I’d interpret it as a full-on bear-hug embrace of feminism – “I’m so secure as a woman I can wear whatever I want and not be concerned about it.”
The girls aren’t being forced to wear these shirts; they’re doing it by choice. Granted, it may be a stupid choice, but it’s theirs.
I think it’s even simpler than that. At this point, we’ve ALL been exposed to the message that Objectifying Women Is Bad; it’s ingrained in our mass culture (whether or not it’s actually lived by). We all know we are Not To Objectify Women, and we all know this is because objectifying women harms them somehow.
The girls wear the shirts because it runs counter to this prevailing attitude. It’s shocking and it gets attention. That’s all. It’s like this t-shirt (which I think is hilarious); it’s so totally against what reasonable people do and say that you don’t have to wink afterward and say, “…but I’m really a nice guy and I don’t really mean that.” We all know you don’t mean that, just as we all know that 14-year-old girls are not inviting strangers to fuck them in the bathroom.
The fact that the messages shock us shows that the battle’s not over yet, but the fact that non-culture-conscious girls are wearing them at all shows that progress has been made.
Weary faddy slutty tees is not as sign of culture cosciousness? And IS a sign of progress???
You’re definitely wrong that they’re not culture conscious, and I’m still asking - what progress, specifically, are we talking about? You can make a statement without trying, as few if any of these girls are trying to make a point, but I’m not sure what statement you’re saying it makes.
:smack: The oats!
Like a good Scot I eat me oats every morning, and have for years. At least now I know why I’m such a lusty wench.
goes off to hand out oats to strangers
This is needlessly abrasive, but sort of correct: I meant “not culture-conscious like those who participate in long-winded threads about this stuff.” The teenyboppers are clearly aware of the culture they live in (hence the porn-star clothing), but I doubt they’re thinking deep thoughts about the current state of feminism and rhetorical irony.
In my previous post I said: “The girls wear the shirts because it runs counter to this prevailing attitude. It’s shocking and it gets attention. That’s all.” In other words, it doesn’t make a statement at all.
I don’t know about you folks, but when I was 14 I’d do ANYTHING to shock people. I’d kick chairs out from under classmates as they were sitting down. I’d make my face up to look like I’d received a horrible beating and then go walk the dog down the street like nothing was wrong. And I listened to the rawest, most jarring punk rock I could get hold of, precisely because it made grown-ups nervous. I didn’t understand why they didn’t like it; I just knew grown-ups hated it, and so I loved it. (I still do, but for totally different reasons now.)
To get back to your question: I said, “the fact that non-culture-conscious girls are wearing them at all shows that progress has been made.” The progress I’m talking about is that this is a step (definitely not the final step, but a step) toward a generation’s less furtive, less shameful, less Victorian, and more enlightened attitude toward sex. The fact that they can wear this stuff JUST for shock value and NOT to make a statement about sexual politics shows, to me, a far greater acceptance of, and comfort with, sexual identity.
Granted, this is a ham-handed groping toward the New Idea; but that’s how paradigm shifts start. (I know, I know: everyone hates the word “paradigm.”) Look at advertisements from the late 70s/early 80s, as the idea of “niche marketing” caught on; they look comically clumsy now, but they were incredibly seductive at the time. Go listen to an old Enigma tape, as I happened to a few weeks ago; it sounds ludicrously simple and lame now, given all the trip-hop that’s come along since, but at the time it was groundbreaking and bewitching. New ideas start out clumsy and inelegant; that’s just how it works. Maybe this is the first clunky step toward a generation’s new attitude, or maybe not, but I’m certain it’s not about a generation that’s growing up to be sex-crazed nymphos on Web sites.
Or maybe I’m giving them too much credit. I doubt it; I’m the optimistic type.
Multiple pictures of Pokey = pokies. A snide eupheimism for erect nipples. I said “Pokies?”, kind of stunned, and she blushed a little and nodded. I don’t think some random 45-year old on the bus was her target audience, but is that cartoon even on anymore?
Maybe she is just a fan of me, Pokey. That’s a perfectly wholesome interest.
