I finally caught an episode of Big Brother Uncut the other night, and interesting stuff it was, too.
I have a few observations.
1. I'm still surprised that you can show frontal nudity - particularly male nudity, which isn't legitimised by artistic history in the way that female nudity is - with an M rating. This is not to say that I'm against the showing of frontal nudity; simply that I'm surprised it's allowed.
2. It was way more debaucherous in my head, and I'm disappointed.
More than anything else, though, I'm totally intrigued by the politics of showering in the Big Brother house. From what I saw, the girls tend to shower in their panties, and the boys tend to shower nude; the one exception (again, that I saw - once I found the show to be relatively un-debaucherous, I turned most of my attention to reading Harry Potter twincest slash) was the young blonde chick that my brother tells me is called Kristy. Whoever said 16-year-olds aren't good for anything?
Anyhow, this girl has taken off all her pubic hair (shaved, I think), and as it is now growing back, she has decided she's going to start wearing panties in the shower again. I find this really odd; I know that in Japan, pubic hair is one of the biggest taboos there is, but I'm really struggling to think of why it might be that, here and now, a naked vulva can be exposed while a hairy one can't.
It's bizarre. While it may be that she's covering up the "Ingrowns! INGROWNS!" that she squealed about, and which, in my experience and from everything I've ever read, are an inevitable part of shaving pubic hair, the things are easily dealt with, don't last long and are only visible on close inspection. Really close inspection. They're not going to show up on TV (which is why pictures of shaved women always look smoother than shaved women really are). Why does this warrant wearing panties in the shower? Clearly, though, it is some sort of an aesthetic issue - I'm just buggered if I can figure out what it is.
I mean, if you're going to be naked, just be naked. We've already seen just about everything you have to offer. And we're going to see less of you once you grow your hair back. What's going on?
I touched earlier on the artistic history of the female nude, and in order to explain my perspective on that I'm going to have to explain my (mildly controversial) stance on the high-culture/low-culture divide. It's probably pretty clear that I don't subscribe to the traditional view of that divide, which is that it Exists, in a capital-letter, inarguable, immutable sort of a way, and that High Culture is inherently (and inarguably, and immutably) Better than Low Culture. Nor am I wild about the idea that the divide doesn't exist at all, and that it's all just a construction of some patriachal conspirators somewhere, and that we should all run around singing the praises of, oh, Fran Drescher because she's the crassest thing I can think of right now. (The angry lesbian school of feminism, anyone?)
My view lies somewhere in the middle: while I don't think there's anything inherently Better about Anna Karenina compared to The Da Vinci Code, I do think that each book will be treated in a different way because they are thought of in a different way - in other words, because they are seen to belong to different literary traditions. Anna Karenina, while long, wordy, ostensibly romantic and boring, is a literary classic, whereas The Da Vinci Code, while long, wordy, ostensibly romantic and boring, is a manufactured hit which people either adore or consider themselves above. Is there anything inherently different about them? Nup. Just their histories. This is apparently not a very postmodern view for me to hold, despite the fact Foucault was an historian. All this academic blather* does, though, have a point - and a connection to Big Brother.
Think about these pictures:
Do you find any of these images confronting? Why?
Is it because there's blood and ropes and things in some of them? Is it because some of them are pornographic? Does anyone think all of them are pornographic? Which ones are artistic? Which ones are exploitative? Which ones are Art, and which ones are "just photos"? And what difference do these answers make?
It's history, people. William Collier's smoking-hot picture of Eve with snakes wrapped around her is Art. L'Origine du Monde is Art. Bleeding cunts and bondage pics are internet porn. That gorgeous black-and-white photo of June Palmer exists in some kind of unstable middle-ground - much the same middle ground that Big Brother Uncut occupies. More on this in a sec.
First, take a look at this:
"Is it a masterpiece, or just some guy with his pants down?"
Ah, Simpsons - a quote for any occasion! This, though, is pretty symptomatic of the problems surrounding male nudes; it's hard to fault the artistic credentials of Michelangelo's David, but the statue is consistently targeted by the morality police for being indecent. Hell, the city of Jerusalem turned down a copy because they considered it pornographic. So what's the problem? Apparently, just that it's a naked man. Odd.
So, pussies can be Art or can be dirty; all cocks are dirty. It makes sense, then, that there's a lot of talk about men having their penises out on Big Brother, but no comment at all about bare boobs or naked ladies. Who said history's not fun?
As for this whole hair thing - well, I don't know that I have an answer. I've got photos up there of hairy and hairless pussies, and that's pretty representative, not only of the general population, but of the history of Western Art, too. There's no clear pattern to the depiction of pubic hair; like anything else, it's gone in and out of fashion, and at any given point in history, it's a straightforward matter to find examples of any pubic hairstyle you care to mention.
--
* For those interested in academic blather and my ongoing bureaucratic travails, my letter of acceptance into Honours for next semester (ie. next week) arrived yesterday, giving me slightly less than 24 hours notice of my enrolment session this morning. When I got to uni - and more to the point, to the front of the line at the faculty office - I was informed that my enrolment package hadn't been delivered, and while it "wasn't any reflection on the standard of [my] application" (damn straight, I got my letter of acceptance, together with a transcript of straight HDs in gender studies, right here), they couldn't do my enrolment until tomorrow. I suspect that this is a stuff-up on the part of the ATO (they that I hate so much), since most of the paperwork I need to do appears to involve pre-printed HECS forms. With any luck, it will all be sorted out tomorrow.
