Nipple-less pro wrestlers of Florida
Over on the Sociological Images blog, a post entitled "The Male Gaze Does Not Allow for Boy Nipples" notes that the men in this giant wrestling billboard have all had their nipples removed.
Link
They were photoshopped out because of a law in Florida that prohibits the display of nipples. Since men's nipples are not sexualized in the same way that women's are, the authors of the law were likely thinking of women's bodies as they penned this ban. Thus, it illustrates that it is women's bodies that we think of when we think of bodies on display because of the adoption (by men and women alike in this culture) of a (heteronormative) male gaze.
the latest
latest episodes
Photoshop is like a type of clothing, in this struggle between the lust to show more of the body and the guilt to show more of the sex.
Hmm... I wonder, does that mean women can show their breasts on TV and billboards as soon as the nipples are removed?
Please note, the "Link" attached to this posting goes directly to the page it is accessed from - clicking on it from http://www.boingboing.net/ will only take you to http://www.boingboing.net/, and clicking on it from the individual post's subpage takes you nowhere but back to the subpage.
The two quotation marks are in front of the link rather than surrounding it; the link is to http://sociologicalimages.blogspot.com/2008/03/male-gaze-does-not-allow-for-boy.html.
Here's the link to the original newspaper story linked to by the blog Where's My Jetpack, which was linked to by the blog Sociological Images, which was referenced by the blog Boing Boing:
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/sports/custom/wrestling/orl-maxwell2808mar28,0,3325425.column
Newspaper story says:
"There is, in fact, no city law that bans the display of male chests. In fact, the exact same image can be spotted -- with nipples aplenty -- on Lynx buses.
Comparing the two pictures is like playing a disturbing game of "Spot the Differences."
What happened, said a similarly uncomfortable city spokesman, Carson Chandler, was that city staffers asked the WWE and folks to create banners that weren't too provocative. And somewhere along the way, the nipples were airbrushed out before the giant sign reached Orlando.
Yes, airbrushed . . . which at least means they didn't involve hubcap-sized pasties."
I always thought Big Show's nipples were holding him back. Kudos to Florida!
peoples must not remove nipples nor spackle belly buttons. So it is written in the name of sanity. Were just freaking mammals with thumbs and cameras.. and stuff.. a lot of stuff. OH, and the thinking always of new stuff.
"...heteronormative male gaze."
Post-modern buzz word hell.
I would think Florida to be the least likely state to ban nipples. I know there are some fundies down there, but their whole economy is based on bathing suits.
Yes, we are marching proudly backwards to the future. There's a hilarious satire of this attitude: "The Department of Homeland Decency: Decency Rules and Regulations Manual." www.homelanddecency.com
I've been seeing these around town but had never paid enough attention to notice the lack of nipples. As an earlier commenter noted, though, there is actually no law preventing the display of nipples; it was all a mix-up. If BB had followed the links back they'd have seen the newspaper story which says as much.
@chronophobe
if you think "male gaze" or "heteronormaive" is buzzword hell, try this one: "homosocial." it's use in modern times comes from eve sedgwick and her assertion that there is an oppressive effect on women from relationships because "of a cultural system (the 1900s in her opinion) in which male-male desire became widely intelligible primarily by being routed through triangular desire involving a woman." basically that for the "mainstream man", the most important relationships he has are "non-sexual" relationships with other men, and his relationships with women are largely there to compete with/impress other men... which oppresses women. insert additional homoerotic subtext here.
note: i actually agree with her for the most part, and i don't think buzzwords are pointless... seomtimes they are simply the only word to describe a phenomena. sometimes something IS "synergistic" or "heteronormative."
BUT, you have to laugh at the aesthetics of some of that language. for as accurate as it can be, it's basically designed to turn off "mainstream" audiences.
kill religion
@jamesgyre
Ooh! Thanks for the Wiki link on Eve Sedgewick and homosociality. I've come up with similar, yet (seemingly) far more hostile theories through my own philosophical fumblings, but I was unaware of Sedgwick's work. I'll check it out.
Postmodern? Come on. The homoerotic subtext of professional wrestling should be obvious to anyone over 12.
Somewhere in some back room of the wrestling arena lies an orphaned sack of nipples.
Yes, but would the TSA in Florida provide some pliers for the passengers to remove their own nipples?
In response to chronophobe & jamesgyre:
I was just discussing a set of related issues the other day with some friends. The difficulty that is posed to feminists (as well as critical race theorists, queer theorists, and others) is to find a balance between calling attention to real (and unnoticed) cases of discrimination or oppression and alienating people who don't think of themselves as sexist/racist/homophobic/whatever.
