Slutty or confident? Where do we draw the line?
The inner ramblings of a struggling feminist.
A few weeks ago I was sifting through my Twitter feed at my usual haunt (Starbucks) when I caught a glimpse of a retweeted NSFW photo. Out of curiosity, I scrolled back up to the risqué image. There she was — our favourite Kardashian (Kim, duh) — breaking the Internet again. The photo of her buck naked left little for the imagination, save for the black rectangles artfully covering her nether regions. Throughout the day, people kept retweeting responses from celebrities (namely Chloe Grace Moretz, Amber Rose, P!nk). There was a lot of food for thought.
NGL, my initial reaction was negative. As a kid, I used to gobble up the litany of conservative values that my parents spewed as truth. My mom firmly believed that tampons could take a girl’s virginity and that unmarried sexually active women were untouchables.
I’ve since learned a thing or two from the Internet (hurrah!) and changed the way my parents think as well. Even then, I still have to check myself once in a while. Is it acceptable to think/feel this way in the 21st century? How would I feel if I were being judged for the same thing? This was one of those times.
Thought #1: Slut-shaming doesn’t help anyone.
We’ve all heard and lived the pernicious double standard: a stud is to male as a slut is to female. (Yeah, that’s right — slut-shaming is so toxic and horrible and bad that it warrants a SAT word.) Long-time rivals Amber Rose and Kim Kardashian even teamed up for once to educate people on slut-shaming. People, male and female, should be allowed to do what they want as long as they’re not hurting anybody and as long as they accept the consequences (à la Socrates). Kim K ain’t hurtin’ anyone. She should be allowed to feel proud of her body. She should be allowed to be confident and feel beautiful. She should be allowed to show off whatever assets she’s comfortable showing. More power to her.
Thought #2: But isn’t Kim K giving the OK to sexualize the female body?
Turning on the TV makes me lose faith in humanity when there’s some distasteful commercial advertising burgers with the aid of a well-endowed woman. It sucks that boobs (you know, those magical things mammals use to feed babies) are constantly being exploited by the media. However, they’re an erogenous zone, and so to some degree people are always going to associate sex with jugs. So knowing that she has a huge online following, knowing that nudes will incite sexual thoughts, isn’t Kim K not only condoning but also perpetuating the sexualization of the female body?
I feel like the only way to curb this obsession with sexualizing the female body is by teaching girls to prove their worth in other ways. Go to school and study hard. Don’t be afraid to be a career woman and chase your dreams. But how do they do that when they’re surrounded by celebrities that Photoshop every photo and invest millions of dollars in sculpting the perfect body? How are they going to stop basing their self-worth on unrealistic beauty standards when their “role models” are all obsessed with appearances?
BONUS RANDOM Thought #3: How is this any different from wearing a bikini?
TBH, it’s not. Look at the photo, the same amount of skin would be showing if she were wearing a bikini, but fewer people would be giving her grief. On the flip side, the context of a photo is important too. A bikini is a physical barrier, but the black boxes tacitly tell us that she’s not wearing anything at all, making it less appropriate than a bikini. But if she were wearing lingerie, people would probably think it inappropriate just the same. Sigh … if only the world were just black and white, and not 50 shades of grey.
So how do I reconcile these warring sides of me? I’m all for female empowerment, but I’m not sure what exactly counts as empowerment. On one hand, it’s when a woman has autonomy over her body and does what she wants without judgment from others. On the other, it’s when a woman pursues her goals outside of the physical aesthetic. The sad part is that I still haven’t figured out how I can do both — there’s no best of both worlds here, Hannah Montana.
