Head coyly tilted
This is several years old, but it makes the point neatly.
Look, if posing naked were empowering, then the rich men who run the world would be lining up for it. We would be awash in naked dick shots of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates and Barack Obama; magazines would be filled with male politicians and financiers and moguls with their bits hanging out. Softly lit, perhaps; head coyly tilted, bunny tail on the ass. Power.
But we’re not awash with those, are we. No Trump, no Putin, no Erdoğan – no generals, no CEOs, no bankers. No one telling men that selfies are empowering. Hmm.
Anthony Weiner, though…
(I miss Violet Socks and her site sooo much. Come back, O Reclusive Leftist!)
The point is 100% on target, but I have to say the thought of most of those men on any kind of display only makes me reach for the brain bleach.
Samantha Vimes: I know you were being facetious, but it’s a point worth addressing explicitly, I think. The key there is that those pics are sent to women who have no interest in them–it is, essentially, a means of crossing someone else’s boundaries. Which, of course, is a very male form of empowerment in a patriarchal society.
It’s something of a full inversion of the dynamics of voyeurism (and related phenomena, like hacking a celebrity woman’s phone for nude pics), in that both the gender roles and the power dynamics flip at the same time.
We do have a fair number of shirtless Putin shots, though, which I suppose have been empowering, in some way.
*And* at the same time, since he didn’t make the women feel too embarrassed to show the world what he’d done, it turned out to be literally disempowering. He can’t stay in politics if he doesn’t stop e-flashing. So, even if a person *thinks* it’s empowering because they get a temporary feeling of boldness, nudity really doesn’t help the public image of a person.
Well Anthony Weiner thought here was something to the theory, but then….