(Incidentally, I thought Obama's recent speech on race was just about the best case I've ever encountered of finding a mean between these extremes, although I will grant that the motivation for the speech was at least originally a matter of political strategy.)
Pomo babble annoys me as much as anyone (especially since I encounter it quite regularly) and I think it's a strong indication of the insularity of academia. I also tend to fall on the side of those who are cautious about ascribing bigoted motivations to people (not all cases of perceived sexism are authentic).
Nevertheless, as a white guy, I know that I don't notice these kinds of things as often. In this particular case of the airbrushed nipples, I think too much is being read into it, but there are plenty of other situations where prejudices are clearly at work. The larger issues here are truly thorny ones, and I've learned (often, the hard way) to tread cautiously.
and another sign that we are controlled by reptilian overlords...!
Silence! Larva food!
I misread the headline. I thought they'd had their nipples removed for real in some kind of body modification. And I thought, that's kind of icky, but not so hardcore as the USAC speedskater a few years back, who fell down in the middle of a race, and his nipple somehow stuck to the highly polished wooden floor and ripped off. But he just scrambled to his feet and finished the race. Now that's badass. Gross, but badass.
And nope, don't have a link or an article. I heard the story from another skater who had been there.
Maybe having your nipples removed surgically could be seen as a good career move? For certain entertainers I suppose.
"smoothies"?
*shudder*
http://deputy-dog.com/2007/08/24/top-10-physically-modified-people-2/
I was just surprised to read "heteronormative male gaze" written by someone under 50.
I think a lot of this nonsense is slipping away with the tiresome baby boomer generation.
We can only hope.
tiresome baby boomer generation. Amen. Too bad we can't gas them.
Has any one else seen The Tale of Nipoless Nippleby? Nary a nipple can you find on he.
now I have to find that damn joke.....
hah!
Mouse is walking thru the jungle and he hears something calling for help.....It an elephant and he fallen into a hole The mouse runs home and gets a piece of rope and his little sports car and drives back to the elephant. The mouse ties the rope to the bumper, throws the other end into the hole. the elephant grabs on and he is pulled out by the mouse in the sports car.
A few weeks later the same elephant is walking thru the jungle and he hears the same mouse calling for help. The elephant sees that the mouse has fallen into a hole. The elephant straddles the hole with all 4 legs. Then he starts to think about sexy female elephants upon which he gets this enormous hard-on which extends down into the hole. The mouse jumps on and runs up to safety
The Moral to the story is
If you got a big dick..............You don't need a sports car
Chin up Kyle, we're old and getting older. Next thing you know, we'll all be dead.
And you will be the tiresome older generation.
Shampoo, rinse, repeat...
"Postmodern"? Isn't that awfully last-millennium?
I'm trying to think of another word that means the same thing as "heteronormative". So far, no luck.
Whoever coined 'heteronormative' obviously didn't know very many heteros. My straight friends are way freakier than me.
"thinkstraightstuffisjebusseswaything"?
JamesGyre @ 12:
Really? I tend to find that when people make up new words, it's because they need them. "Ping" isn't a word invented just for the hell of it. It exists because it describes a new concept that has never been discussed before.
Not to say that academia isn't remarkably insular--it is. But a great deal of that is due to the aggressive disinterest of the "mainstream," not the inherent tendency of academics towards elitism. Most academics I know would die from happiness if some random person on the street expressed interest in their specialty.
Please don't take offense at the hardcore sociology jargon! I think people have simply missed the deliberate oxymoronic pun on "heterosexual male gays."
@25 Clearly, you haven't been anywhere near Brown University's English/Modern Culture and Media/Feminist Studies departments recently. My friend, who graduated with a creative writing degree only about 2 years ago, was always telling horror stories about how they were going on about how "female writing is circular" and tripe like that, and how every other story was about rape, and meanwhile, she was sitting there going "I'm a woman, and seriously, why can't I write fantasy novels?" So nope, the Gen X and Y folks are still talking about "the phallocracy" and so forth.
@34 SOME jargon is necessary; Joe Random Guy on the street doesn't need to know about parse trees or flavors of quarks, but try talking syntax or particle physics without them. But I assure you that much of the jargon in the fields of literary/art/media criticism and [insert oppressed group here] studies is just nonsense. I believe it was in William Safire's "On Language" column that I read about someone getting a submission into one of those fields' major journals... only to write to them the next issue saying that the paper they had accepted had not a single meaningful sentence in it. Very "Emperor's New Clothes". Yes, the mainstream ignores academia too much - most people, sadly, don't know an atom from John Adams (you've all seen that Leno bit where he asks people obvious questions, right?). But when the rest of academia considers you bunk, maybe you actually are.
