The Power and the Glory, Part II (see last May for Part I)

<p><strong>BACK TO POLITICS:</strong></p>

<p>Here is the First Lady of France, aka Carla Bruni Sarkozy:</p>

<p>

<p>If you are in the mood for a bit of camp, here is a reworking by M. Sarkozy himself of "Birth of Venus" by Botticelli:</p>

<p>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ka-RIHQlv_4</p>

<p>Of course, the Obama family is not the Sarkozy family, and the United States is not France, where all things are possible--and where this long thread would surely be considered quite quaint.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p>Thanks, Fred. I think we have an understanding here. :)<br>

That said, I'm not convinced either way whether contemporary society's preference for female nudity over male nudity is a cultural aesthetic, or a universal one. I think it'd be interesting to study, say, the relative sexualization of female breasts in tropical cultures where women routinely walk around topless. And I'm not sure just how far our society will go in the direction of male nudity becoming as socially acceptable as female nudity.<br>

One thing to think about, that I alluded to earlier, is that there are three distinct realms of nude images in our society off the top of my head... fine art, marketing, and pornography. There may be others you can think of, but these are the ones that seem interesting and obvious to me.<br>

With (heterosexual) pornography, I think my observations about visualization and roles are on target. Men are just genitalia, while women have a more complete image. And girl-on-girl action is accepted and encouraged, but two guys kissing automatically shunts it into the realm of "gay porn". At any rate, female nudity is used in het porn as pure sexuality with little aesthetic value.<br>

Marketing is all about setting up positive associations, so female nudity is used in a subtly (or not) titillating manner... but it's considered tacky to be too obvious about it. What I find interesting is how much female nudity is used in marketing to women as well as men. That's one of the things that has me thinking universal aesthetic over cultural values. Do most people, even women, find women's bodies more pleasing? A lot of advertising uses beautiful women in manners that are barely sexual, arguably not sexual at all.<br>

Fine art is full of pretentious BS, so it's hard to read a deeper meaning. The fine art world (like, say, this website) would for the most part like to pretend that the aesthetics of nudity are nonsexual, or at least not predominantly about sex. When we look at nudes, whether male or female, we're judging things other than (or at least much more than) our chances of nailing the model. I think it's situational myself. Fine art nudes can be titillating or not, and actually can get substantial artistic worth out of playing around the edges of sexual stimulation, deliberately invoking feelings of awkwardness and shame as well as lust in the viewer. For me, art is about expressing feelings, so I'm all for using whatever it takes, including overt sexuality, to make the viewer feel what the artist wants the viewer to feel.<br>

But why the predominance of female nudes in fine art photography? I think it's at least in part because photography is such a male-dominated field, and that gets back to the sexual titillation thing... photographers as a whole are more likely to find women sexually attractive than men. How much does that skew things? How much does sexual stimulation influence our choice of subjects? There are a lot of people who would be embarrassed to admit truth in this, but hey, I'm pretty sure Mapplethorpe felt many of his highly sexual photos of men were really hot.<br>

Then there are people, both right and left, who think that ANY depiction of female nudity is pornography and exploitation, that there's no functional difference between nudity in fine art, marketing, and pornography. But I say those people are narrowminded cretins, so I don't care what they think.<br>

At any rate, I suspect the data is too polluted to draw really sound inferences about cultural versus universal aesthetics just from seeing what people shoot and what sells. I think advertising is probably more telling than fine art, if only because it has no morality of its own, and measures itself purely in what sells. So what does the dominance of female nudity in advertising tell us, and of that, what can we actually believe?</p>

<p><strong>Thank you Lannie</strong>,<br>

I had "lost" the mail, since the system does not allow easy recording of outgoing mails.<br>

It is what I think and I hope that I have been consistent with it.<br>

L.</p>

<p><em>"I'm not convinced either way whether contemporary society's preference for female nudity over male nudity is a cultural aesthetic, or a universal one."</em></p>

<p>I am convinced, though open to being shown some empirical evidence otherwise, that it is cultural, for all the reasons I've given and Don has given, not least of which is the fact that a long-standing and sophisticated culture, Greek civilization, certainly had a different approach from us. Nothing you've written, Dave, shows me empirical evidence of something universal. All your examples can be explained culturally.</p>

<p><em>"And I'm not sure just how far our society will go in the direction of male nudity becoming as socially acceptable as female nudity."</em></p>

