the dress to see a picture of the dress, and google was text-based at the time.
According to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, it was the most popular search query that they had ever seen but they had no way of giving people what they wanted; a picture of Jennifer Lopez in the dress.
Although it was not an overnight process, this iconic dress on Jennifer Lopez is what sparked the creation of Google Images.
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In 2004, over 140 million viewers tuned in to watch Superbowl XXXVIII for the game between Carolina Panthers and New England Patriots, but the most exciting moment happened during the halftime show.
Janet Jackson invited Justin Timberlake on stage with her, and during their performance, he pulled down part of her bustier and revealed her nipple on live TV.
There was a lot of backlash for indecent exposure but those few seconds were what gave Jawed Karim one of the three co-founders of YouTube the idea for YouTube.
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It’s so funny to me how the demand for women’s bodies or the demand to have access to women’s bodies led to such great advancements in technology.
We cannot talk about the commodification of women’s bodies without referring back to the Golden Age of Porn which is the fifteen years between 1969–1980. It started in America but quickly spread Internationally. During this time, a lot of people were loosening up with what they saw as okay, and not okay sexually thanks to a series of court rulings around this time.
As we all know, when any market starts to get hot people want to cash out, and this market like every other market is built on the exploitation of labor, the labor in this market is the women, and they are also the commodity.
If a woman was making money with her body, there is usually a man above them making more money from their body to offer them “protection”. In most cases though, the people these women need protection from are their “protectors”.
This brings to mind a scene from the tv series “The Deuce”, where the character based on the real feminine activist Andrea Dworkin said to Eileen that “for every one woman/girl that has been able to successfully make money and stand in the light from sex work, there are two dozen more who are used up and tossed aside”.
So the commodification of women's bodies does not even benefit the women too many times to count.
This topic is kind of hard to engage with because it’s not up to anyone to tell people what they can and cannot do with their bodies. It’s particularly hard for me because I’ve never really understood it, and especially how it’s supposed to be empowering or liberating but I would say that if your liberation or your empowerment does not upset your oppressor, can you say you are liberated?
Although there is a choice to participate or not to participate, there is such a high demand for access to women’s bodies that this choice becomes a privilege for some women.
I have so many things I want to say concerning this topic, and a lot of things I do not know or understand about it, but I wanted to put what I do know about it in writing and even though there was a lot of rambling, I hope you got something from it.