Girls’ fashions never seem rebel against anything older than five years and each fashion in particular is not a reaction to feminism. It’s a feminist issue because of the fact that girls always invent restrictive rules for themselves, but the rules they are following that year are usually only a variation on the two themes of “I don’t want to look like a slut,” and “screw you I am not a slut no matter what I wear.” It’s always in defiance. I refuse to be pretty, I refuse to be ugly, I refuse to be hot, I refuse to be modest." Girls really do need to stop rebelling through their clothes and they should probably stop rebelling against themselves so much. I think most of all I blame it on the fact that everyone always has to be a rebel all the time these days. It’s like you can never just be something, you always have to make it clear what you are not. It’s not even just that teenagers need to shock people, it’s that they need to make the cool statement.
You had me up to “more enlightened.” I see nothing enlightened in proclaiming your sexuality, any more than proclaiming a distate for Japanese culture, your affliction of irritable bowel syndrome, your salary, etc. An enlightened approach would be to keep these things to yourself unless it came up. This isn’t because sex is a “taboo” topic (as it isn’t one to me); it’s because others generally don’t care, or want to know, about your sex life - any more than they want to smell your farts.
I think “from our culture” should be appended to that. I think it’s especially great that this conversation can even be occuring and isn’t instantly swept under the rug - but that’s a compliment to the environment as a whole, not to some girl following some trend that happens to push our cultural boundaries.
I’m not sure that one can “choose” to be objectified. Objectification is not really under the control of the object. The object can attempt to fight it, but if I view Catharine MacKinnon as a stupid whore who’s good for only one thing (and it is not discourse on legal governance over pornography), she’s objectified (at least by me).
It does not really matter whether she teaches her class in a burka, pleated khakis and blouse, or in a “Bend Me Over, Rover” babydoll T-shirt. I have objectified her.
I do not really think the “Slut” line of T-shirts says much at all. If anything, it may be a cute attempt to co-opt perjoratives, much like gays did with “queer.” In the end, it makes me think that the person wearing the T-shirt is an idiot who is trying too hard, but what do I know.
Explain Paris Hilton in the Carl’s Jr. burger commercial, then.
There was a commercial in all of that?
The fact that it is my explanation that matters proves my point. Do I objectify her or not? What if I think its a vibrant, glowing young woman, who makes a lot of money?
I think you are over generalizing. I have seen no indication girls around here are wearing shirts like that. I would have noticed.
The more I think about this thread, the more I think that the Neo-Porn era hasn’t begun, it is just about to end.
The book in the OP is not really only about what girls wear to be shocking. It’s about girls trying to assert themselves by immitating pornstars and and by immitating the kind of man that likes Howard Stern. What about all those other things in the snippet? What about the fact that over a third of the people watching the Man Show are females? What about how common it is now for women to admire pornstars? Why is that stuff liberating and good? Why is it good to say you don’t like working with women? There is a whole thing in that quote about the book that everyone glossed by. It’s about women who try to act like the worst side of men, but not in reverse. Not making a show where men jump on trampolines in their underwear, but watching a show where women do, and where juggies dance around and everyone gets to make fun of how stupid women are. Why are so many women into that stuff?
Great, this is exactly what I’ve been thinking of how to express. A mature attitude about sex is one that acknowledges that it’s fun, part of how we got here, and largely private. Wearing a t-shirt to O-chem lab that says, “Pink Taco” with an outline of a taco made out to look like a vulva underneath is just stupid.
Holy crap; you’re 21, a junior in college, and you can have sex with a new partner every weekend if you really wanted to. I don’t understand why you have to have an idiotic t-shirt that allows the rolls of fat you’ve picked up from the dorm food and beer to hang out as well.
Good post, threemae.
As a female fan of The Man Show, I’d have to say that
a) The show was indisputably about the stupidity of men.
b) The humor was not at all based on mocking or insulting women. It was about things that men like talk about. Things like the Batmobile, farts, boobies, and chugging beer, in no particular order. I’d say that the way women are portrayed (as snarling, spiteful, irrational harridans) in the average TV sitcom is a lot more insulting than a little breast appreciation in an over-the-top satire like The Man Show.
c) It immediately turned to shite when Adam Corolla and Jimmy Kimmel left. Probably because neither of them is actually the neanderthal goon they pretend to be. If you only ever saw it after this point, I take back everything I said. You are right. It was horrible unfunny tripe.
That’s correct. I hear it stopped being a lowbrow, but occasionally clever, satire of male stupidity when they left and turned into a real embodiment of that stupidity. But I have no idea why anybody would have watched that show without Carolla and Kimmel.
Why is it private? Why does it have to be private? What is wrong with public communications on sexual topics?