I have a few observations.
1. I'm still surprised that you can show frontal nudity - particularly male nudity, which isn't legitimised by artistic history in the way that female nudity is - with an M rating. This is not to say that I'm against the showing of frontal nudity; simply that I'm surprised it's allowed.
2. It was way more debaucherous in my head, and I'm disappointed.
More than anything else, though, I'm totally intrigued by the politics of showering in the Big Brother house. From what I saw, the girls tend to shower in their panties, and the boys tend to shower nude; the one exception (again, that I saw - once I found the show to be relatively un-debaucherous, I turned most of my attention to reading Harry Potter twincest slash) was the young blonde chick that my brother tells me is called Kristy. Whoever said 16-year-olds aren't good for anything?
Anyhow, this girl has taken off all her pubic hair (shaved, I think), and as it is now growing back, she has decided she's going to start wearing panties in the shower again. I find this really odd; I know that in Japan, pubic hair is one of the biggest taboos there is, but I'm really struggling to think of why it might be that, here and now, a naked vulva can be exposed while a hairy one can't.
It's bizarre. While it may be that she's covering up the "Ingrowns! INGROWNS!" that she squealed about, and which, in my experience and from everything I've ever read, are an inevitable part of shaving pubic hair, the things are easily dealt with, don't last long and are only visible on close inspection. Really close inspection. They're not going to show up on TV (which is why pictures of shaved women always look smoother than shaved women really are). Why does this warrant wearing panties in the shower? Clearly, though, it is some sort of an aesthetic issue - I'm just buggered if I can figure out what it is.
I mean, if you're going to be naked, just be naked. We've already seen just about everything you have to offer. And we're going to see less of you once you grow your hair back. What's going on?
I touched earlier on the artistic history of the female nude, and in order to explain my perspective on that I'm going to have to explain my (mildly controversial) stance on the high-culture/low-culture divide. It's probably pretty clear that I don't subscribe to the traditional view of that divide, which is that it Exists, in a capital-letter, inarguable, immutable sort of a way, and that High Culture is inherently (and inarguably, and immutably) Better than Low Culture. Nor am I wild about the idea that the divide doesn't exist at all, and that it's all just a construction of some patriachal conspirators somewhere, and that we should all run around singing the praises of, oh, Fran Drescher because she's the crassest thing I can think of right now. (The angry lesbian school of feminism, anyone?)
My view lies somewhere in the middle: while I don't think there's anything inherently Better about Anna Karenina compared to The Da Vinci Code, I do think that each book will be treated in a different way because they are thought of in a different way - in other words, because they are seen to belong to different literary traditions. Anna Karenina, while long, wordy, ostensibly romantic and boring, is a literary classic, whereas The Da Vinci Code, while long, wordy, ostensibly romantic and boring, is a manufactured hit which people either adore or consider themselves above. Is there anything inherently different about them? Nup. Just their histories. This is apparently not a very postmodern view for me to hold, despite the fact Foucault was an historian. All this academic blather* does, though, have a point - and a connection to Big Brother.
Think about these pictures:
Do you find any of these images confronting? Why?
Is it because there's blood and ropes and things in some of them? Is it because some of them are pornographic? Does anyone think all of them are pornographic? Which ones are artistic? Which ones are exploitative? Which ones are Art, and which ones are "just photos"? And what difference do these answers make?
It's history, people. William Collier's smoking-hot picture of Eve with snakes wrapped around her is Art. L'Origine du Monde is Art. Bleeding cunts and bondage pics are internet porn. That gorgeous black-and-white photo of June Palmer exists in some kind of unstable middle-ground - much the same middle ground that Big Brother Uncut occupies. More on this in a sec.
First, take a look at this:
"Is it a masterpiece, or just some guy with his pants down?"
Ah, Simpsons - a quote for any occasion! This, though, is pretty symptomatic of the problems surrounding male nudes; it's hard to fault the artistic credentials of Michelangelo's David, but the statue is consistently targeted by the morality police for being indecent. Hell, the city of Jerusalem turned down a copy because they considered it pornographic. So what's the problem? Apparently, just that it's a naked man. Odd.
So, pussies can be Art or can be dirty; all cocks are dirty. It makes sense, then, that there's a lot of talk about men having their penises out on Big Brother, but no comment at all about bare boobs or naked ladies. Who said history's not fun?
As for this whole hair thing - well, I don't know that I have an answer. I've got photos up there of hairy and hairless pussies, and that's pretty representative, not only of the general population, but of the history of Western Art, too. There's no clear pattern to the depiction of pubic hair; like anything else, it's gone in and out of fashion, and at any given point in history, it's a straightforward matter to find examples of any pubic hairstyle you care to mention.
--
* For those interested in academic blather and my ongoing bureaucratic travails, my letter of acceptance into Honours for next semester (ie. next week) arrived yesterday, giving me slightly less than 24 hours notice of my enrolment session this morning. When I got to uni - and more to the point, to the front of the line at the faculty office - I was informed that my enrolment package hadn't been delivered, and while it "wasn't any reflection on the standard of [my] application" (damn straight, I got my letter of acceptance, together with a transcript of straight HDs in gender studies, right here), they couldn't do my enrolment until tomorrow. I suspect that this is a stuff-up on the part of the ATO (they that I hate so much), since most of the paperwork I need to do appears to involve pre-printed HECS forms. With any luck, it will all be sorted out tomorrow.
posted by beck at 3:35 pm
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