<p>I agree, our society may not go terribly far. We seem to be regressing in many ways. I don't think that's because of anything inherent in or universal about either male nudes or female nudes. It has to do with our puritanical and religiously-based repressed culture among other cultural factors. It also has to do with a white, male dominance in making up the cultural "rules". Male dominance regarding the nude seems obvious. And I've long noticed how differently and more openly and blatantly black male nudes are often treated than white male nudes. When I was a kid and my friends were thumbing through National Geographic for a bit of titillation, they were seeing mostly non-white women's breasts. They couldn't as easily get away with looking at pictures of white women's breasts, though most of them managed to sneak glimpses of Playboy. I assume the differences in the way black people's bodies have been treated is nothing inherent or universal and is rather a cultural skew.</p>

<p><em>"With (heterosexual) pornography, I think my observations about visualization and roles are on target."</em></p>

<p>They are. I brought up gay porn (and add now some newer porn that's being geared to women) to show that, when men are the object of sexual desire, they are shown differently. I bring it up to show that it has more to do with the viewer's sexuality than anything inherent or universal about female or male nude bodies <em>per se</em>. There just happens to be a lot more straight porn, again, for cultural reasons. Many lesbians I know who watch porn watch gay porn and respond to the different way men are portrayed.</p>

<p><em>"What I find interesting is how much female nudity is used in marketing to women as well as men. That's one of the things that has me thinking universal aesthetic over cultural values."</em></p>

<p>It makes me think just the opposite . . . culture . . . male dominance (nothing inherent about that). The male sensibility reigns, for the most part, in advertising, even where women are making decisions. We have established a patterns that's hard to break. But it doesn't <em>need</em> to be that way and it's not universal or natural.</p>

<p><em>"For me, art is about expressing feelings, so I'm all for using whatever it takes, including overt sexuality, to make the viewer feel what the artist wants the viewer to feel."</em></p>

<p>Yes. And I'd take it a step farther to relate it to this thread. That overt sexuality can be every bit as divine (accepting for a moment that divinity even relates at all to the topic, of which I'm skeptical) as any other kind of photographic nudity.</p>

<p>I'd agree that I have no hard evidence to suggest a universal aesthetic over a cultural one. And like I said, I think the data is too polluted to draw good inferences (ie the male domination of fine art photography, especially at the amateur level).<br>

But going to your comments about Greek art... one of the problems with the data is that very few cultures have left substantial bodies of fine art work throughout history. The Greeks did in part because of their choice of media - marble sculptures are very durable. And 20th century printing/broadcast and 21st century Internet have created more ability to generate and reproduce images than ever before. So our sample sets are largely confined to one culture that died out 2000 years ago, and the present day.<br>

Ancient China left a lot of art, but there was very little depiction of nudity, and much of that was secretive and censored (basically ancient Chinese porn). The Islamic world shuns representational art in general. Indian art? I honestly don't know enough about it to make any sort of informed judgment.<br>

At any rate, I don't think the evidence, in the form of the history of artistic depiction, is a useful guide to the question, because it's too biased to present day Western society. And I doubt most of us are really academically qualified for the level of philosophy of aesthetics required to seriously discuss this situation without beer involved. :) So I guess it's just a matter of opinion! Which means, like most matters of opinion, that it isn't actually important.<br>

Shoot what you want to shoot, view what you want to view. I was going to say within the realm of informed consent here, but that starts wandering into philosophical questions about street photography...</p>

<p>The absence and then the prevelance of the female nude in our history is at its root due to the availability of women generally and to artists. Lannie and I have noted the social position of women as property, covered and confined (another point to keep in mind is the early age young women married). This was true not only in our long ago but well into the 20th century as anyone here born into an immigrant family from the less developed parts of the world can testify. I'm in my sixties. My sister tells of her envying me my freedom as a boy to go where I pleased without a chaperone. My aunts and my mother were literally confined to the house except for church and shopping. A man could only encounter the female nude with his wife and at the brothel. This began to change with industrialization when women entered the workforce. Documents from the beginning of industrialization, in England, when spinning and weaving had been the "cottage industry" performed by women and children, express concern for the fate of young women who entered the textile factories in the city and the danger to them sexually, unchaperoned and beyond the control and defense by their families. Thus began the process of women becoming generally available through being 'free workers' in the world rather than confined to the home and the chaperoning of the family.</p>

<p>The former predominance of the male nude seems to have two sources. One is availability, including Greco-Roman statues. Artists in the Christian era first learned figure drawing by copying statues. The other is the ideology of the male developed by the Greeks. I doubt if the homosexual percentage of the population of Athens in Plato's day was any different than in contemporary Athens. It is probably a stable ratio over time. So would be the ratio of homosexual to heterosexual artists, I think. At the same time women were entering the workforce something happened to the ideology of the male nude. We see less evidence of it in art. By the early 19th century David returns the male nude to its former status as emblematic of the Revolution and the Republican virtures. That's about the last appearance of the ideological male nude.</p>

