Why the Internet will consume porn, but reject sexuality
The Internet and collective media leapt upon Kim Kardashian following the unlawful release of her sex-tape by Vivid Entertainment back in 2003. Called a slut, whore, and any other imaginable feminine-specific derogatory term, the internet soundly rejected the idea of a woman filming an intimate moment between her and her committed partner for personal viewing.
Of course, even if the tape had been intended for public consumption, we still shouldn’t leap to shame her. The fact remains that Kim filmed a video with her longterm boyfriend for their eyes only. The tape was released without her consent and should be considered a gross invasion of privacy. Instead, Kim was lambasted globally for a private moment of sexuality made horrifically public. Furthermore, her male partner received little to no negative backlash. If a woman can be accused of being a slut during instances of privacy, where then, can a woman be a sexual being without facing public ire.
The answer is that a woman can never be a sexual being, merely a sexual object.
No public outcry is raised when an advertisement boasts a chesty woman sprawled across the hood of the car, no witch-hunt reaches fever pitch from the image of a woman submissively kneeling on a can of beer. A woman’s sexuality is only appropriate when subjected according to capitalist interventions. A woman may show her breasts, but only in the pseudo-sexual context of buying and selling. Sex sells, of course, but sex should not liberate women. Overtly sexual photographs of women are plastered all over billboards, the media, and the Internet. We call nude photographs or videos of women porn because we are posited as the voyeur. The woman is naked for us, not for herself. Consuming porn is ubiquitous, and if we play into gender stereotypes, we dismiss it by saying “boys will be boys.” Looking at your dad’s porno mags is a part of growing up. Heaven forbid, however, that you be the object in the photographs or videos. It’s healthy and commendable to consume a woman’s sexuality, but it is the height of degradation to be the woman posing for the voyeur.
Within patriarchal society, a woman can only occupy rigid ends of a binary. She can be classified as either the virginal mother or the carnal whore. She cannot exist as a combination of the two, nor can she refute the positive or negative associations of either end. The positive end of the binary—the virgin—is of course, an impossible idealization of the feminine. Women who fail to live up to this idealization are morally compromised and thus unfeminine. Because the expectations are simultaneously impossible to achieve and set by men, every woman finds herself unable to attain “true” femininity. We are never told that the feminine ideal is impossible, but instead that we, unable to fulfill such rigorous and rigid expectations, are bad women. To be unfeminine is an insult.
Kim’s new selfie posted to her instagram is twofold “offensive” and thus twice as subversive. Here, according to Simone de Beauvoir, is Kim culturally posited as the positive end of the feminine binary, the mother, while also calling into her figure the embodiment of the whore. Women, Kim would argue, are not one or the other, but rather aspects and embodiments of all different kinds of permutations of women.
For all this rhetoric, ultimately, Kim is an adult. It isn’t anyone’s place to tell her what she can do with her body and to whom she may show it. We flock to the Internet to look at the leaked nudes of celebrities, we buy magazines with them sprawled in the buff across the covers, but as soon as a woman releases a photo of her own body out of her own subjectivity, we label it vanity, sluttish, and indecent. I would bet you any money that the people foaming at the mouth, enraged by Kim’s nude photo, were among the first people to violate Kim’s privacy by watching her sex-tape.