I always wanted to take one of the classes where they expected you to "deconstruct" writing... and hand in a blank sheet of paper. If the text has no inherent meaning outside of our race/class/gender/Marxist interpretation, clearly anything I write is irrelevant.
The higher up you go in academia - both in terms of reputation and in terms of increasing degree level - the more its only purpose appears to be sustaining itself. It's less true in the hard sciences, but not entirely absent even there. Really, I'd have been much happier if my intro computer science course had actually taught me to program. I honestly regret not having gone to art school - or even become an electrician - rather than having an Ivy degree I'm never going to use at all (beyond babbling on the internet) because I don't want to go to grad school.
Ornith @ 36:
I find that to be a pretty silly assumption. Sure, wacky humanities types have fallen for a hoax or two. So have perfectly respectable "hard" scientists. In my experience, the tendency towards pretentious, contentless, self-referential silliness is spread pretty evenly across the academic board.
What isn't spread nearly as evenly is people's tolerance for it. I don't know if it's because of the Doctor (or Doc) or what, but when it comes to field-specific technical jargon, people tend to cut physicists and mathematicians a lot more slack than, say, Minority Women's Studies professors. Take, for example, this thread: The knee-jerk assumption is that the "heteronormative male gaze" is some sort of wacky nonsense feminist lingo, rather than what it is: the short-hand label for a fairly straight-forward analytical concept. For the link-shy, I can even sum it up in one sentence: It's the assumption that the viewer of any given image will be a (heterosexual) man, and the viewed a woman. You can argue whether such a thing exists, or whether it is a useful concept, but you can't really claim with a straight face that it's difficult to understand.
Now, none of these links were hard to find. None of these ideas are hard to understand. So why the kneejerk assumption that it's all a bunch of nonsense? Would you be so fast to make an assumption of nonsense when reading a physicist discussing Lichtenberg figures?
About "buzzwords" and "pomo babble" more generally: They may sound ridiculous outside academia, but inside academia they function as a kind of shorthand that allows people to communicate without having to keep explaining basic concepts like "heteronormative gaze" every time they want to talk about something else. Imagine having to explain what a "computer" is every time you wanted to have a conversation about podcasting or some piece of software. The conversation would never go anywhere, and it would only ever stay at a very superficial level.
Another example: without concepts like "climate change," or "racism," we'd be so busy explaining the ideas/situations behind them over and over again, that we'd never get down to the business of figuring out what to do about them.
Every field has a similar language, both inside and outside academia--the techies, scientists, lawyers, etc. each have theirs. You can't talk about anything hi-tech without using language that some people don't understand. To those people, your language will seem like nothing more than "buzzwords" and "techie babble" when it's actually terminology that is essential for effective communication. And so it's necessarily elitist.
So anyway, the buzzwords and pomo babble may sound ridiculous outside of academia, but know that they're critical to effective communication inside of it. The problem is bridging the communication gap between academia and the general public. Academia is a world where important ideas get batted around--and those discussions need to make it out into the mainstream for them to be even remotely useful. And it's difficult because it either involves familiarizing the public with academic terminology and the discussions behind them, or translating the terminology and discussions into everyday English, which is often quite difficult to do without watering it down completely.
@ HERESIARCH514: Great post.
@ Spinobobot:
I kinda wish that this was required reading for white people:
http://seamonkey.ed.asu.edu/~mcisaac/emc598ge/Unpacking.html (unfortunately this is just an excerpt...the full piece is more effective IMHO)
And this for straight people:
http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~hyrax/personal/files/student_res/straightprivilege.htm
And then maybe we'd get more people writing responses like this guy:
http://andrewbeatty.wordpress.com/white-privilege-unpacking-the-invisible-knapsack/
Ornith: you're thinking of Alan Sokal's wonderfully-constructed hoax 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' (Social Text 46/47, pp. 217-252). Sokal has an enormous amount of info on the hoax, its aftermath, and what it implies here.
(It's especially notable that the journal refused to publish his exposure of his own article as a hoax...)