<p>In the 20th century the female nude becomes dominant in art, taking a position in art which it had been denied in the past. </p>

<blockquote>

<p ><a href="../photodb/user?user_id=6027759">Don Essedi</a> , May 12, 2010; 09:55 a.m.</p>

</blockquote>

<blockquote>The absence and then the prevelance of the female nude in our history is at its root due to the availability of women generally and to artists. [...] This was true not only in our long ago but well into the 20th century as anyone here born into an immigrant family from the less developed parts of the world can testify. I'm in my sixties. My sister tells of her envying me my freedom as a boy to go where I pleased without a chaperone. My aunts and my mother were literally confined to the house except for church and shopping. A man could only encounter the female nude with his wife and at the brothel</blockquote>

<p>Don,<br>

this is true but not as linear as you put it. There were different attitudes towards nudes in the twentieth century. The situation in the 1920's was extremely liberal in respect to the 1940's and the post-WW II period.<br>

In the 1960's we know what developments happened.<br>

Human history is a continuous alternation of moments of rigidity and restriction and moments of extreme liberality.<br>

Today's patterns are again much different: but, according to Dave's and Fred's posts, there is a prevailing pervasiveness of the female and the female nude, in respect to the male nude.</p>

<p>"This video is about nudity but not necessarily sexuality." Well, since we have at times been discussing precisely that (<em>i.e</em>., whether and to what extent the nude is about sexuality), I might as well provide the link:</p>

<p>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rPjzJUG1l0&feature=related</p>

<p>Here is another by the same poster to Youtube:</p>

<p>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMsappNjKbo&feature=channel&ytsession=vMKFCiIigkfN0rT8U28k_PDavBB2H5O6OMQ0TomDOKg_dZ58EFd6LEpRuWbDLUBYWu4VvT_N5A2CEV6QPavskPhRHaI81G7htsotN63GkYP-Ul0MGXRFvefIxM228XOu3MuH-qKxGPqcEtMEHYXXKJgwz-sXk-9H2SspvzpZ9PBP-Itu1dFu6vgH7V-bZW0jWoDSrtW1atr0-I4QYHLth4kOIUQ8EaLMOJZGioB4i2jXvhntln8tYe1WWOu-pGW9wbxxFXi1tG1XDmQOuMklVByhc63vumms-GbTxvXA8pdgyGotk-fQavqNFDIqrXT4</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p>It is interesting to see where Youtube.com draws its <em>own</em> line between what I presume that we can call the "decent" and the "indecent":</p>

<p>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo2mYSdr_f4&feature=related</p>

<p>Even after these two very long threads, "The Power and the Glory" (May-June, 2009) and "The Power and the Glory Part II," I am not sure that I am any closer to being able to explicate in words when I think that that line has been crossed--but that there is such a line I do not doubt.</p>

<p>The problem is that they just keep moving the darned thing!</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p><em>"This video is about nudity but not necessarily sexuality."</em></p>

<p>That's what he says his premise is at first but then much of what he says after that conflates sexuality with pornography. He seamlessly moves from talking about sexuality to talking about the titillation of porn. He then proceeds to talk about how the confusion of artistic nudity and the titillation of porn is so problematic. But it's really his own confusion that's a problem. He doesn't know whether he's talking about sexuality or whether he's talking about porn and that's a problem. Art and porn are much more opposed than art and sex. It's unfortunate that that significant differentiation escapes him . . . and others.</p>

<p>I agree with him that a web site's inability to distinguish art nudity from sexuality is offensive. His own inability to distinguish between sexuality and porn is as offensive if not more so.</p>

<p>He distinguishes, conveniently, between the aesthetic expression of beauty and power of the nude on one hand and the vulgarity of porn on the other. What he doesn't address is whether there can be an aesthetic expression of beauty and power that is sexual though not pornographic. He's demonizing sexuality in precisely the same way he's accusing others of demonizing nudity.</p>

<p>By comparing nudity in art to pornography he is able to (falsely) build up the beauty and power of the nude. Some nudes are presented in a beautiful and powerful way. Others are not. The not beautiful and not powerful can be as much art and as aesthetically compelling as the beautiful and powerful.</p>

<p>He says: <em>"The human body is a marvel and should be treated as such."</em></p>

<p>Artistic <em>shoulds</em> are suspect and usually out of line, especially when they purport to tell others (and society), as he does, how to approach something. Good artists, creative artists, free artists will treat the human body however they damn well please. This doesn't mean that every treatment of a human body is art. The determination of art will be made keeping many factors, cultural, historical, and definitional in mind. Some treatments of the human body will simply be porn. But the fact that a body isn't marveled at will, in itself, not prevent it from being considered art.</p>

<p>He says of the nude models he's encountered: <em>"They all desired to be considered beautiful."</em></p>

<p>My advice: He might want to expose himself to more of a variety of models. Many of the people I've photographed have expressed a vast array of reasons to pose nude and many of the artists I've met have a expressed an array of reasons to work with nudes. A lot of other reasons have come up besides this one.</p>

<p>I think this man's is a valid and interesting perspective. It is one man's take. There are many others. He speaks for no one but himself and the extrapolations he makes to other artists and to society are his own projections. I would respect his speaking to the way he sees and wants to shoot nudes. But this says nothing about the artistic or aesthetic nude. It is about nudes in <em>his</em> art.</p>

<blockquote>

<p><em>"This video is about nudity but not necessarily sexuality."</em><br>

<br /> That's what he says his premise is at first but then much of what he says after that conflates sexuality with pornography. He seamlessly moves from talking about sexuality to talking about the titillation of porn.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Well, Fred, that was my conclusion, too. This is more or less where we left off, I think.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p>I see that the original "The Power and the Glory" started last year on May 11:</p>

<p>http://www.photo.net/philosophy-of-photography-forum/00TK0V</p>

<p>A year later this one seems to have just about run its course, sort of like a wildfire. . . .</p>

<p>Thanks to all who tried to answer my question. I still have no idea what the answer is myself.</p>

<p>I thought that someone would comment on the First Lady of France, Carla Bruni Sarkozy, since her role in the French media reflects our enormously different cultures. . . .</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<p><em>"What he doesn't address is whether there can be an aesthetic expression of beauty and power that is sexual though not pornographic."</em></p>

<p>Lannie, this is one of the keys to me, and I'd like to hear what you think, not regarding his thoughts, just your own.</p>

<p>I'd probably add, because I'm curious, whether you think there can be an aesthetic expression of beauty and power that is <em>lustful</em> though not pornographic. Can lust (forget about adulterous lust for now, because that clouds the matter) be portrayed in a divine aesthetic?</p>

<p>That is like the ultimate question in all this, Fred, but the grocery store closes in less than a half hour and the cupboard is bare.</p>

<p><em>Mañana</em>. . . but maybe someone else will respond before I get back to it.</p>

<p>Good darned question, though. . . .</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

<blockquote>

<p>I'd probably add, because I'm curious, whether you think there can be an aesthetic expression of beauty and power that is <em>lustful</em> though not pornographic. Can lust (forget about adulterous lust for now, because that clouds the matter) be portrayed in a divine aesthetic?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Fred, it is a darned good (good <em>qua</em> difficult) question, as I said, but only because of the difficulty of drawing a line. What line? Well, take the artistic portrayal of a kiss, to use a mild example, whether in a still photo, a sculpture, or a movie. There are kisses and there are kisses, and some are obviously more passionate and even lustful than others. We have all seen some pretty good artistic portrayals of the "screen kiss," and so we know that at this rather mild end of the continuum it is possible to convey <em>from outside</em>, as it were, something divine and beautiful and powerful--at least within the narrative of a love story. The reason, I think, is that we identify with one of the characters <em>from inside</em>, and so the kiss, though seen from outside in a movie, is occurring between two persons, one of whom we are likely to identify with. The playwright or screenwriter, that is, has hooked us pretty good by the time we get to that point in a movie, in most cases, and so the kiss is both seen from outside while <em>being identified with </em>as a kind of vicarious experience from inside, <em>i.e.,</em> as if it were happening to us. Thus, if I see a beautiful woman who has been wooed by our hero in the film, and if I have come to identify with that hero, then the kiss is <em>something happening to me </em>in the sense that it is happening to the character with whom I identify.</p>

<p>That is, to the extent that I am caught up in the story and have almost forgotten that it is not real, then I am susceptible to the suggestion that I am experiencing the kiss (to some mild degree) almost as if it were happening to me. It is not, of course, and so at some point I might just get up and go to the lobby for some popcorn, at which point I will then indulge my lust for popcorn. I am being only slightly facetious here. The point is that, while watching a movie, I both know that I am watching a movie but at times am so caught up in the narrative that I can almost forget that obvious fact--but it is a spell easily broken. In the meantime, I can both see and feel beauty in the kiss simultaneously.</p>