Velocity girl:
I took a look at the links you provided, but I must say I don't find them overly compelling. I don't dispute that many of the examples of privilege are true (although some of them I think have changed over time, and some have even been partly reversed because of affirmative action programs, norms of political correctness, and the embrace of multiculturalism and "diversity" in academia).
My main criticism is a strategic one: what is an unduly privileged individual supposed to do in response to the recognition of privilege? Should I feel bad all the time whenever things go smoothly for me (and in my own case, how do I know whether it is my straightness, whiteness, or maleness which I should feel bad about it)? Many aspects of privilege are effects of culture, which I feel are beyond my power to do much about it (at least as an individual).
Now I happen to be somewhat sympathetic to this project (of eliminating relations of oppression or domination), but how would many white, Southern, working-class men feel, for example? Many of them are sick of being assumed to be racist (by Northeast and West Coast intellectuals) just because they are Southerners. They feel resentment because they are being held responsible for something they did not do (while at the same time undergoing disadvantages themselves in virtue of socioeconomic class). As I've had to live in the South the last several years, I've come to appreciate more their situation.
For purely strategic purposes, I think it much more sound to focus on bringing oppressed groups up, out of oppression, without emphasizing bringing down groups who are privileged. Accusations of unconscious racism or sexism can be extremely counterproductive, unless very carefully phrased in such a way as not to seem beyond the powers of an individual to change. "If I'm going to be called a sexist no matter how I treat women, then why I should I put so much effort into treating them as equals in the first place?"--might be one response.
Moving beyond rhetorical effectiveness though, I'd argue that many aspects of privilege, perhaps even the most important ones, are not zero-sum games. All individuals should be treated with respect and dignity, but these are not limited quantities. Moreover, I am not going to give up the notion of "merit" (as the first article seemed to suggest) simply because in the past it has been used to justify white/male/straight/etc. privilege. This is an abuse of the concept rather than evidence of its intrinsic disvalue.
As MLK so wisely urged us, we should judge people not by the color of their skin (or by any other superficial feature), but by the content of their character. Let's not forget that last part. Some judgments are morally acceptable if they are made on the basis of morally relevant characteristics. There is worth to the idea of merit, if for no other reason than the way it motivates people to work hard and to treat other people decently. The radical equality that a postmodern relativism entails is simply for most people a non-starter.
(We've come a far way from nipple-less wrestlers--sorry, moderator--but I still see this as a response to the use of "heteronormative gaze" in the article above. In any case, I would argue this is an important issue worth discussing.)
Spinobobot@
Your comments/questions are great, valid and worthy of discussion. I've been working out some of those issues for myself, and I could comment at length in response to what you've written, but unfortunately I don't have the time and this doesn't seem to be the place.
Let me just say this: The project of "bringing oppressed groups up, out of oppression, without emphasizing bringing down groups who are privileged" is an issue of power.
As you've recognized in your mention of white, Southern working-class men, oppression and powerlessness is not just a gender or race issue--it is also a class/socio-economic issue, sexuality issue, and ability issue...and others as well. The issue of privilege, power, and oppression is incredibly complicated. Clinton and Obama are simultaneously members of privileged groups and members of oppressed groups.
The only way to "bring oppressed groups up, out of oppression" is to enable them to have equal power in creating the rules of the game, in creating the world they want to live in...in creating the future. This requires allowing for the renegotiation of existing rules (both formal and informal) that exclude people from these opportunities, which is something that people have a difficult time accepting, largely because they either can't see the inequity embedded in the rules, or because they think that they will end up suffering as a result of their renegotiation.
The preference is to simply to work to include people in existing structures, which merely addresses the symptoms of social inequity, not its root causes. I would argue that this too is necessary, and BOTH the symptoms AND the root causes need to be addressed simultaneously. But pursuit of both goals requires that we identify the rules that exclude people (both implicitly and explicitly) from renegotiating the rules of the game and creating the world they want to live in, and the existing structures from which people are excluded, and develop broad support for doing something about it. Think about that White Privilege essay as being the Inconvenient Truth of the social equity movement. The goal is not to make people feel bad, but to create awareness of the problem and to inspire people to action. The Inconvenient Truth was weak in the latter part, and so was that essay, but there are other groups/projects who have picked up where they left off. But the thing to remember is that building awareness is just a first step, not the goal.
As far as "merit" goes, if you're going to retain the notion of "merit" then the definition and qualities of "merit" must be renegotiated through a process that involves everyone--including those currently marginalized and oppressed. Otherwise you will simply be applying the standards of the privileged to everyone, which is a form of oppression.
I hope that addressed some of your issues...