<p>Yet, there is in conventional morality the traditional norm that anything beyond the kiss is a private matter. (Even the kiss can be seen as the "public display of affection" which some persons find always inappropriate.) There are some practical as well as esthetic considerations that come to mind if one goes much beyond the kiss. One of the practical considerations is that sexual activity beyond the kiss usually is best carried out in private, regardless of prevaling norms. That is, serious love-making is a private matter in that, even though it can be witnessed from outside, it cannot be experienced from outside. If I were to see a breast fondled onscreen, then perhaps the same thing could happen as witnessing a kiss, but even there the escalation has begun and I begin to realize the obvious discrepancy between what I am seeing and what I am feeling. In other words, it gets harder and harder to imagine that the hero's hand is mine:<em> I am now increasingly outside as the passion escalates</em>, and since I am not being fooled for more than an instant as to who is involved in the scene, I very quickly become nothing more than a voyeur. It is very difficult to see any possible divine component in the voyeur role.</p>

<p>To the extent that I no longer identify so totally with the character in the movie, I become a "third wheel." This is the reason, I think, that <em><strong>love stories are more successful in inverse proportion to what is shown.</strong> </em>The actual showing of body parts, etc. comes to be a distraction which pulls one away from being involved in the story to becoming a mere witness to the story--with all that that entails.</p>

<p>I thus do not see how in cinema, at least, it is possible to retain the divine esthetic as I become more and more the detached observer--which is increasingly likely as the passion escalates. In other words, it seems almost inevitable that I will be looking at the love scene as if it were pornography--which it might well be, even at the relatively mild end of the spectrum. The more skin is shown, the more likely I am to be <em>distracted by the skin </em>from any real sense of identity with one of the characters.</p>

<p>In all of the above, I am assuming that one of the defining attributes of pornography is that <em>the viewing is coming totally from outside</em>. If that same degree of objectification occurs in witnessing the simple nude, then such viewing, too, can be pornography for me, even as someone else might be more easily capable of transcending it and moving on to a higher plane of esthetic appreciation. Very often I do walk away or turn away from the nude precisely because I realize that I have lost sight of the esthetic value of the work, or am at risk of doing so.</p>

<p>I could go on and on about this topic, but I think that you get the idea: I sincerely doubt that there can be much or anything of a divine esthetic in witnessing sexual interaction beyond the kiss--at least in a movie, and to a large extent in still photography.</p>

<p>I do realize that the viewer of a movie is different from the viewer of a simple nude photo or painting, but I think that in either case one is surely aware when one's "way of looking" has crossed some very important divide. Therefore, when one looks at a simple nude photo or painting "that way," one knows it, and knows as well that one must rein in the lustful tendency--or simply turn one's attention to something else.</p>

<p>All of this reminds me that many, perhaps most persons, have a rather active fantasy life, and surely some fantasies can be pornographic. Even so, in the genuine fantasy one constructs one's narrative comparable to what the writer of a screen play is doing for us. To the extent that I am lost in that narrative and am a party to the action in the fantasy, I am much less likely to interpret the experience of a sexual fantasy as something like pornography. Even so, this is treacherous territory--even if one leaves out considerations of whom one is with during the fantasy. <em>Most married males in heterosexual relationships, for example, do not typically fantasize about their own wives.</em><br>

<em> </em><br>

That fact alone ought to give one pause, but I realize that you specified at the outset that you were not addressing cases of adultery in fact--and I am simply saying that it is hard not to address that "issue" when discussing fantasy. Is the fantasy, that is, one that I should be having? The esthetic question has now become the ethical question.</p>

<p>I have heard it said that the man who fantasizes about another woman while making love to his wife is engaging in a pornographic act through the pornographic fantasy. His own partner's body is thus being used as an object of physical stimulation: his mind is elsewhere, on the woman he is having sex with (or seducing or being seduced by) in the fantasy.</p>

<p>This is the kind of territory where paintings, photos, movies, and fantasies have some common but also disparate elements. I despair of coming up with a general theory at this time. Witnessing "something" from outside can be interesting, even fascinating, as well as exciting. Unfortunately, the more one sees <strong><em>oneself</em></strong> from outside, the less likely one is have any sense of the divine, any sense at all of anything "special," any sense of "the power and the glory" which one feels in true love. In such a case, the case of true love, one is totally in the moment and <em>with that person whom one loves. </em></p>

<p>When one is in love, making love to any degree (even with a kiss), that is, one really does not want either to see or be seen by others. Should we apply a different set of criteria when we are witnesses as opposed to being those who might be witnessed?<br />--Lannie</p>

<p>I got caught by the clock from finishing my editing. I was going to add at the very last:</p>

<p><strong>AT SOME POINT ESTHETICS MUST GIVE WAY TO ETHICS.</strong><br>

<strong> </strong><br>

Unless something really compelling comes along, this concludes my participation in this thread.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>